St. Peter the Martyr

Saint Peter of Verona
Saint Peter the Martyr by Pedro Berruguete
Martyr
Born	1205 Verona, Italy
Died	April 6, 1252 on the road from Como to Milan, Italy
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Canonized	March 9, 1253, Perugia, Italy by Pope Innocent IV
Feast	April 6 April 29 (General Roman Calendar, 1586–1969) June 4 (Dominican particular calendar)
Attributes	Dominican with a hatchet in his head or a severe head wound; or writing the words "Credo in Deum" as he dies.
Patronage	Guaynabo, Puerto Rico; Inquisitors; midwives

Saint Peter of Verona O.P. (1206 – April 6, 1252), also known as Saint Peter Martyr, was a 13th-century Italian Catholic priest. He was a Dominican friar and a celebrated preacher. He served as Inquisitor in Lombardy, was killed by an assassin, and was canonized as a Catholic saint 11 months after his death, making this the fastest canonization in history.

Thomas Agni of Leontino, Dominican archbishop of Cosenza, and later patriarch of Jerusalem, was the first to write a life of the blessed martyr. He lived for many years with Peter of Verona and had been his superior.

He was born in the city of Verona into a family perhaps sympathetic to the Cathar heresy. Peter went to a Catholic school, and later to the University of Bologna, where he is said to have maintained his orthodoxy and at the age of fifteen, met Saint Dominic. Peter joined the Order of the Friars Preachers (Dominicans) and became a celebrated preacher throughout northern and central Italy.

From the 1230s on, Peter preached against heresy, and especially Catharism, which had many adherents in thirteenth-century Northern Italy. Pope Gregory IX appointed him General Inquisitor for northern Italy in 1234. and Peter evangelized nearly the whole of Italy, preaching in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Genoa, and Como. In 1243 he recommended the new Servite foundation to the pope for approval.

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