Ignatius of Loyola

Íñigo López de Loyola was born on October 23, 1491, in the family castle at Loyola, in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa within the Crown of Castile ^[1]. He was the youngest of thirteen children in a minor noble family with a long record of military service to the Castilian kings. His mother, Marina Sánchez de Licona, died when he was still very young, and much of his upbringing fell to relatives and to the wife of the local blacksmith, María de Garín ^[2].

As a teenager Íñigo was sent to serve as a page in the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, treasurer of Castile, at Arévalo. There he absorbed the manners of court life: fine clothing, swordsmanship, gambling, and the chivalric romances that were popular reading among young nobles of his generation ^[1]. By his own later account, recorded in the autobiography he dictated near the end of his life, he was vain about his appearance and eager for personal glory ^[3].

When Velázquez died in 1517, Íñigo entered the military service of Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Nájera and viceroy of Navarre. He took part in campaigns and local disputes, and contemporaries described him as brave to the point of recklessness ^[2]. Nothing in these years suggested the religious founder he would become; anyone asking who was Ignatius of Loyola in 1520 would have heard about an ambitious Basque soldier, not a saint.

The turning point of any Ignatius of Loyola biography comes on May 20, 1521, when French forces besieged the citadel of Pamplona during their invasion of Navarre. Íñigo urged the badly outnumbered garrison to resist. A cannonball shattered his right leg and injured the left, and the fortress surrendered shortly afterward ^[1]. The French, impressed by his courage, carried him back to the castle at Loyola to recover.

The leg was set badly and had to be broken and reset, a procedure he endured without complaint. A protruding piece of bone was later sawed off at his own insistence, because he could not bear the thought of a deformity showing beneath the fashionable tight hose of a courtier ^[3]. The operations left him with a permanent limp.

During the long convalescence he asked for the tales of knightly adventure he loved, but the castle held only two books: a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and a collection of saints' lives known as the Golden Legend. Reading them repeatedly, he noticed a pattern in his own moods. Daydreams of worldly honor left him dry and restless afterward, while thoughts of imitating Saint Francis and Saint Dominic left a lasting peace ^[3]. This observation, which he later developed into his teaching on the discernment of spirits, convinced him to abandon his military ambitions and devote himself to God ^[4].

In early 1522 Íñigo left Loyola for the Benedictine shrine of Montserrat, where he made a general confession lasting three days, gave his fine clothes to a beggar, and hung his sword and dagger before the statue of the Virgin in an all-night vigil modeled on the knightly ceremonies he knew from romances ^[1]. He then walked to the nearby town of Manresa, intending to stay a few days. He remained for roughly ten months.

At Manresa he lived on alms, let his hair and nails grow, and practiced severe fasting and penance. He passed through periods of scruples and despair so intense that he later admitted he had been tempted to end his life ^[3]. Out of this crisis came a series of spiritual illuminations, the most famous of them beside the river Cardoner, which he said taught him more than all his later studies combined ^[3].

From notes made during this period he began composing the Spiritual Exercises, a structured program of meditation, self-examination, and prayer arranged over roughly four weeks. The book is not devotional reading but a director's manual for guiding another person through an ordered encounter with the life of Christ ^[4]. First printed in 1548 with papal approval, it remains in continuous use nearly five centuries later and is widely regarded as one of the most consequential works in the history of Christian spirituality ^[5].

In 1523 the former soldier made his way to Jerusalem as a begging pilgrim, traveling through Rome and Venice. He hoped to spend his life in the Holy Land, but the Franciscan custodians of the holy places, wary of the danger to unauthorized Latin Christians under Ottoman rule, ordered him to leave ^[1].

Back in Spain, he concluded that if he wished to help souls he needed an education. He sat with schoolboys in Barcelona to learn Latin grammar, then studied at the universities of Alcalá and Salamanca. In both cities his habit of giving informal spiritual guidance drew the attention of the Inquisition, which imprisoned and examined him more than once. He was never convicted of heresy, but he was forbidden to teach on theological matters until he completed formal studies ^[2].

