St. Peter Faber was a saint who made saints, a scholar who traveled Europe, an inspiring preacher who was even better one-on-one, and a co-founder of one of the most consequential religious orders in history, the Society of Jesus.
Pope Benedict XVI called him “a model to follow for all future Jesuits,” and the Jesuit Pope Francis said, “I am very much helped by the example of Peter Faber, whom I love very much … one of the greatest men the Society has ever had.”
Faber was so loved because he was warm and attentive — he drew close to other people, with the angels, and with God. In this he is very much like St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose life was marked by the same three loves.
If you have read Heidi, you can imagine Faber’s early life.
Peter Faber was born in 1506 in a village in the French Alps, near the Swiss and Italian borders. Like Heidi’s friend Peter in the classic children’s novel, he was a shepherd boy who cared for a mountain flock.
His extended family was religious, with two Carthusian uncles. Peter as a boy showed the remarkable ability to remember and repeat priests’ sermons by memory. However, there was little opportunity for education in his village, so his peasant family sent him to a neighboring village with a school.
Education would take Faber in a direction they could never have imagined. He attended the University of Paris, where he made two close friends who were from modern-day northern Spain: his roommate, St. Francis Xavier, and the nobleman-turned-spiritual-seeker St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Faber was ordained in May 1534 and that summer he helped form the group that became the Society of Jesus, pronouncing private vows with six others at Montmartre, the hill in Paris where the white-domed Sacré-Cœur stands today.
While Ignatius and Xavier have become better known, Faber is said to have been the most highly esteemed by his confreres. The companions later placed themselves at the service of Pope Paul III, who sent Faber all over Europe to spread the faith.
Faber was known for his gentle, friendly manner.
In addition to his work preaching and offering spiritual direction, Faber was sent to Germany, where the Reformation was convulsing the Church.
His approach to theological debate was to stress personal reform in Christ, rather than focusing on divisive issues. He didn’t want to win debates; he wanted to win souls. Faber recognized that the real source of the rebellion against the Catholic Church wasn’t merely the doctrinal errors of the Protestant reformers, but the failures of holiness among the Catholic clergy and hierarchy.
According to Faber, “the good that can be achieved, thought or organized, may be done with a good, not a malign, spirit.”
Pope Francis often praised his style and, and in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, he cited Faber’s insight that, in evangelization, slow and steady wins the race — or, as Faber put it, “time is God’s messenger.”
Faber’s secret was his highly tuned awareness of another world.
Faber is said to have traveled 15,000 miles on foot and muleback on his missions. He traveled by himself but was never alone, he said, because he carried on a continual conversation with the citizens of heaven: the angels and saints.
As St. Francis de Sales wrote: “Peter Faber told how great comfort he had found as he went among places infested with heresy in communing with the guardian Angels thereof, whose help had often preserved him from danger, and softened hearts to receive the faith.”
Faber himself wrote, “I want to seek and beg for these two things: To be loved by God and his saints and to love God and his saints!”
He spoke to saints in heaven at a time when saints were proliferating on earth. Catholic author and evangelization leader Sherry Weddell cites the years of Faber’s early ministry as an example of a time when God responded to corruption in the Church by sending saints. In addition to the first Jesuits, she lists Philip Neri, Teresa of Avila, Angela Merici, and Charles Borromeo. Together, they revolutionized the Church, introducing the first version of CCD religious instruction, Catholic devotional publishing, and organized Eucharistic adoration.
But above all, of course, Faber was a friend of God.
Pope Francis said of Faber, “Faber could discern God’s voice in his desires. One goes nowhere without desire and that is why we need to offer our own desires to the Lord.”
What did Faber desire? “To be expanded in God,” he wrote in his spiritual memoir, Memoriale. “Desiring what is essential and primordial, that is, the first place be left to the perfect intention of finding our Lord God.”
He wanted to “allow Christ to occupy the center of my heart,” he wrote, and to “never seek in this life to be tied to any name but that of Jesus.”
Friendship — human, supernatural, and divine — was central to Mother Seton’s life, also.
Elizabeth Ann Seton was also a passionate friend her whole life long. “If I did not feel my heart full and overflowing with tenderest, truest love to my Julia, I should be sure it was no longer in my bosom — dear dear Friend!” she wrote to Julia Scott.
Elizabeth cherished Scott because she was one of her few friends from her Protestant days who stayed close when she entered the Catholic Church — and Elizabeth also cherished her new friends, the citizens of heaven. “Sometimes I feel so assured that the guardian Angel is immediately present that I look from my book and can hardly be persuaded I was not touched,” she wrote in her journal.
But the highest love of her soul was God, of whom she wrote, “Oh! If I did not see our Lord in all and trust it to Him, what an aching heart should I have.”
In St. Peter Faber’s life, as in Mother Seton’s, this attitude did great things with a short life.
Father Faber’s approach transformed lives. One young man he befriended and brought into the Jesuits became St. Peter Canisius, a theological consultant at the Council of Trent. A boy he helped prepare for First Communion entered decades later and became St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, a Jesuit brother.
Then, in 1546, when Faber was just 40 years old, he set out for the Council of Trent as a papal theologian but became ill on the journey. In Rome, he died in the arms of his college friend Ignatius. Elizabeth also died young, at age 46. With God, love does a lot with a little.
TOM HOOPES, autor más reciente de El Rosario de San Juan Pablo II, es escritor residente en el Benedictine College de Kansas, donde imparte clases. Es anfitrión de La extraordinaria Story podcast sobre la vida de Cristo. Su libro Lo que dijo realmente el Papa Francisco ya está disponible en Audible. Antiguo reportero en la zona de Washington, D.C., fue secretario de prensa del Presidente del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos y pasó 10 años como editor del periódico National Catholic Register y de la revista Faith & Family. Su trabajo aparece con frecuencia en el Register, Aleteia y Catholic Digest. Vive en Atchison, Kansas, con su esposa, April, y tiene nueve hijos.
Imagen: Public Domain.
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