In 1541, Alfonso Salmerón and Paschase Broët were sent to Ireland as papal envoys at the request of the Archbishop of Armagh, Robert Wauchope, who had fled to the Continent rather than accept Henry VIII’s supremacy of the Church in Ireland. Little was known about Ireland at the time except that it was experiencing great turmoil, both religious and political. The mission of the two Jesuits was to sustain the faith of the faithful, reconcile the lapsed, and report back to Rome about the true situation.
Before travelling to Ireland, Ignatius gave instructions to Salmerón and Broët, including this piece of advice: “Imitate the artifices of the evil spirit when he is tempting a good man: enter the other’s door and come out your own in order to net him for the greater service of God.”77
The primate of Scotland, Cardinal David Beaton, whom Salmerón and Broët met in Lyons, told them that the Irish “were the wildest people in the world, barbarous and incapable of any civilization.”78 Four years later, Beaton was hacked to death in his bedroom by his own countrymen. They were indeed bloody and dangerous times!
Undeterred by Beaton’s warnings, Salmerón and Broët, crossing over from Scotland, arrived in the north of Ireland. They remained for thirty-four days. Without any knowledge of the Irish or English languages, their ability to communicate with the native Irish was extremely limited. Danger was everywhere, and since they could not hide safely, they decided there was no point in waiting for arrest: “Our consciences told us not to run the risk of probable death without hope of doing any good.” They crossed back to Scotland and then travelled on to Dieppe, and thus reached Italy. Salmeron would later write, “Ireland was not without its share of the cross of Christ our Lord for we suffered hunger and thirst, and had no place to put our heads, nor even a place to say an Our Father in peace.”79
If the brief Irish mission had little success, the same could not be said of an earlier mission to the far-off Indies, made in response to the persistent request of King John III of Portugal for Jesuits to be sent to his territories in India. Initially, Ignatius designated Simão Rodrigues and Nicolás Bobadilla for the mission, but in the event neither of them made it. Bobadilla, who had been working in Naples, became ill on his arrival in Rome and was unable to depart for Lisbon. Rodriguez arrived safely in Lisbon but was detained by King John at the royal court before he could set sail for Goa.
Ignatius was faced with a serious problem because of Bobadilla’s illness. With only a day’s warning, in March 1540, Ignatius notified Francis Xavier, who had no inkling of any change of plan, that he would have to undertake this mission to the Indies in place of Bobadilla. The announcement brought Xavier great joy, for he had long had an intense desire to convert the Gentiles.80 After a delay of some nine months in Lisbon, on 7 April 1541, Xavier set out for Goa. An Italian Jesuit, Messer Paulo, embarked with him. The pair eventually arrived safely in Goa in the spring of 1542, having spent the winter in Mozambique. Xavier pronounced his final vows in Goa in 1543, separated by thousands of miles from his early companions.
Francis Xavier’s letters from the Indies proved to be most effective publicity for the Society of Jesus in Europe and were read with interest and enthusiasm in the royal courts of Spain and Portugal, as they were in Paris and Cologne, and later at the Council of Trent (1545–63). They were copied and re-copied, and were the source of inspiration for many generous young men to follow in Xavier’s missionary footsteps.
Xavier laboured tirelessly in the East (mostly in India and Japan) for a number of years and then, in 1552, he courageously set out for China, accompanied by a Jesuit scholastic named Ferreira and a Chinese layman named Antonio. He was sick, emaciated, and exhausted when he reached the island of Shangchuan, from where he hoped to sail to the mainland. He died one night in early December 1552. Some Portuguese merchants who were present at his death wrapped his corpse, whole and entire, in the religious garb he wore, covered it in lime, and buried it in the ground. Their intention was to carry the bones back to India after the lime had consumed the rest, as Xavier himself had requested. After three months, the grave was dug up and Xavier’s clothing was found to be entirely intact; his body was quite solid and incorrupt. His body was then brought back to Goa, where it was embalmed and placed in the college chapel in the presence of the local dignitaries and the citizenry. The people of Goa greatly venerated Xavier, and his place of rest quickly became a place of pilgrimage. Shortly after Xavier’s death, King John III of Portugal ordered the beginning of his canonisation process, and he was canonised on 12 March 1622, along with Ignatius.
We still possess some of the correspondence between Ignatius and Xavier. Xavier used to sign his letters to Ignatius, “Your least son in the farthest exile.”
Xavier’s letters would sometimes take two years to arrive in Rome, and it was almost a miracle that they arrived at all. In the end, Ignatius called Xavier back to Rome so that he could learn at first hand about the problems the Society was facing in far-off Asia. Ignatius’s summons arrived two years after Xavier had died.
The Society took rather longer to establish itself in Spain than in the Italian peninsula. This was mainly due to the fierce opposition raised by Melchor Cano, the brilliant Dominican theologian of Salamanca. Cano disapproved strongly of some of the novelties in the Jesuit way of proceeding and even went so far as to suggest that the Spiritual Exercises were heretical in their teaching.
