In the spring of 1548, Canisius was sent with eleven companions to Messina, where the Viceroy, Don Juan de Vega, had founded a college.  On the eve of their departure St. Ignatius put to them four questions in writing.  Canisius answered the questions thus:—­

1.  “I am ready, with the help of God’s grace, to remain here or to go to Sicily, to India, or wherever it may be that obedience requires me.

2.  “If I am sent to Sicily I affirm that I will accept with joy whatever office is conferred on me, even should it be that of porter, cook, or gardener.

3.  “I am ready to learn or to teach in any department of science, although hitherto I may have been quite unskilled in it.

4.  “I will regard as best for me whatever my superiors may decide to do with me, whether they entrust me with any office or with none.  I promise this day, the 5th February, for my whole life never to demand anything for myself concerning my lodging, office or any other similar thing, but once for all I leave the guidance of my soul, and every care for my body in the complete submission of my judgment and will, to my father in God, the Rev. Father General, 1548.  Peter Canisius of Nymwegen.”

Hereupon St. Ignatius appointed him professor of rhetoric at Messina, and Canisius wrote to his friends at Cologne:  “As I am useless for any spiritual office I am entrusted with the insipid department of belles lettres.  I teach rhetoric for which I have little aptitude, but I take pains to form these good youths, and am always ready, with God’s help, to do all that obedience requires of me.”

After a fruitful year, during which he had learned Italian, and having preached in that language, had obtained some wonderful conversions from sin, he was recalled to Rome, where he laid his four solemn vows* in the hands of St. Ignatius.  Immediately afterwards he was told to prepare for his apostolate in Germany.

* The first three of the solemn vows taken by the Jesuits are those of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  The fourth vow is the promise to go wherever the Pope may send them.

William iv., Duke of Bavaria, surnamed the valiant, on account of his faithful adherence to the Catholic Church, at a time when so many of the reigning princes of Germany fell away, saw, with distress and alarm, the daily increasing dangers to which his beloved fatherland was a prey.  Even in the college which he had himself founded at Ingolstadt, heresies were steadily gaining the upper hand, and he besought St. Ignatius to send him learned men, imbued with the apostolic spirit, to stay the progress of error.