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 Maybe because
he was orphaned and had been treated shabbily by one of his brothers, Peter
Damian was very good to the poor. It was the ordinary thing for him to have
a poor person or two with him at table and he liked to minister personally
to their needs.
Peter escaped poverty and the neglect of his own brother when his other
brother, who was archpriest of Ravenna, took him under his wing. His brother
sent him to good schools and Peter became a professor.
Already in those days Peter was very strict with himself. He wore a hair
shirt under his clothes, fasted rigorously and spent many hours in prayer.
Soon, he decided to leave his teaching and give himself completely to prayer
with the Benedictines of the reform of St. Romuald at Fonte Avellana. They
lived two monks to a hermitage. Peter was so eager to pray and slept so
little that he soon suffered from severe insomnia. He found he had to use
some prudence in taking care of himself. When he was not praying, he studied
the Bible.
The abbot commanded that when he died Peter should succeed him. Abbot Peter
founded five other hermitages. He encouraged his brothers in a life of
prayer and solitude and wanted nothing more for himself. The Holy See
periodically called on him, however, to be a peacemaker or troubleshooter,
between two abbeys in dispute or a cleric or government official in some
disagreement with Rome.
Finally, Pope Stephen IX made Peter the cardinal-bishop of Ostia. He worked
hard to wipe out simony, and encouraged his priests to observe celibacy and
urged even the diocesan clergy to live together and maintain scheduled
prayer and religious observance. He wished to restore primitive discipline
among religious and priests, warning against needless travel, violations of
poverty and too comfortable living. He even wrote to the bishop of Besancon,
complaining that the canons there sat down when they were singing the psalms
in the Divine Office.
He wrote many letters. Some 170 are extant. We also have 53 of his sermons
and seven lives, or biographies, that he wrote. He preferred examples and
stories rather than theory in his writings. The liturgical offices he wrote
are evidence of his talent as a stylist in Latin.
He asked often to be allowed to retire as cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and
finally Alexander II consented. Peter was happy to become once again just a
monk, but he was still called to serve as a papal legate. When returning
from such an assignment in Ravenna, he was overcome by a fever. With the
monks gathered around him saying the Divine Office, he died on February 22,
1072.
In 1828 he was declared a Doctor of the Church.
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