High Middle Ages (11th century)
Feast: February 21
Orphaned, abused, and once traded for a pig, he became a cardinal who told popes and bishops exactly what was rotten — and named names.
Peter Damian's childhood was miserable. His parents died young. One of his brothers took him in and used him as a swineherd — one account says the brother literally traded the boy for a pig. Another brother, Damian, an archpriest, recognized the boy's intelligence and paid for his education. Peter added his rescuer's name to his own out of gratitude. He became a brilliant teacher, but around 1035 he abandoned the university for the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, where the monks lived in pairs in stone cells, fasting and praying with an austerity that made other monasteries look comfortable. Peter thrived. He became prior, then began writing. His Book of Gomorrah, addressed to Pope Leo IX, documented sexual abuse among the clergy with graphic specificity and demanded that the Pope remove offenders from ministry. Leo thanked him but softened the response. Peter kept pushing. He wrote against simony — the buying and selling of Church offices — with equal fury. Multiple popes made him a cardinal-bishop; he kept trying to resign and go back to his cell. He called himself 'Peter the Sinner' and meant it. He ate almost nothing, wore a chain mail shirt next to his skin, and flagellated himself — practices that later generations would find excessive, but that Peter saw as the minimum response to a Church drowning in corruption. He died in 1072, on his way home from yet another reform mission.