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 Saint Ignatius of Loyola Council of Trent Issue Scott 113 (1946) 
 400th Anniversary of the Death of Saint Ignatius of Loyola Scott 212-213 (1956) July 31 is the Feast Day for Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the date of his death in 1556. He was the founder of the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuit order. Born in 1491, Ignatius Loyola was the son of a Basque nobleman and entered military service against the French in the Spanish province of Castile where he was wounded in his leg at Pamplona (1521). He was subsequently wounded by a cannonball after which he walked with a limp for the remainder of his life. During his convalescence he meditated on the lives of the saints and other writings, experienced a conversion, and spent a year in penance at famous 11th century Benedictine Montserrat Abbey, where he formulated the Spiritual Exercises. After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem he spent several years in study at several locations in Spain and lastly at the University of Paris where he received a Master of Arts degree in 1534. He gathered six disciples who followed the Spiritual Exercises, and they all were ordained priests. The group was approved as an order in 1540. In addition to vows of obedience, they practiced charity and took an oath to go wherever a pope sent them. Their work did not confine the new order to a church or monastery, but they were present ‘in the world,’ wherever their work took them. Ignatius was designated as the first General of the order. David Farmer describes the organization under Ignatius’ leadership: "For fifteen years he inspired, counselled, and directed his subjects with prudence and understanding. His iron will and determination did not make him unlovable or impatient. But the way of total obedience, made by the aspirant during the Spiritual Exercises, was insisted upon; it has often been compared to a military commitment and the Society of Jesus to an army."One of their earliest fields of service to the Church was in German territories where Lutheran and Calvinist churches organized during the 16th century Reformation movements. Jesuits also took leadership in foreign missions such as in the Far East, including India and China, as well as in Africa and North and South America. Jesuits arrived in England in 1540 where they were in peril of arrest and torture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Jesuits became the ‘schoolmasters of Europe,’ and advisers to Roman Catholic rulers. Later, because of their great success, power and influence, they came to be regarded as a potential threat to increasingly-secular 18th century ‘enlightened despots’ (e,g,, France, Austria, Portugal, Spain) because of their ultimate loyalty to papal authority, which is one of the reasons they were suppressed in 1773. The Order was restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814 after the devastation of the wars of the French Revolution. Today, the Jesuits are the largest order of priests and brothers within the Church with approximately 15,000 members, distributed among nine regions world-wide. Their headquarters remain in Rome with the General Curia attached to the Church of the Gesu in the Borgo San Spirito. REFERENCES: |
