Article Tools
- Text Size
- Add a comment (1)
- Print this article
- Email this article
He was born the year before Columbus discovered America. His contemporaries were larger-than-life figures like Michelangelo, St. Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, and King Henry VIII.
He was often described as a “soldier saint,” but he bore arms for only a few months of his life. He was also called a “reformer,” but he rarely spoke about the church’s need for change. He was, however, a natural-born leader of men, a pastor, and one of the most flexible men of his time. His work the Spiritual Exercises, which embodies all three of these character traits, has led countless people to a deeper relationship with Jesus.
Clearly, Ignatius of Loyola was a heroic figure, both in his age and in the history of the church. He is revered throughout the Catholic world and by many Protestant traditions, but he has not always been well understood.
A Shift in Dreams. He was born Ignacio Lopez de Loyola in 1491. As a boy at his family castle in the Basque country of northern Spain, he had the traditional education of the nobility. He learned how to read and write, to dance, to duel, and to cut a fine figure at court. A romantic at heart, he often dreamed of the military exploits he would do, and the fair maidens he would court. But when he was in his late twenties, all his dreams were shattered when he took a cannonball in his right leg at the battle of Pamplona. (The injury left him with a limp for the rest of his life.)
During his long and painful recuperation back home at Loyola castle, Ignatius underwent a profound spiritual conversion that grew deeper and deeper with the passing years. He described himself up until that point as “a man given to worldly vanities and having a vain and overpowering desire to gain renown.” From that point on, he left all that behind him.
Betraying the restlessness of the newly converted, Ignatius set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as soon as he regained his strength. He paused along the way at Manresa, a little town outside Barcelona, where he ended up spending about a year praying, fasting, and seeking out people to talk with them about “the things of God.” It was here that he began making notes about what was going on in his soul and what he was learning from other people. This was the origin of the Spiritual Exercises, which he continued to refine for the next twenty years. Then it was off to Palestine—where he was able to stay only a few months.
Flexible before God. On the way back to Europe, Ignatius decided he needed to go back to school “in order better to help souls.” Helping others had already become the dominant drive of his life. In fact, in his immense correspondence of twelve thick volumes (larger than anybody else’s in his century), “helping souls” appears on almost every page.
After some false starts, Ignatius ended up at the University of Paris, where he remained for six years, earning a Master’s degree in philosophy and evangelizing young men by guiding them through his Exercises. He and his companions wanted to go to the Holy Land to help convert the Muslims, but the tense political and military situation prevented them. So they decided to stay together and found a new order, for which they got the pope’s permission in 1540. They elected Ignatius superior, and for the remaining fifteen years of his life, Ignatius the adventurer, Ignatius the traveler, Ignatius the evangelist, became Ignatius the administrator—he stayed in Rome governing the order.
While it may seem that Ignatius lurched from project to project, from whim to whim, a closer look shows a man who remained flexible before God, ready to make changes, sometimes drastic changes, when he felt they would best serve God’s purposes. He wasn’t a soldier saint, and he wasn’t a reformer. He was simply a pastor who did everything he could to “help souls” come to Jesus.
A Soldier Saint As Father-General of the Jesuits, Ignatius is often depicted as running his order along military lines—something you might expect from a former soldier who loved to dream about military exploits. It is true that Ignatius saw obedience as important for an order in which the members undertook so many different ministries. His famous Letter on Obedience sounds extraordinarily demanding to our ears. In actual practice, however, Ignatius rarely gave commands, and he told local superiors to give commands only when absolutely necessary. Most frequently, he told Jesuits in the field to “do as you think best.”
The key to Ignatius’ approach as a leader is probably found in his time at Manresa. While he was there—remember, it was not long after his dramatic conversion—Ignatius tried to imitate and even surpass the saints in the harsh way he treated his body. He let his hair and nails grow and rarely took a bath. Aiming for extreme holiness, he sought to deny every bodily urge and pleasure. But over time, he came to realize that this style of life was frustrating his goal of helping souls. People were more repelled by him than attracted. He was also ruining his health, which meant limiting the amount of energy he had for ministry.
