Ignatius
Loyola, Mystic, Educator, Preacher,
and Founder of the Jesuits
31 July 1556
and Founder of the Jesuits
31 July 1556
In^igo de
Recalde de Loyola, youngest of thirteen (one of my sources says eleven)
children of Don Beltran Ya'n^ez de Loyola and Maria Sa'enz de Licona y Balda,
was born in 1491 in the family castle in the Basque province of Gu'ipozcoa, in
northeastern Spain, near the French border. (In the preceding sentence,
"n^" is used to denote "n" with a tilde over it, and is
pronounced "ny" in Spanish and, I assume, in Basque, though this is
just a guess--Basque has no known connection with any other language.) As
befitted a boy from an aristocratic family, he spent some time as a page at the
court of Ferdinand and Isabella, the rulers of Spain. Here, by his later
testimony, he was involved in gambling, wenching, and duelling. He got into
trouble with the law, but escaped punishment because he was technically a
cleric. (This does not mean that he was destined for the priesthood. In those
days someone becoming a priest went through seven steps: doorkeeper, reader,
exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest. The first four were called
Minor Orders, and did not involve any serious commitment, but they did make one
technically a cleric, which was useful if one got arrested for anything less
than murder or treason. Probably many young noblemen took the first step simply
as a precaution. Later the law extended the definition of "cleric" to
anyone who could read. See the BIO notes on Thomas a Becket, 29 December.) He
then entered military service, but fought in only one major battle, the defense
of Pamplona against the French in 1521. The professional solders knew that
their position was indefensible, and proposed to surrender. Inigo (or Ignatius,
to give him the Latin form of his name) had visions of military glory, and
urged his comrades to fight. He was promptly hit in the leg by a cannon ball,
the town surrendered anyway, and the French sent him home on a stretcher.
The leg was
badly set, and did not heal properly. It had to be rebroken and reset, and
again it healed crookedly and let him with a permanent limp. Meanwhile, he was
bedridden for many months, and spent the time reading. He asked for tales of
knightly adventure, but instead was given a Life of Christ, written
by a Carthusian monk. He read it, and his life was transformed. He went on
pilgrimage to Montserrat (near Barcelona), where he hung up his sword over the
altar, and then spent about a year at Manresa near Montserrat first working as
a nurse and orderly in a hospital there, and then retiring to a cave to live as
a hermit and study The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, a
book urging the Christian to take Christ as example, and seek daily to follow
in His footsteps. It is probably during this year that he wrote hisSpiritual
Exercises, a manual of Christian prayer and meditation. He directs the
reader to begin with an event in the life of Christ, and to imagine the scene
in detail, to replay the episode in his mind like a movie script, and to try to
feel as if he had himself witnessed the event, and then to use this experience
as a motive for love, gratitude, and dedication to the service of God. The book
is available today in hardcover and paperback. It has been much used by
Christians of all varieties--John Wesley was enthusiastic about it. Ignatius
then made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to see with his own eyes the scenes of Our
Lord's life and death. He wanted to stay and preach to the muslims, but the
Franciscans stationed there advised him that he needed an education in order to
preach effectively.
Back in Spain,
he spent ten years (1524-1534) getting an education at Barcelona, Alcala',
Salamanca, and Paris, beginning by going to elementary school to learn Latin
grammar, and ending with a Master of Arts degree from the University of Paris.
In Salamanca, he often preached to groups of people assembled by chance; but in
those days a layman undertaking to preach on his own, without a license or
supervision, was automatically suspected of heresy. Ignatius was twice imprisoned
by the Spanish Inquisition and questioned about his beliefs, an experience that
made a deep impression on him. (He was finally acquitted, but forbidden to
discuss religious matters for three years.) Today, his followers are
aggressively proud of the fact that no member of their order has ever sat on an
Inquisitorial tribunal. (It is possible that Ignatius already had doubts about
the Inquisition. He was a Basque, and I am told that the Inquisition was never
active in Biscay because the Basques, although thoroughly orthodox Christians,
would not tolerate it.) In 1534, he and six fellow students formed a group who
vowed to travel to Jerusalem and there preach the Gospel to the moslems. (The
most famous of the six is Francis Xavier, who went to India and China as a
missionary, and who is commemorated on 3 December.) This group later took the
name, "The Society of Jesus," and were nicknamed "the
Jesuits" by outsiders, a nickname that stuck.
In 1537 the
Jesuits (now ten in number) gathered in Venice and (having found that renewed
war in Palestine made journeying there impossible) offered their services to
Pope Paul III. Ignatius and some of the others were ordained to the priesthood,
and they were assigned various tasks. In 1540 they became a formal organization,
with the usual monastic vows, plus a fourth vow of personal obedience to the
Pope. In order to have more time for preaching and study the order abolished
the practice (followed by almost all previous orders) of reciting the monastic
Hours in community. Its chief goals were:
(a) renewal of the Roman Catholic Church through extensive education and the encouragement of frequent use of the sacraments,
(b) extensive missionary work in non-Christian countries, and
(c) a suitable response to the growing challenge of Protestantism.
In the
remaining fifteen years of his life, Ignatius supervised the Jesuits from Rome
and saw the order grow from ten men to a thousand. It was always active in
missions, and became deeply involved in education, and in counselling those
with difficult decisions to make, particularly rulers. The Order undertook to
win back to the Roman obedience those areas that had recently become
Protestant. Ignatius counselled his Jesuits (technically neither monks nor
friars, but priests regular) to proceed with charity and moderation,
"without hard words or contempt for people's errors." He died
suddenly on 31 July 1556.
His writing include the following prayer:
Teach us, good Lord, to serve
thee as thou deservest;
to give, and not to count the
cost,
to fight, and not to heed the
wounds,
to toil, and not to seek for
rest,
to labor, and not to ask for
any reward,
save that of knowing that we
do thy will.
The biographies were written by James Kiefer
