St. Ignatius of Loyola, Egotist

[1491–1556] FEAST DAY: July 31

Ignatius of Loyola grew up in his father’s castle dreaming of chivalry. Family history told how in 1321 his ancestors, the seven sons of Juan Perez de Loyola, drove an army of French and Navarrese from their Basque homeland. But there were more recent examples of heroism to inspire him. Ignatius’s father, Beltran, had distinguished himself fighting for Ferdinand and Isabella in their final push to drive the Moors from Spain. And Ignatius’s older brothers (he was the youngest of thirteen children) covered themselves in glory fighting in France, Naples, and the Low Countries. His oldest brother, Juan, even sailed with Columbus on the explorer’s second voyage to the New World, where he died in battle against the Indians. Stirred by these deeds of valor in his own family, Ignatius longed to sacrifice himself for a great king, to faithfully serve a beautiful lady, and to win immortal fame in the eyes of the world.

By the time Ignatius was out of his teens, he had adopted all the qualities of a cavalier: he was ambitious, vain about his appearance, prickly regarding his honor. Juan de Polanco, Ignatius’s secretary and one of his earliest biographers, tells us that at this time Ignatius was “addicted to gambling and dissolute in his dealings with women.” When Ignatius and another courtier, Francisco de Oya, quarreled over who had the right to a certain lady’s favors, de Oya swore to settle the matter by killing Ignatius. For the next year Ignatius went everywhere armed, waiting for de Oya to make his move, spoiling for a duel that would end either with his death or his rival’s.

Of course, Ignatius could not win glory as a strutting courtier alone; he had to prove himself in battle. When he was twenty-six years old he got his chance. Ignatius had entered the service of Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Najera and viceroy of Navarre, a province that both the Spanish and the French claimed as their own. Ignatius was in Pamplona when the French attacked the city. Faced with an army of twelve thousand Frenchmen and batteries of heavy artillery, the city council did the pragmatic thing and surrendered. But Ignatius did not. He rallied the garrison of the citadel to disregard the surrender and fight the invaders. Pamplona’s surrender was meaningless if the city’s stronghold remained in Spanish hands. With no other option, the French attacked the citadel. For the next six hours Ignatius was in his element, leading a desperate, hopeless defense against vastly superior numbers and the relentless pounding of French artillery. When a portion of the fortress wall collapsed, Ignatius drew his sword and leapt into the breach, ready to win fame at last. As Ignatius stood on the pile of rubble, waiting for the onslaught, a cannonball passed between his legs, shattering one and wounding the other. When Ignatius fell, the garrison’s courage collapsed. They surrendered to the French commander, who played his part in this chivalric pageant by sparing the lives of the defenders and sending his personal physicians to treat Ignatius.

After two weeks the doctors believed Ignatius was strong enough for the journey home. A team of soldiers placed the wounded hero on a litter and escorted him back to his family’s castle. He was still basking in the praise of his family when the physicians the Loyolas had summoned delivered some bad news. The leg shattered by the cannonball had been improperly set; it would have to be broken and set again. Bear in mind, at this time Western medicine had no anesthesia. Ignatius was fully conscious when the surgeons went to work on him. Writing about it later, he described the procedure as “butchery.”

Still, the legs did not heal as Ignatius expected they would. The shattered leg was now shorter than the other one. Even worse was how the other leg had mended—with an unsightly lump of bone protruding just below the knee. Ignatius refused to limp, and would not tolerate a deformity. He commanded the surgeons to saw off the offending lump of bone and stretch his other leg—again, without anesthesia.

During the long, agonizing weeks that followed Ignatius’s sister-in-law Magdalena nursed him. When he was improving but still bedridden, he asked her for some novels to read. Magdalena owned only two books, and both were religious classics of the Middle Ages: a life of Christ written by Ludolph the Carthusian and Jacobus de Voragine’s collection of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend. With nothing else to amuse or distract him, Ignatius started reading.

Ignatius’s conversion progressed every time he turned a page. He felt deeply ashamed that he had let vanity, pride, lust, and violence rule his life. Then he had an inspiration. He could still pursue the chivalric ideal by serving the King of Heaven, pledging undying love to Our Lady, and striving to win souls for God. The course of his future life was confirmed for him one night in August or September 1521 when the Blessed Virgin and the Christ Child appeared in his room.

