Saint of August 2: San Pedro Fabro. Catholic Santoral

Every August 2 the Church celebrates San Pedro Fabroborn on April 13, 1506 in Savoy (France). He was the largest of a devout and moderately prosperous family, who lived in the countryside and grazing. At sixteen he was sent to study La Roche, under the care of Pierre Veillard, a holy and scholarly priest who exerted a great influence in him.

In 1525 he entered the College of Montaigu at the University of Paris, but soon moved to Santa Barbara, where he shared accommodation with San Francisco Javier, through which he would meet San Ignacio de Loyola.

Transformed by exercises

The doubts and temptations about their future assaulted Fabro, but advised by Ignacio, made the first week of the “spiritual exercises.” That experience would make him rethink everything in his life and decide to follow Christ, becoming the first disciple in Paris of the founder of the Society of Jesus.

In 1530 Fabro received the degree of Bachelor and Degree in Arts, and began a period of six years of intermittent study of theology. In early 1534 he does the complete spiritual exercises, also under the guidance of Ignacio.

It was such a rapport with the exercises that, later, San Ignacio considered it to be director of them. The first general of the Jesuits referred to Fabro as “the best director of exercises” among all his teammates.

Magnificent theologian

Pedro Fabro was ordered in May 1534 and celebrated his first Mass on August 15 in Montmartre. In that celebration San Ignacio and his companions made the votes of poverty, chastity and obedience, and promised to travel and work apostolicly in the Holy Land.

Fabro would then have a very active role in achieving the pontifical approval of the Society of Jesus, whose responsibility corresponded to Pope Paul III.

Fr. Pedro Fabro died on August 1, 1546 in Rome, after a career as a pontifical theologian. He was beatified by Pius IX in 1872.

It is known that he had an extraordinary gift for friendship. Everywhere its simplicity and sympathy, together with a solid knowledge, aroused the love of God in which he tried. His contribution to the nascent Society of Jesus was great.

The first German Jesuit, Saint Pedro Canisio, said of him that “he had never found a deeper theologian or a man of such impressive holiness … all his words were full of God.”

The memorial

This was reflected in his Memorialhis spiritual newspaper written between June 1542 and May 1545. After the Spiritual exercises and the Constitutionshe Memorial Fabro is considered the most important document in the definition of the spirituality of the Society of Jesus.

His purpose was to tell the divine graces he received, those that helped to discern better where the spirit guided him. Unfortunately, the manuscript remained unpublished for three centuries.

Pedro Fabro’s life demonstrates how the original charisma of the Jesuits was received, reflected and irradiated by a personality considered the simplest and least deep among the members of the foundational generation. And, at the same time, more cheerful and less austere than that of its main founder, San Ignacio.

ENROLLED IN THE BOOK OF THE SANTOS

On December 17, 2013, Pope Francis, with the authority that corresponds to him as a pontiff, enrolled in the book of the Saints to the Jesuit priest Pedro Fabro.

Later, on January 3, 2014, by presiding over the feast mass of the Holy Name of Jesus in the Church of Gesú of Rome, the Holy Father said that “Fabro was devoured by the intense desire to communicate to the Lord.”

“If we do not have the same wish, then we need to stop in prayer and, with silent fervor, ask the Lord, for intercession of our brother Pedro, to seduce us again: with that spell of the Lord who took Peter to all these” crazy “Apostolic follies,” added the Pope.

If you want to know more about this saint, we suggest this article of the Catholic encyclopedia: https://ec.aciprensa.com/wiki/San_Pedro_Fabro.

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