Ignatius’ decision to cut his hair, trim his nails, and finally take a bath, meant far more than a renewed commitment to personal hygiene. It meant that he was learning how to join practical wisdom to religious zeal—a trait that he would elevate to an art form as he continued to grow in the Lord. Another example of his use of practical wisdom, in fact, was his decision to continue his studies. He saw that an advanced degree from a well-respected university would open doors for him and his Spiritual Exercises that would otherwise remain shut.
A Reformer Textbooks describe Ignatius as a church reformer and a tireless Catholic champion against Martin Luther. There is a grain of truth in that depiction—but only a grain. While Ignatius was a student at Paris, Lutheranism hit the city and the university with force. Yet Ignatius seemed to pay little attention to it. He and his companions wanted to go to Jerusalem, not to Luther’s town of Wittenberg. Only in the last several years of his life did he turn his attention to the Reformation and begin to see it as a major concern for the order.
But surely he was a church reformer? Well, if by church reformer you mean somebody who worked to help people deepen their faith, yes, he certainly was. But so was every saint in history, yet we usually don’t consider St. Benedict or St. Francis church reformers.
Historians are coming to realize that the whole church may not have been as corrupt as we once thought. True, there were grave abuses in the way popes were elected and the way bishops held more than one bishopric and collected money from them all. While there were serious problems in “the institutional church,” at the same time, the religious practice and devotion of everyday people was in many places lively, fervent, and reasonably well instructed. If we want to call Ignatius a reformer at all, perhaps we would do best to describe him as a reformer of souls, not of practices or institutions. He was more of an evangelist than a reformer, if we want to be clear.
Ignatius never applied the word reformer to himself, either. The Council of Trent undertook the reform of the institutional church, and it reconvened in 1551-52 while he was general. Ignatius was obviously gratified that the pope picked two Jesuits as his theologians at the council. But while he certainly supported the council, he showed little interest in its deliberations or decisions. His heart and his concerns were focused on the missions abroad and pastoral work at home. And it is with this word—pastor—that we finally come to see what kind of person Ignatius really was.
A Pastor! At first, Ignatius and the other early Jesuits saw themselves as men on the move. Their role was to preach, hear confessions, and reconcile enemies. As head of the order, Ignatius continued this impulse, but he made a crucial decision that provided some balance to this original mobility. Ignatius began to see that people were better helped in the long run through stable institutions, where the work that his men had begun could continue to be fostered and developed over whole generations. This new insight helps to explain his decision to commit the Jesuits to the staffing and running of schools. Here was the stability of presence he saw as necessary—and here, too, was a place where his men could evangelize enthusiastic young people who could then bring the gospel into the world.
Throughout his life, Ignatius showed a flexibility before God that has become the hallmark of the Jesuit order. After his injury at Pamplona, he could have devoted all his time to regaining his military prowess and becoming the hero he had dreamed about—but he heard God’s voice, and he adopted a new dream. At Manresa, he could have remained a solitary hermit—but he saw how he was hindering rather than helping his spiritual growth, so he changed tactics. Once in Rome, he could have become an adventurer-?missionary—but he saw the need for stability in his order, and so he set down roots. At every turn, Ignatius adapted to the situation before him, willing to put aside his own ideas for the sake of building the kingdom of God. That took guts.
A very informative essay on one of the church’s most famous evangelical figures and of course, the founder of the Jesuit order. He predated Teresa of Avilla by several years and it is not certain that those two great doctors of the faith ever actually met. This article depicts him as being a more restrained figure than the more usual fanatical force of legend. But a surprising omission is the absence of any mention of Francis Xavier, Ignatius’ most famous disciple who was responsible for bringing the Catholic faith tradition to Goa and whose uncorrupt body was later presrved in India.