In stark contrast, Francis Borgia, the Duke of Gandia, requested permission to join the Society soon after becoming a widower.81 His eminence in Spanish royal circles meant that the matter had to be kept secret. Through his father, he was the great-grandson of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, and the grand-nephew of the famous Lucrezia Borgia, wife to seven husbands. On 2 February 1548, Francis Borgia made his solemn profession of vows in secret. He subsequently went to Rome during the final months of 1550.
In 1548, Paul III appointed three experts to examine The Spiritual Exercises: the Inquisitor Cardinal of Burgos; the Vicar of the Supreme Pontiff, Filippo Archinto; and Egidio Foscharari, who was Master of the Sacred Palace. They approved them with a laudatory testimonial. On 31 July 1548, Paul III issued the papal bull Pastoralis officii, confirming and approving The Spiritual Exercises. They had been translated into elegant Latin from the original Spanish by Jesuit André des Freux in 1546–47.
During Ignatius’s life, the full Spiritual Exercises—a retreat of some thirty days—was given to approximately 7,500 people, of whom about 1,500 were women, including religious sisters. Of the 6,000 or so men who made the full Exercises, only about 1,000 were members of religious orders or became religious afterwards. The majority were laymen who continued on in their chosen state of life. It is believed that there were about 100 Jesuits giving the Exercises in more than 100 towns and cities in the years 1540–56.
In the years 1548 and 1549, the Jesuits began a totally new work, a work for which they would subsequently become famous down through the centuries: education. The first Jesuit schools were founded in Messina and Palermo in Sicily and rapidly spread to numerous towns and cities, not only in Europe but also in Latin America and Asia. It has often been said that the Jesuits became “the schoolmasters of Europe.” Schools very quickly became the chief work of the Society of Jesus, with parents anxious that there should be a Jesuit school in their town or city. From approximately 1551, the Jesuits began to open schools at the rate of about four or five per year. By 1565 they had thirty colleges in Italy alone. This rapid expansion became a great drain on manpower in the early Society, but the Jesuits were anxious to educate good Christian leaders for the future. The education was free of charge “for rich and poor,” the cost of the whole enterprise being borne by wealthy nobles and benefactors.82 The schools looked more to the formation of mind and character than to the mere acquisition of knowledge. It was hoped that students would become active and committed Christians in the service of the common good, and especially to the less fortunate members of Society.
Ignatius, while preoccupied with the rapidly growing Society, still had time to keep an eye on aspects of the curriculum taught in these schools. Jesuit schools became renowned for their high academic standards and for their promotion of music and theatre. The students often gave public performances of Greek and Latin plays and orchestral pieces to the citizenry of the towns and cities.
Ignatius would not permit a Jesuit to administer any sort of physical punishment in the colleges, not even on the palm of the hand. A lay corrector was appointed to administer any such punishment to the boys. This arrangement had some unfortunate consequences for the lay corrector at the hands of some irate students!
In February 1551, Francis Borgia, with Ignatius’s encouragement and advice, founded a college in Rome. This became known as the Roman College, later the Gregorian University, and won renown throughout the Catholic world for its scholarship and research. Young Jesuits from sixteen or more countries, all speaking different languages, attended this college. In such a Tower of Babel, it was just as well that the language of instruction was Latin for all.
In 1550, Ignatius called a meeting, summoning to Rome from the various provinces all the first fathers who could attend without inconvenience or interruption to their work. At this meeting, he handed each of them a letter written in his own hand in Spanish.
Upon examining the matter factually and, so far as I could perceive within myself, without any emotional bias, I have come on many and varied occasions to the factual conclusion that because of my many sins, many imperfections, and many inward and outward infirmities, I lack to an almost infinite degree the qualities required for the responsibility over the Society which I presently hold by the Society’s appointment and imposition . . . All this being taken into account, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, my one God and Creator, I lay down and resign, simply and absolutely, the office I hold, requesting and with all my soul beseeching in our Lord the professed, along with whomever they shall prefer to add for this purpose, would accept this offering of mine, so justified before his Divine Majesty.83
In his biography of Ignatius, Pedro de Ribadeneira tells us that, while admiring Ignatius’s humility, the Jesuits gathered in Rome for this meeting could not in good conscience agree to his request. They told Ignatius that they would not have another general superior while he was alive, and they asked him to retract his petition. Ribadeneira writes that those present told Ignatius that he was the father of the Society, that he was everybody’s teacher and the leader chosen by God to lay the foundation for this spiritual building.84 So, disappointed in his hope that he could lay aside the burden he was shouldering, and even though he was recovering from a recent illness, Ignatius concluded that it was God’s will that he continue as superior general and so gave his complete attention to governing the Society.