Confessor — 31 July — III Class (1962 Missale Romanum)
I. Identitas et Origines
Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola was born in 1491 in the ancestral tower-house of Loyola, near Azpeitia in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, the youngest child of a large noble family of minor but proud lineage. The name Ignatius, which he adopted in later life out of devotion to St. Ignatius of Antioch, has so displaced his baptismal name that the world scarcely remembers the Basque courtier Íñigo at all — which is fitting, for the saint himself would have wished it so.
His youth belonged wholly to the world. Sent as a page to the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, treasurer of Castile, and afterward attached to the service of the Duke of Nájera, Íñigo was formed by the courtly and military ideals of late-medieval Spain: honor, gallantry, the romances of chivalry, and a quick readiness for the sword. The record does not permit us to gild this period. He was vain of his appearance, ambitious of glory, entangled in the affairs of honor common to his class, and in 1515 was the subject of criminal proceedings at Azpeitia for excesses whose exact nature the surviving documents leave discreetly obscure. The Church does not canonize a man’s past but his conversion; and the distance between the young hidalgo of 1515 and the General of the Society of Jesus is itself a sermon on grace.
On the twentieth of May, 1521, defending the citadel of Pamplona against a French army, Íñigo was struck by a cannonball that shattered his right leg and wounded the left. The French, honoring his courage, carried him back to Loyola. There, upon a sickbed, the whole direction of his life was to turn.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The convalescence at Loyola is among the most consequential sickbeds in the history of the Church. The wounded soldier, enduring brutal surgeries undertaken partly out of vanity — he had the badly-set bone re-broken so that his leg might not be disfigured — asked for romances of chivalry to pass the time. The house possessed none. He was given instead a Castilian translation of the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony and a volume of the lives of the saints drawn from the Legenda aurea tradition. Reading them, he began to notice a movement within his own soul that would become the seed of his whole spiritual doctrine: daydreams of worldly glory left him afterward dry and sad, while thoughts of imitating the saints — “St. Dominic did this, therefore I must do it; St. Francis did this, therefore I must do it” — left a lasting peace and joy. From this simple observation of consolation and desolation the entire science of the discernment of spirits, as he would later systematize it, took its origin.
Resolved to give himself to God, he made his way in 1522 to the Benedictine shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, where, after a general confession lasting three days, he kept a knight’s vigil of arms before the altar of the Black Madonna, hung up his sword and dagger, gave his fine clothes to a beggar, and put on the sackcloth of a pilgrim. He then withdrew to the nearby town of Manresa, intending to stay a few days. He remained nearly a year.
Manresa was his novitiate under God’s own direction. He begged his bread, tended the sick, prayed for hours in a cave above the river Cardoner, and practiced penances of a severity that permanently broke his health — a fact his later legislation for the Society, with its marked moderation regarding corporal austerities, quietly acknowledges as a lesson learned at cost. He passed also through a furnace of scruples so violent that he was tempted to despair of God’s mercy; his deliverance from them made him, for the rest of his life, one of the Church’s surest physicians of scrupulous souls. At Manresa, by his own account dictated years later, he received an illumination beside the Cardoner in which the things of faith and of human learning were shown to him with such clarity that all he learned in sixty subsequent years, he said, did not equal what he received in that hour. The substance of the Spiritual Exercises was drafted in this period, though the book matured under his hand for two decades more.
The virtues of the mature Ignatius were those of a will entirely surrendered and entirely energetic: an obedience to the Church so complete that he made it the subject of formal rules; a self-mastery that governed a naturally vehement temperament until his contemporaries marveled at his calm; and a charity that expressed itself less in sentiment than in labor — houses for catechumens, for endangered women, for orphans, founded in Rome by a man simultaneously governing a worldwide order.
III. Apostolatus
Ignatius understood that zeal without learning is a sword without a hilt. After his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1523 — the Franciscan custodians, fearing for his safety, refused his wish to remain there — he sat, a man past thirty, on school benches among boys to learn Latin grammar at Barcelona, then pursued studies at Alcalá and Salamanca. In both places his habit of giving spiritual conversation and instruction drew the attention of the Inquisition; he was examined, imprisoned for a time, and released without censure of his doctrine, though restricted in his teaching. It must be said plainly: the Church’s tribunals scrutinized him, and he submitted to that scrutiny without bitterness, regarding the trial of his orthodoxy as a service rather than an injury. Seeking freedom to study and speak of God, he went to Paris in 1528, and there, over seven years, took his Master of Arts.
At Paris he gathered the companions whom God had prepared: among them Peter Faber, the Savoyard priest, and Francis Xavier, the brilliant and worldly Navarrese whom Ignatius won by patient siege — tradition attaches to this conquest his repeated urging of Our Lord’s question, Quid prodest homini, si mundum universum lucretur, animae vero suae detrimentum patiatur? (Matt. 16:26). On the feast of the Assumption, 1534, in the chapel of St. Denis at Montmartre, Ignatius and six companions vowed poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem — or, should that prove impossible, to place themselves at the disposal of the Roman Pontiff. War with the Turk closed the sea road to Jerusalem, and so the alternative clause of the Montmartre vow became the charter of a new order.
Near Rome, at the wayside chapel of La Storta, Ignatius received in prayer an assurance — recounted in the earliest companion narratives — that God the Father had placed him with His Son, and that the Father would be propitious to them at Rome. On the twenty-seventh of September, 1540, Pope Paul III, by the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, confirmed the Society of Jesus. Ignatius was elected its first General in 1541, yielding only under obedience after twice refusing, and spent his remaining fifteen years at Rome, directing from a few small rooms an apostolate that reached from Brazil to Japan. He composed the Constitutions of the Society with years of deliberation and prayer; he established the Roman College and the German College, planting the Society’s great educational apostolate; he added to the three vows of religion a fourth, of special obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff regarding missions — a vow that made the Society an instrument fitted exactly to the Church’s need in the age of Protestant revolt and of newly opened continents. The men he sent out — Xavier to the Indies above all — and the colleges he founded became a principal human instrument of the Catholic restoration that followed the Council of Trent.
