St. Peter Favre

St. Peter Favre — Pierre Faber in French, often Peter Faber in English — was born in 1506 in Villaret, a shepherd village in Savoy. As a boy he tended flocks and longed for study. His family sent him to school; he walked to Paris and entered the Collège Sainte-Barbe. There he roomed with a Basque student named Iñigo, later St. Ignatius of Loyola, and with a Navarrese named Francis, later St. Francis Xavier. Favre was the first of the three to be ordained.

Ignatius gave him the Spiritual Exercises. Favre received them so deeply that Ignatius later said Favre was the best of all at giving them to others. In 1534, in the crypt of Saint-Denis at Montmartre, Favre celebrated the Mass at which Ignatius, Xavier, and four others vowed poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem — the seed of the Society of Jesus. When they could not sail for the Holy Land, they placed themselves at the Pope's disposal. Favre preached, taught, and heard confessions in Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain.

His special gift was not controversy but conversation. In a Germany torn by the Reformation he refused to treat every Protestant as an enemy. He prayed for them by name, visited them, and trusted that a changed heart would do more than a winning argument. His spiritual diary, the Memoriale, is a record of a man who saw angels, feared his own weakness, and kept returning to the Eucharist and to Mary. He was gentle, often ill, and always on the road.

In 1546 Paul III summoned him to the Council of Trent as a theologian. He set out from Spain already exhausted and died in Rome on August 1, 1546, in Ignatius's arms, at the age of forty. He was beatified in 1872 and canonized by Pope Francis — another Jesuit — on December 17, 2013. The Society keeps his feast on August 2.

Liturgical Celebration

The Society of Jesus keeps St. Peter Favre on August 2, the day after his death in 1546. He is not on the General Roman Calendar as an obligatory memorial, but local churches and Jesuit houses celebrate him with the Mass of a priest or a religious.

Traditions and Customs

The day is well used to pray for Jesuits, for spiritual directors, and for Christians who must speak with those who disagree. A slow reading of a page of the Memoriale, or an hour of the Exercises, fits his memory.

Prayer and Devotion

Pair his memorial with St. Ignatius of Loyola (July 31) and St. Francis Xavier (December 3). The three roommates of Sainte-Barbe still belong together.