Peter of Alcantara

Peter of Alcantara (1499–1562), Franciscan priest. This future founder of a reformed branch of the Franciscan Order came from Estremadura (Spain), where his father was a lawyer and its governor. He was educated at Salamanca university, but became an Observant Franciscan in 1515 at Manjaretes, an extremely strict house, where he began the life of asceticism which was to equal that of some of the Desert Fathers. Although not yet a priest, he was sent as guardian to a new foundation at Badajoz; three years later, in 1524, he was ordained. His example of extreme penitence and poverty was matched by his skill as a preacher, which depended on infused as well as acquired knowledge of God. At Lapa, a remote contemplative house of which he became guardian, he later wrote a book on prayer (c.1556), which may have been derived from Luis of Granada's similar work. It won instant acclaim and was translated into several European languages. In 1538 he became a provincial of the strict Estremaduran province, tried unsuccessfully to reform it still further, and then retired to Arabida, near Lisbon, where he inspired a community of Franciscan hermits.

This led to the foundation of a new province later called the Alcantarines, based on Pedrosa, where the surviving miniature monastery, built to his own specifications, had cells only seven feet long; the number of friars was never more than eight and they practised three hours' mental prayer a day besides the usual liturgy and austere practices. These he described to Theresa of Avila, whom he first met in 1560 and strongly encouraged in her Carmelite reform. ‘He told me’, she wrote, ‘that he slept but one hour and a half in twenty-four hours for forty years together…that he never put up his hood, however hot the sun or heavy the rain; nor did he wear any other garment than his habit of thick coarse cloth or anything upon his feet …It was usual for him to eat but once in three days. One of his companions told me that sometimes he ate nothing at all for eight days; but that perhaps might be when he was in prayer, for he used to have great raptures and vehement transports of divine love, of which I was once an eyewitness…When I came to know him, he was very old and his body so shrivelled and weak that it seemed to be composed as it were of the roots and dried bark of a tree rather than flesh. He was very pleasant but spoke little unless questions were asked him; he answered in a few words, but in these he was worth hearing, for he had an excellent understanding.’ She later testified that he had done more to help her nascent reform than anyone else. A few months after her convent of St. Joseph at Avila was opened, Peter fell ill and died in his convent at Arenas, kneeling. He was canonized in 1669 and made patron of Brazil in 1826 and of Estremadura in 1962. Feast: 19 October.

Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.

• Earliest Life with testimony of St. Theresa etc. in AA.SS. Oct VIII (1866), 623–809; Estudios sobre San Pedro de Alcantara en el IV centenario de su muerte, 1562–1962 (Archivo Ibero–Americano, 1962). Other Lives by F. Marchese (1667, Eng. tr. 1856) and J. Piat (1959). His treatise on prayer was translated into English by D. Devas (1926); see also E. A. Peers, Studies of the Spanish Mystics, v. 2 (1930); Bibl. SS., x. 652–62