IV. Mors et Cultus
Worn by chronic illness, Ignatius died quietly at Rome in the early morning of 31 July 1556, so unexpectedly that he received neither Viaticum nor the final blessing he had asked be sought from the Pope — a death without ceremony, for a man who had long since made the perfect oblation of his will. The Society he left numbered about a thousand members in twelve provinces.
He was beatified by Paul V in 1609 and canonized by Gregory XV on 12 March 1622, in that famous canonization which raised to the altars on a single day Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Ávila, Philip Neri, and Isidore the Farmer — the Roman wits said the Pope had canonized four Spaniards and a saint. His body rests beneath the altar of the magnificent chapel dedicated to him in the church of the Gesù at Rome, the Society’s mother church. Pope Pius XI declared him heavenly patron of all spiritual exercises and retreats. In the calendar of the 1962 Missale Romanum his feast is kept on 31 July, the day of his death, as a III class feast, with the Mass proper to him whose Introit sounds his own motto: In nomine Iesu omne genu flectatur.
In the East his cult finds no place, as his life falls entirely within the period of the separation; yet the Byzantine tradition’s own great teachers of interior discernment — one thinks of the Fathers of the Philokalia on the testing of thoughts — treat of the same spiritual terrain that Ignatius mapped in the West, a convergence worth noting as a comparative observation rather than any assertion of dependence.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Three works transmit the mind of Ignatius. The first and greatest is the little book of the Spiritual Exercises, formally approved by Paul III in 1548 — not a book to be read but a discipline to be undergone, ordering the soul through the purgative contemplation of sin, the following of Christ the King, the election of a state of life free from disordered attachment, and the crowning contemplation for obtaining divine love. Its opening “Principle and Foundation” teaches that man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and thereby to save his soul, and that all other things are to be used or set aside insofar as they conduct him to that end — a sentence in which the whole of moral theology is compressed. Its concluding oblation, the Suscipe, gives to the Church one of her most perfect prayers of self-surrender: Suscipe, Domine, universam meam libertatem — “Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.”
The second is the body of his Constitutions and letters — thousands of the latter survive — in which a mystic’s soul directs an administrator’s pen. The third is the autobiographical account of his early life which he dictated, under obedience to his companions’ urging, to Luís Gonçalves da Câmara in his final years, referring to himself throughout only as “the pilgrim.”
Two phrases distill his spirit. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam — to the greater glory of God — is the comparative that refuses all resting-places short of the more perfect. And in the rules appended to the Exercises for “thinking with the Church” (sentire cum Ecclesia), he taught that the truly obedient mind must be ready to hold that what seems white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines — a deliberately vivid maxim expressing not the abolition of the intellect but its perfect docility to the Bride of Christ, whose judgment is guided by the same Spirit who gave the Scriptures.
VI. Oratio
Collect of the feast (1962 Missale Romanum):
Deus, qui ad maiorem tui nominis gloriam propagandam, novo per beatum Ignatium subsidio militantem Ecclesiam roborasti: concede; ut, eius auxilio et imitatione certantes in terris, coronari cum ipso mereamur in caelis. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
O God, Who, to spread abroad the greater glory of Thy name, didst strengthen the Church militant with a new support through blessed Ignatius: grant that we who fight on earth by his help and after his example may deserve to be crowned with him in heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
It is worthy of note that this Collect enshrines the saint’s own motto in the liturgy itself — ad maiorem tui nominis gloriam — and casts the Church in the Pauline figure of an army at war, for which Ignatius was raised up as a novum subsidium, a fresh reinforcement sent at the hour of need.
VII. Aspiratio
O God of majesty, Who didst cast down the soldier of earthly glory at Pamplona that Thou mightest raise up a soldier of the Cross: break in me whatever resists Thee, and give me the grace to say with Thy servant Ignatius — take, Lord, all my liberty; give me only Thy love and Thy grace, and I am rich enough. All for Thy greater glory. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Primary sources. The Spiritual Exercises, read ideally with the text of the Vulgate Scriptures at hand; the Autobiography dictated to Gonçalves da Câmara; the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus; and the letters of St. Ignatius, of which the letter on obedience addressed to the Portuguese Jesuits is the classic. The critical editions of all these are found in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, the great documentary series that places Ignatian studies on ground as firm as any saint of the modern era enjoys.
Early lives. Pedro de Ribadeneira, his companion, wrote the first formal Vita (1572); the narratives gathered from the first companions in the Fontes Narrativi volumes of the Monumenta preserve the testimony of eyewitnesses.
Classic and standard accounts. Butler’s Lives of the Saints for 31 July; the article on St. Ignatius in the Catholic Encyclopedia; and, for the historical setting of the early Society, modern scholarly treatments may be consulted with the usual discernment regarding their theological framing.
Learning paths. This entry opens naturally onto the Spiritual Practices path (the discernment of spirits, the examination of conscience, and the structure of the Exercises); the Church History path (the Catholic restoration of the sixteenth century and the Council of Trent); and the Theology and Doctrine path (obedience, sentire cum Ecclesia, and the theology of the states of life). For the liturgical dimension of his motto — the glory of God as the first end of the Mass — see the Sacred Liturgy path on the Four Ends of the Holy Sacrifice.