Saint Ignatius de Loyola
(Born Inigo Lopez de Loyola.)
For having totally turned his life around from being a noble born soldier of Spain, to being a Noble Soldier of Christ. He was born in the 1491st year of our Lord in Azpeitia in Basque country’s Guipuzcoa province. In 1521 he was a soldier defending Pamplona against a vastly superior french force, when his commander wanted to surrender Inigo persuaded them to “fight on, if not for victory, then for the glory and honor of Spain”. During the battle his leg was struck by a cannon ball, and when the french won they carried him off to his ancestral home in admiration for his courage, rather than holding him as a POW. His leg badly wounded never healed properly and after a series of painful surgeries he was at deaths door, but on the feast of saints Peter and Paul he began to heal, though his leg was always deformed, and shorter than his other one throughout his life.
During his recovery he was bored to tears, but there was nothing but The Life of Christ, and a book on the lives of the saints. With little else to fill out his day he read them and began to admire the virtuous and in many ways heroic saints. Many times in fact he would daydream he was living his life as a great saint , and other times he would dream of being a man of great wealth and fame, he noticed great peace in the former and noticed he was unfulfilled in the latter. This observation would change his life, and be the basis for the discernment of spirits, the cornerstone of Ignatian Spirituality.
That new direction for his life prompted him to leave as soon as he was well, in the early months of 1522, his ultimate destination was planned to be Jerusalem. On his way to his immediate destination Barcelona, he stopped at a shrine, confessed his sins, and stayed all night in vigil before leaving his knife and sword on the altar. He proceeded to a cave near the town of Manresa, where he only planned to stay a few days, but ended up spending ten months there in prayer and doing good works, his time here was the basis for his Spiritual Exercises, a book which proscribes a month of silence and prayer, which has changed many lives and brought many poor sinners to sainthood. During his time at Manresa he was granted a vision which he would not describe except to say that it was the most important vision of his life that taught him to see god in all things, an important ignatian principal. It was here also that he underwent many drastic, and unadvisable penances, that lead to him having trouble with his stomach for the rest of his life.
He eventually left and went to Barcelona, where he took a ship to Italy and made his way to Rome to petition The Holy Father Adrian the VI for permission to make a pilgrimage to the Muslim held Holy Land. he was granted his pilgrimage, but upon arriving in Jerusalem the Franciscan in charge of all christians there told him to leave as it was too dangerous, when he refused the order was repeated under threat of excommunication, he then departed.
Later at the age of 33, having discerned a vocation to the priesthood he went to Barcelona he spent two years there studying latin a subject so basic at the time that he had to learn it among small children while begging room and board from the locals. Upon learning latin he went on, to the University of Alcala, while studying there he would teach people the Gospel and prayer. It was this extracurricular activity that caused the paranoid Spanish Inquisition to jail him for more than a month, and order him to stop teaching there. This was a command that he couldn’t meet in good conscience so he left for the University of Salamanca where the Dominicans imprisoned him, but finding no heresy in what he taught released him with the order only to teach children, and even then only the basic’s of the faith, so he left again for Paris.
It Was at the University of Paris that he was finally ordained after years of studying and begging. It was also in Paris that he directed six of his friends (most notably Francis Xavier, who was canonized a saint at the same time as Ignatius.) through his spiritual exercises. They all took vows of chastity, and poverty, and decided that upon ordination they would make a pilgrimage to the holy land, it was Ignatius’s plan to wait until then to say his first mass. They waited for a year doing good works but no ships came that would go to the Holy Land, so Ignatius, Peter Faber, and James Lainez decided to go to Rome to place themselves at the service of the Pope, not as a religious order but as individual priests. At a Chapel they stopped at along the way Ignatius received another vision in which God the Father promised to be favorable with him in Rome and place him with his son.
The Pope put them to work preaching and teaching, and in 1538 Ignatius said his first mass over what was purported to be the very manger Jesus was lain in at birth, at the church of St. Mary Major in the Chapel of the Manger. In 1539 he gathered all his companions together in Rome to discuss their future, it was decided that they would form a new religious community and place it in direct service of the Holy Father, and require an additional vow of obedience to the pope. On September 27, in the 1540th year of our lord Pope Paul III formally approved their new order the Societatis Jesu, or Society of Jesus (A.K.A. The Jesuits). They voted to select their Superior, it was unanimous with the exception of his own that Ignatius should be the leader, the first time he refused asking them to pray, reconsider, and vote again, when the outcome was unchanged he accepted.
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