St Peter of Alcantara, born Giovanni Garavita, son of Alfonso and Maria Vilela de Sanabria, was born in Alcantara, Extremadura (Spain) in 1499.
After completing his university studies in Salamanca, at the age of 16 he entered the Discalced Franciscans (later called Observants) of Los Majaretes, he received the habit, and took the name Peter. He was ordained a priest in 1524 and a few years later was granted permission to live in seclusion in the friary of St Onofrio, giving firsthand testimony to the very austere life of penance and harsh poverty, motivated by his passion for the Franciscan ideal and the desire to restore the Order to the rigorous observance of the Rule.
He was elected Minister of the Province of St Gabriel in 1538, Peter began his work of reform, recalling the brothers to the rigor of their Franciscan origins with the so-called "Constitutions for the Members of the Most Strict Observance," which he wrote and approved at the Chapter of Plasencia in 1540.
However, he encountered strong resistance from the friars and was forced to abandon his idea of reform; he then decided to retire as a hermit in Portugal, where other friars soon joined him and together they established small communities, of which Peter was the guardian and novice master.
In 1553 he returned to Spain, and after a further period of solitude and penance, he decided to go barefoot to Rome, to Pope Julius III, to ask permission to found small communities of poor people. The Pope granted it, so Peter, upon returning to Spain, founded so many new friaries so that in 1561 they became the autonomous Province of St Joseph, for which he drafted new Constitutions even more severe and rigorous than the previous ones. But this time the new reform, which called for a return to the original poverty, spread so rapidly to the other Provinces of Spain and Portugal that in 1562 it was approved with the Papal bull, In suprema militantis Ecclesiae.
The reform soon spread to other countries in Europe, the Far East, and Latin America.
St Peter of Alcantara is also known for his encounter with St Teresa of Jesus. In 1560, passing through Avila, he visited the Carmelite nuns' Convent of the Incarnation, where he met Sister Teresa, who confessed to him that she was experiencing a profound spiritual crisis. Peter, who was well acquainted with that type of distress, reassured her and gave her strength. Of him, the saint of Avila wrote in her Autobiography: "What a model of virtue was Brother Peter of Alcantara! The world today is no longer capable of such perfection! What courage the Lord gave this Saint to undertake forty-seven years of such harsh penance" (chapter XVII, XXX).
St Teresa chose him as her spiritual director and advisor for her Carmelite reform.
St Peter died on the 18th October, 1562, in Arenas de San Pedro, in the Diocese of Avila. He was beatified by Gregory XV on the 18th April, 1622, and canonized by Clement IX on the 28thApril, 1669.
Amongst his writings, the Treatise on Prayer and Meditation of 1556-57 is famous.
From the Roman Martyrology: At Arenas in Castile in Spain, St Peter of Alcántara, priest of the Order of Friars Minor, who, distinguished for the gift of counsel and for his life of penance and austerity, renewed the discipline of observance in the friaries of the Order in Spain and was an advisor to St Teresa of Jesus in the reform of the Carmelite Order.