Babies learn to smile by smiling back at their mothers. All of us learn by watching others, remembering, evaluating and rejecting or imitating. Whom we imitate is important. For he or she then becomes our role model.  Role models we find in school, on the job, on a hike, golfing or working with  volunteers. Not every  model is created by face-to-face interaction. We are also attracted to behaviors indirectly: through reading, watching movies, plays or television or hearing sermons.

A local group was recently discussing the “Social Gospel” movement. Talk turned to differing action options available within Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity. One participant said wistfully, “The Catholics have an advantage. They have saints as their role models.”  Another shot back, “Then it’s a pity the President isn’t Catholic.”

No, the President isn’t Catholic. But he attended a Catholic parochial school in Arkansas. He spent his undergraduate years at the Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He has heard of a saint or two.

European saints who lived after the invention of printing are apt role models.  For they  interacted with wide networks. Their writings were often published and are still read. Modern saints were observed and described minutely by both friends and antagonists, especially in the early  Reformation and Counter-Reformation. 

Saints come far, far closer than most of us to what God intended us all to be. They conquered self, made immense time for prayer, sacrificed personal interests for the good of their neighbors and overcame misunderstandings and persecution.  We need visible saints like Mother Teresa to counterbalance an increasingly Pavlovian America where monkey sees, monkey becomes excited, monkey wants and monkey grabs the banana. 

In Black Mountain, NC in April 1999 I will teach an adult education course looking at modern saints. One saint comes to mind as someone our beleaguered President might find congenial. That saint’s self-effacing behavior the President might even, with the grace of God, elect to emulate. That saint  wrote 37 books (one of them the most successful Catholic catechism of all time), and raised funds to found 18 colleges in several European countries. He was a cherished friend of emperors, kings and princesses, of impoverished students and plague victims. He preached incessantly from his pulpit at Augsburg and elsewhere. He was a gentle director of consciences and the wise superior of many  religious men. In 1925 he was declared a Doctor of the Church, alongside Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. What the President could learn by modeling himself on such a holy  man is great personal humility and an unquenchable eagerness to blame himself, not others.

The suggested role model was born Piet Kanis on May 8, 1521 in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He died in Freiburg, Switzerland on December 21, 1597. Loyola Press of Chicago in 1998  issued  an 859 page paperback edition of his splendid 1935 biography by the English Jesuit James Brodrick. Its title is  SAINT PETER CANISIUS.

As an early member of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus,  “the  Jesuits,” Canisius vowed to God chastity, evangelical poverty and obedience. Since 1517 Luther and other Protestants had attempted a radical reform of Christianity, increasingly via attacks upon the Mass, the jurisdiction of the Pope, upon a celibate clergy, upon devotions to the Mother of God, to saints and through attacks upon other inherited Western beliefs, customs and approaches to holiness. Western Christendom was dreadfully in need of reform.  None realized this more than Peter Canisius. But he and his fledgling Jesuit Order took an opposite approach to Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. Through their Counter-Reformation they and other Catholics opted rather to make a clearer case for tradition and to apply vigorously, not abolish or relax, the old disciplines. 

Canisius was a steady, workaday, immensely productive  man. He was not  showy or noisy. Yet he was a distinguished public figure, active at the Imperial Court and at the reforming Council of Trent. He debated Melanchthon in 1557 at the Diet of Worms. Canisius had great love for families and saw them as the best schools for the young. Of children he said in a 1572 sermon in Innsbruck: “Children are the best part of Christianity and the fairest hopes of the Church. God takes delight and joy in children. ” (Brodrick, p. 296). 

God called the celibate Peter Canisius and the married Bill Clinton to different kinds of lives en route to personal salvation. But the President will find in the Saint a shared love of family and children and impressive skills in leadership, empathy, and management of complex agendas under trying conditions. What a President facing removal from office for misdeeds might also note is Canisius’s straight talk and his demand always to be held accountable. The President can profit by imitating the saint’s willingness not just to take, but actively to seek, correction by others, to humble himself and voluntarily to admit when he was wrong. Brodrick’s long biography makes those qualities shine forth in every year of the saint’s long life.

A fair number of the religious men whom Canisius supervised were undertrained, eccentric and easily panicked. Yet when they faltered, Canisius blamed himself, not them, and asked for penances from his superiors in Rome. In a  letter of 1562 about intemperate behavior by one of his subordinates, Canisius asked the Jesuit Vicar General to impute “to me rather than to him the blame for this raging storm, which could not have arisen but for my imperfections. “ (p.331).  Let the President pray to move his own behavior and attitudes in that direction.

Apart from his personal holiness, Peter Canisius should be to many American holders of high office a secular role model as both a great manager and fund raiser.  (Remember the 18 colleges he founded!) Anyone successfully imitating Canisius in 1998 Washington would face his challenges like a man. He would not lie. If he exaggerated any one thing, it would be his personal unworthiness. How odd that the greatest saints call themselves the greatest sinners. Odder yet:  they mean it. 

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