Saint Ignatius of Loyola

That knight was Íñigo López de Loyola. All his life until then he had longed for only one thing: to win glorious military victories and capture the heart of a noble lady at the royal court. But on that sickbed, when he asked for romances of chivalry to pass the time, all anyone could find were two old religious books, “The Life of Christ” and “The Lives of the Saints”. Through them, a conversion that would shake the world began in his soul.

The proud wounded soldier took off his shining armor and laid his nobleman’s sword at the foot of Our Lady’s altar, to become a true knight of the King of Kings. He is Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus (Societas Jesu, SJ). He wrote the great spiritual handbook “The Spiritual Exercises” (Exercitia Spiritualia) and left the world a motto to live by: “AMDG”, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, for the greater glory of God in all things.

His mother died when he was small, and as a youth Íñigo was sent to serve in the household of the royal treasurer Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar at Arévalo. Growing up in the glittering world of the court, the young man was the very image of a dashing, proud and wayward knight: dressing in splendid clothes, fond of wearing a long sword, skilled at fencing, passionate about gambling, and often mixed up in bloody street brawls. He had one burning worldly dream: to win glorious victories on the battlefield to bring honor to his family and capture the heart of a lady of high nobility.

To pass the dull time in bed, he asked to borrow the adventure novels of chivalry that were his favorite reading. But the only books in the castle then were two religious ones: “The Life of Christ” by Ludolph of Saxony and “The Lives of the Saints” in a Spanish translation. Reluctantly, he picked them up and read. And page by page, the books began to work wonders in his soul.

Leaving Montserrat, he went to the small town of Manresa not far away. He meant to stay only a few days, but ended up staying almost a whole year, from March 1522 to February 1523. He lived in a damp natural cave overlooking the river Cardoner. He let his hair and beard grow long, fasted and did strict penance, begged for food every day and spent seven hours a day on his knees praying in that cave. It later became an important pilgrimage site for the Jesuits, and he himself always looked on it as the place where God had schooled him in the spiritual life.

There, because of his zeal in teaching catechism to the people and guiding others through the Spiritual Exercises, he was twice suspected by the Inquisition, arrested and questioned, which was not unusual at the time for people of strong spiritual influence who had no official theological degree. When he was acquitted but forbidden to preach until he had finished theology, Ignatius calmly accepted it and decided to go farther still. In 1528 he walked to Paris and entered the Sorbonne, the most famous university in the world at the time. For seven hard years, from 1528 to 1535, begging during the summer holidays to pay his fees, he completed his studies with distinction and earned his Master of Arts at forty-three, very late compared with his fellow students.

On June 24, 1537, in Venice, Ignatius and his companions were ordained priests. Because of the war between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, the way to the Holy Land was blocked. Remembering their earlier vow, in the autumn of 1537 Ignatius set out for Rome with Faber and Laínez. A few kilometers from Rome, in the little wayside chapel of La Storta, in a moment of ecstatic prayer, Ignatius saw God the Father place him beside Jesus carrying the Cross. Jesus looked at him lovingly and said:

“I want you to serve Me... I will always support you in Rome!”

From that vision he was convinced that the new order must bear the holy Name of the One it served: the Society of Jesus (Compañía de Jesús; in Latin Societas Jesu, abbreviated SJ).

On September 27, 1540, through the bull Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae, Pope Paul III solemnly approved the Formula of the Society of Jesus. Besides the three usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience taken in every religious order, the Jesuits take a special fourth vow: complete obedience to the Holy Father in every mission, ready to set out for any dangerous place without hesitation and without asking for travel money.

From that small room, the spiritual commander directed an extraordinary missionary army. He sent Francis Xavier to India and Japan, and Peter Canisius to revive the faith in Germany; later his order would send Matteo Ricci to China. He wrote the massive Constitutions of the Jesuits himself and nearly seven thousand pastoral letters to direct its work all over the world, an enormous volume of correspondence for a man managing everything from one small room. He founded the Roman College, today the famous Pontifical Gregorian University, and the German College (Collegium Germanicum) to form generations of outstanding clergy for the Church. In Rome he also founded the House of Santa Marta to protect women who had gone astray and wanted to start a new life, and an orphanage to care for homeless street children.

He taught the Jesuits a practical and flexible spirituality: “Be contemplatives in action” (Contemplativus in actione). A religious does not have to shut himself up behind monastery walls; he must find God in all things, in every event, every task and every person. The motto “AMDG” (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, for the greater glory of God) became the compass guiding every thought, word and deed of the members of the order he founded. He also left a rule of action still widely quoted today, even outside the Church:

“Act as if everything depended entirely on your own efforts; but pray as if everything depended on God alone!”

When he died, the Jesuits had grown from the original group of seven friends into a body of more than a thousand members present on four continents, running more than a hundred colleges and educational institutions.

In 1922, Pope Pius XI solemnly proclaimed Saint Ignatius of Loyola patron of all retreats and spiritual exercises throughout the world. The Church celebrates him on July 31 each year.

In Vietnam, the Jesuits are bound up with the birth of the Vietnamese Romanized script, Quốc ngữ, through the work of Father Alexandre de Rhodes (Đắc Lộ) and the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century, as well as the dedicated service of Jesuits today in education, spiritual exercises and communications.