Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Saint Ignatius Loyola of (Spanish Inigo de Oñez y Loyola) (1491-1556), sometimes erroneously called Íñigo López de Recalde, Spanish ecclesiastic, who founded the Society of Jesus, the Order of the Jesuits.
Loyola was born at his family's ancestral castle in Guipúzcoa and as a youth served as a page at the court of Ferdinand V, king of Castile. He later entered military service under Antonio Manrique de Lara, duke of Nájera, and was seriously wounded in 1521 at the siege of Pampeluna (now Pamplona). While recovering, he read a book of lives of the saints, with the result that he resolved to devote himself to a spiritual life. In 1522 Loyola retired to a cave near Manresa, in Catalonia, and lived and prayed in great austerity for ten months, after which he undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
After his return to Spain in 1524, Loyola began his education, entering a grammar school in Barcelona. He studied at the universities of Alcalá and Salamanca in 1526-27, and in 1528 he matriculated at the University of Paris. There, in 1534, he formed the pious fraternity that later developed into the Society of Jesus. In 1537 members of the fraternity proceeded to Rome, where they received the oral approval of Pope Paul III, who gave official confirmation to the order in 1540. The following year Loyola was elected first general of the order. In addition to administering the affairs of the rapidly growing order, he devoted his time to writing the Constitutions of the Order (completed after his death, July 31, 1556, and never essentially modified) and to the completion of his Spiritual Exercises.
The Spiritual Exercises were formulated by Loyola during his retirement at Manresa, using as a model Exercises for the Spiritual Life (1500) by the Spanish abbot Garcia de Cisneros. The work is essentially a manual for meditation on the meaning of life and on the development of a way of life. The meditations are divided into four periods or weeks: the first dealing with the reformation of a person affected by sin; the second, with the conformation of the reformed person to the model of Christ; the third, with the strengthening of the person so conformed through appreciation of the passion and death of Christ; and the fourth, with the transformation of the whole person in identification with the risen and triumphant Savior honoring God the Father. The Spiritual Exercises form the model for most Roman Catholic missions and retreats.
Loyola was canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. He is venerated as the patron of retreats; his feast is celebrated July 31.
Photo of Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Jesuits or Society of Jesus, religious order of men in the Roman Catholic church, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 and confirmed by Pope Paul III in 1540. The motto of the order is Ad majorem Dei gloriam (Latin for “to the greater glory of God”), and its object is the spread of the church by preaching and teaching or the fulfillment of whatever else is judged the most urgent need of the church at the time. Education has been its chief activity almost from the outset, and it has made notable contributions to scholarship in both theology and the secular disciplines.
II Preparation for Membership
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The preparation required of a candidate, especially for membership as a priest rather than as a brother (temporal coadjutor), is considerably longer than that required for the secular priesthood or for membership in other religious orders. After two years in seclusion and prayer as a novice, the candidate takes simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and becomes a scholastic. He then typically spends two years of study in review of classical subjects and three years studying philosophy, mathematics, and the physical sciences. Several years of teaching follow, succeeded by three years' study of theology, after which ordination to the priesthood takes place. Following a fourth year of theological study and a year of retirement and prayer, the candidate is awarded his final grade, becoming either a coadjutor or a professed. The coadjutors take final simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but the professed take these vows as solemn vows and add an additional solemn vow to go wherever the pope may send them; furthermore, the professed take five simple vows, among them the renunciation of ecclesiastical office beyond their order unless by directive of the order. The order is governed by a superior general, residing in Rome, who is elected for life by the general congregation of the order, consisting of representatives of the various provinces; there are now more than 90 regional provinces in the world, each under its own father provincial.
III History
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The aim of Ignatius of Loyola in forming his band was to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to convert the Muslims; all access to the Holy Land was barred, however, by the outbreak of war with the Ottoman Empire, and the members of the order submitted to the pope a constitution that bound them to go as missionaries to any place the pope might direct. After the constitution was approved, Loyola was elected the first superior general of the order.
The development of the order was rapid. Its members took leading parts in the Counter Reformation, establishing schools and colleges throughout Europe. For 150 years they were the leaders in European education; by 1640 they had more than 500 colleges throughout Europe; by about a century later the number of colleges had increased to more than 650 and, in addition, the order had total or partial charge of two dozen universities. More than 200 seminaries and houses of study for Jesuits had also been established. The education of Jesuits in the period of the Counter Reformation was designed to strengthen Roman Catholicism against Protestant expansion. Among the laity the Jesuits were concerned chiefly with the education of the nobility and those of wealth, although they did conduct trade schools and, in mission countries, schools for the poor.
In the mission field the expansion of the order was equally great. Missions were established by Saint Francis Xavier in India and Japan, and the order spread to the interior of China and the coast of Africa. Letters from the Jesuit missionaries in Canada, containing ethnological, historical, and scientific information, were published as the Jesuit Relations and form a unique and valuable source of information about the native tribes of that country. The most famous work of the Jesuit missionaries in the New World, however, was the establishment in the order's South American provinces of reductions, or village communities of native peoples under the spiritual and temporal direction of the priests. The most successful were the reductions of Paraguay. In that country for almost 200 years the Jesuits governed a communal nation of Native Americans, founding 32 villages with a total population of about 160,000; they taught the Native Americans agriculture, mechanical arts, and commerce and trained a small army for defense of the settlements.
The history of the Jesuit order has been marked by a steadily increasing prejudice against it, especially in Roman Catholic countries. Their devotion to the papacy called forth opposition from nationalistic rulers and leaders, and their zeal for ecclesiastical reform antagonized the clergy. At one time or another the order has been expelled from every country in Europe, and in 1773 a coalition of powers under Bourbon influence induced Pope Clement XIV to issue a brief suppressing the order. Frederick II, king of Prussia, and Catherine II, empress of Russia, both admirers of Jesuit education and scholarship, refused, however, to give the brief the publication necessary to make it effective, and in those countries the order survived in local organizations until 1814, when Pope Pius VII reestablished the Jesuits on a worldwide basis. Political and religious opposition also revived; since the reestablishment of the order, it has been free from attack only in Denmark, Sweden, Britain, and the United States.
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