In February 1522, when Ignatius’s legs were well and strong again, he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat. There he hung his sword and dagger on the grill before the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then kept a nocturnal vigil, in deliberate imitation of the ceremony in which a gentleman prepared for knighthood by spending the night in prayer.

Ignatius had a well-developed sense of gallantry, but in terms of the spiritual life he was immature. He spent the next year with Dominican friars, learning the basics of religious formation. As he read and studied, he began to develop his own ideas on how a man could live for God. Later he would bring these ideas together in a book, the Spiritual Exercises, a work that is not only the cornerstone of the training of a Jesuit, but also the basis for the contemporary religious retreat movement. The Ignatian ideal urges the Christian to shake off the desire for comfort and success and become a new person impatient to do God’s will no matter how difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous it may be.

Ignatius wrote his Spiritual Exercises as a handbook. It takes thirty days for a retreatant to complete the exercises, and with each new day come fresh challenges to examine his actions, his motivations, and his desires, and to give up any attachment that might hold back spiritual development. While other spiritual classics are inspirational, the Exercises is practical: it is a method detailing how to change one’s life by altering one’s perspective—from doing what makes one happy to doing what is pleasing to God.

Ignatius had no formal education, so he enrolled at the University of Paris to study theology. His roommates were two other theology students, St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Faber. Under Ignatius’s influence both men abandoned their plans for worldly careers in favor of a life dedicated to God. Five more students joined this little circle of friends to form an informal community of men zealous to work for the greater glory of God. On the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1534, Ignatius and his seven friends met in the crypt of the chapel of Saint Denis in Paris’s Montmartre district. Faber, the only priest among them, said Mass. Then, before they received Holy Communion, they all recited personal, informal vows of poverty and chastity. They weren’t thinking of founding a religious order yet, but they did want to do something to bind themselves more closely together. If people asked who they were, they said they were the Compania de Jesus, in Latin the Societas Jesu, in English the Society of Jesus. Or, as they are best known, the Jesuits.

In November 1537 Ignatius, Faber, and their fellow Jesuit James Lainez set out for Rome. Once Ignatius had offered to fight for the Duke of Najera; now he was offering his services to Pope Paul III. In a chapel outside the Eternal City Ignatius had a vision in which he heard God the Father promise, “I will be favorable to you in Rome.” And he was. The Jesuits impressed Paul III. He assigned Faber and Lainez to teach theology and scripture at Rome’s Sapienza University and encouraged Ignatius to follow his own ad hoc mission of preaching and teaching.

In Rome Ignatius and his companions refined their vision of themselves. They saw themselves as teachers and defenders of Catholic doctrine and as the particular servants of the pope, ready to go anywhere he felt they could do good. On September 27, 1540, Pope Paul III gave formal approval to the Society of Jesus. Not surprisingly, by a unanimous vote the Jesuits elected Ignatius the first general of their order.

During the last fifteen years of his life Ignatius saw the Society of Jesus grow from eight to one thousand members with seventy-six houses in twelve provinces across the globe—including Brazil, Japan, and India. In an effort to turn back the effects of the Reformation, he opened a Jesuit seminary in Germany.

Rome was sweltering under a heat wave in July 1556 when Ignatius fell ill with a stomach complaint. The doctor assured him it was nothing to worry about. On July 30 Ignatius felt very ill, but kept his discomfort to himself. He did, however, ask his secretary, Juan de Polanco, to take a message to the pope requesting a papal blessing on Ignatius and the Society of Jesus. Polanco replied that he had several important letters to write that day; he would go see the pope tomorrow. “I would be pleased more today than tomorrow, or the sooner the better,” Ignatius said. “But do what you think best in the matter.”

The sun was just coming up the next day when the infirmarian made a perfunctory call on Ignatius and was shocked to discover his superior all alone and in his death throes. Polanco raced to the Vatican, but by the time he returned Ignatius Loyola had died—without the papal blessing, or even the last rites.