In 1528 he enrolled at the University of Paris, then the leading theological faculty in Europe, where he spent seven years and took the name Ignatius. He supported himself by begging trips to Flanders and England, and he earned the degree of Master of Arts in 1535 ^[1]. In Paris he guided a circle of talented fellow students through the Spiritual Exercises, among them Francis Xavier and Peter Faber. On August 15, 1534, in a chapel on Montmartre, Ignatius and six companions vowed poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or, if that proved impossible, service to the pope ^[4].

War between Venice and the Ottoman Empire closed the sea route to Jerusalem, so the companions, now ordained priests, presented themselves to Pope Paul III in Rome. Ignatius had been ordained in Venice in 1537 but delayed celebrating his first Mass for over a year ^[2]. In 1539 the group resolved to form a permanent religious order under obedience to the pope, and on September 27, 1540, Paul III approved the Society of Jesus in the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae ^[1].

The new order broke with monastic tradition. Jesuits sang no communal office in choir, wore no distinctive habit, and bound themselves by a special fourth vow of obedience to the pope regarding missions, all so that members could be sent anywhere at short notice ^[5]. In April 1541 Ignatius was elected the first Superior General, accepting only after his companions refused to hear his objections.

Among the central Ignatius of Loyola achievements of the following fifteen years was the drafting of the Jesuit Constitutions, a detailed body of law completed in substance by 1550 and still the governing framework of the order ^[4]. From a modest set of rooms beside the church of Santa Maria della Strada in Rome, he wrote or dictated several thousand letters directing Jesuits across the world, one of the largest surviving correspondences of the sixteenth century ^[5].

Ignatius spent his final decade almost entirely in Rome, governing an order that grew from ten members in 1540 to roughly a thousand at his death, spread across Europe, India, Brazil, and Japan ^[1]. He sent Francis Xavier to Asia in 1540 and followed the missions closely through letters that took years to arrive.

Education became the Society's signature work almost by accident. The college founded at Messina in Sicily in 1548 proved so successful that requests for schools poured in, and by 1556 the Jesuits operated more than thirty colleges ^[5]. Ignatius also founded the Roman College in 1551, the ancestor of the Pontifical Gregorian University, and the German College in 1552 to train clergy for lands affected by the Reformation ^[2]. In Rome itself he organized houses for catechumens and for women leaving prostitution.

His health, damaged by the austerities of Manresa and by chronic gallstones, declined steadily. He suffered recurring fevers yet kept working, and between 1553 and 1555 he dictated the memoir of his early life now known as the Autobiography ^[3]. He died in his room in Rome in the early morning of July 31, 1556, without receiving the last rites, because his assistants had not realized the end was so near ^[1].

Pope Gregory XV canonized Ignatius on March 12, 1622, in the same ceremony as Francis Xavier and Teresa of Ávila, and the Church keeps his feast on July 31 ^[1]. Pope Pius XI declared him patron of spiritual exercises and retreats in 1922. His remains rest beneath an ornate altar in the Church of the Gesù in Rome, and the rooms where he lived and died are preserved beside it ^[2].

The order he founded became the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church and one of the most influential educational bodies in history. Jesuit schools and universities today number in the hundreds worldwide, including institutions such as Georgetown University in the United States, and Jesuit missionaries left deep marks on the histories of India, Japan, China, Paraguay, and Canada ^[5]. In 2013 Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the first Jesuit pope, taking the name Francis, an event that renewed public interest in the founder ^[6].

Beyond the institution, the practices Ignatius developed, especially the daily examen and the discernment of spirits, are now used well beyond the Jesuit order, in retreat houses and spiritual direction across many Christian traditions ^[4]. Among the more striking Ignatius of Loyola facts is this reversal: a courtier once obsessed with reputation is remembered for a motto of self-effacement, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God.