http://www.awrsipe.com/Docs_and_Controversy/2004-12-01-magisterium.htm

Born in 1007 in Ravenna, Peter Damian experienced evil early in life. According to his medieval biography, Peter Damian’s mother had willfully withheld food from him so that he would die and relieve the family of the burden of having another child to care for and feed. This was not an uncommon way of handling unwanted children, especially in times of famine. However, it was the mistress of a local priest who intervened and saved his life. As a child, he lost both parents and spent some time being raised by his siblings. His medieval biographer claims that he spent some of his childhood with an abusive older brother, but Peter Damian never confirms this in his own writings. Peter Damian did, however, reminisce warmly about a period of time that he spent under the care of one of his older sisters. (11) Finally, his brother Damian, the archpriest of Ravenna, took him under his care and saw to it that he was properly cared for and educated.

Peter Damian was an excellent student and eventually became a master rhetorician at schools in Parma and Ravenna. To appreciate his work, it is important to keep in mind that he was trained as a rhetorician using language and categories that would have appealed to eleventh-century sensibilities. As Jean Leclercq noted, his was an age that loved powerful language. (12) Though his language was strong, his goal was to call people to penance and to reform their behavior. While it is true that he wrote some sophisticated theology on issues such as divine omnipotence, it would be a mistake to read him as a philosopher.

Perhaps as a result of his early experiences of evil, Peter Damian was increasingly scandalized by the behavior of the students and professors at the diocesan cathedral schools. Town and gown fights, sexual immorality, simony, and clergymen jockeying for higher positions were just some of the behaviors that scandalized him. In 1035, at the age of 28, Peter Damian walked away from his promising career and joined a strict monastic community at Fonte Avellana. Once he was in the safe, if austere, environment of the monastery, he set about the task of reforming the Church through a series of widely distributed letters, treatises, and sermons.

Because of his growing fame as a preacher and a reformer, Peter Damian was plucked out of the monastery and appointed the cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1057. The reform issues facing the Church as an institution during his lifetime were simony, clerical concubinage, and the sexual immorality of monks and clergy. Simony, the buying and selling of sacred things, was a pervasive sin. He defended the moderate position that simoniacal and sexually active clerics could validly perform the sacraments for others–though their sacramental acts simply served to condemn them as vessels fit for destruction. (13) His most lasting institutional reform involved the process of electing the pope. Peter Damian and several of his fellow reformers established the system whereby the cardinals elected the pope in order to free papal elections from the direct control by the Roman nobility, the emperors, and other political powers. (14)

After several years in the vanguard of the reforming party of the Roman Curia, Peter Damian asked to be relieved of his duties so that he could return to the eremitical life of his monastic order. Still he never abandoned the cause of reform. He was a man deeply committed to the quiet life of contemplation even as he played a large role in international affairs involving both the Church and the state until his death in 1072. As a monk, he was a strong advocate of “the discipline” or self-flagellation but his sermons reveal a playfulness and delightfulness that seem inconsistent with his harsh ascetical practices and strident reform rhetoric.