Today is the feast of Blessed Peter To Rot. It’s the last time we’ll celebrate Blessed Peter To Rot because he’s scheduled to be canonized October 19.
Peter To Rot illustrates why Pope St. John Paul II accelerated the canonization process. He wanted to showcase both modern examples of holiness and the modern persecution of the Church. Peter To Rot lived from 1912–1945 and died a martyr’s death in odium fidei.
He comes from a part of the world still not too well-known to many outsiders: Oceania. He was born in a village on the island of New Britain, one of the larger islands off the northeast coast of an equally largely unknown island country: Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia.
Papua New Guinea is largely a remote, tropical jungle with many isolated peoples—there are tribes that had no contact with the outside world until the 20th century. Papua New Guinea became the colonial contest between the British, Dutch, and Germans. When the Germans lost World War I, Australia assumed a League of Nations mandate over parts of the island, a status continued as a post-World War II U.N. trusteeship. Today, the island is divided in two: the eastern half of the island, by the name of Papua New Guinea, gained independence from Australia in 1975, the western half was annexed by Indonesia.
Returning to colonial times, the foreign powers allowed Christian missionaries into the country. Methodists arrived in the New Britain village where Peter’s father was a chief. But he was converted by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and brought many of his people along with him: even today, at least 25 percent of Papua New Guinea is Catholic.
Peter, born in 1912, was a second-generation Catholic. Observed and educated by the local priest, he expressed an interest himself in the priesthood, but his father thought it not the proper moment. So, at age 18, Peter went off to become a catechist. From what we know of his studies and his subsequent behavior, he was a zealous catechist who continued to spread the Gospel. He married in 1936 and had three children.
His true test came with the Second World War. Imperial Japan had spread across the Pacific and, in 1942, drove the Australians out and took over Papua New Guinea. With their own religious and Asia-first convictions, the Japanese arrested clergy (especially foreign clergy) and put them in an internment camp (and Japanese internment camps were known for their cruelty).
That left Catholics in his area without priestly support. Peter stepped into the gap, baptizing children, organizing prayer, providing spiritual counsel, and instructing people in the Faith. Eventually, the Japanese prohibited public religious services, so Peter’s work became clandestine.
The next major Japanese blow against the Church was an effort to restore the local pre-Catholic practice of polygamy. Peter may have been discreet in organizing prayer, but he criticized the backsliding on the Gospel that a resurgence of polygamy represented. For that, he was arrested and put into an internment camp himself.
He predicted that the Japanese had it in for him when he told relatives the Japanese said they would be sending a doctor to give him some medicine, though he insisted he was not sick. When the doctor came, he gave Peter an injection that caused him to convulse. It’s said they held him down, and some even claim they beat his neck with a board. He died and his body was sent back to his village. From then on, he was regarded locally as the “martyr catechist.”
Pope St. John Paul II beatified Peter during his 1995 pilgrimage to Papua New Guinea (which was also one of Pope Francis’ last travels abroad).
So, why is Peter relevant?
Even if he is “from a faraway country,” he is a man of our times, a man whose life was profoundly affected by an event of which some Americans still have memories: World War II.
He prefigured Vatican II by living out the layman’s role of evangelization and mission. Peter was not a priest. He became a catechist because, given the dearth of missionaries and the remoteness of his country, he recognized “the harvest is great but the laborers are few.” He did not turn from the plough. He exemplifies the laity’s task of taking responsibility in the Church.
Peter was not a priest. He became a catechist because, given the dearth of missionaries and the remoteness of his country, he recognized “the harvest is great but the laborers are few.Tweet ThisPope Francis elevated the role of catechist as a permanent lay ministry in the Church, alongside lectors and acolytes. But even apart from the still relatively few lay persons formally installed in any of those ministries, there are plenty of informal catechists who continue the work of passing on the Faith to others, without whose labors the Church’s evangelical mission would be impeded.
Peter stood up for marriage. Our Lady of Fatima said that the devil’s assault would be on marriage and the family, and we see that in our own society. But those assaults take different forms in different contexts. For the West, it might be no-fault divorce and contraceptive intercourse. In parts of the Third World, it’s a toleration of relapse into polygamy, justified by some as “inculturation.”
And Peter was a martyr. Last week, the Church celebrated two feasts that perhaps epitomize what most Catholics think of when they think of “martyrs.” We honored Sts. Peter and Paul, the pillars of the ancient Church and its two great martyrs. We then honored the first Christian martyrs of Rome, those we imagine when we speak of the Colosseum, lions, crucifixion, and human torches.
But martyrdom was not a phenomenon of just the first three centuries. Arguably, there were more martyrs for the Faith in the 20th century than back then. While we might imagine such martyrs behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, there were also many victims of the Germans and Japanese as well. And, like John the Baptist in the first century or the English martyrs who would not recognize Henry VIII’s serial “marriages” in the 16th, Peter was a martyr for the truth of marriage.
(For additional information on St. Peter To Rot, see here.)
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