He was the room-mate of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier and as integral as them to the founding of the Society of Jesus. But it’s taken nearly 400 years longer for him to be canonised – at the behest of a Jesuit pope On 17 December 2013, Pope Francis issued a bull of canonisation declaring the sixteenth-century Jesuit Peter Faber a saint. Not for Faber a solemn ceremony in St Peter’s Square. This form of canonisation suspends the ordinary processes of saint-making and is reserved for those long dead whose outstanding holiness has long since been recognised. Faber was born in 1506 into a farming family in the village of Villaret in the Duchy of Savoy and never lost a fondness for the popular devotions of his childhood. It was while studying in the University of Paris