The Society of Jesus

Ignatius of Loyola was clever, dynamic, disciplined and ambitious--qualities that make captains and kings. But instead of a great empire builder, Ignatius became a great saint; instead of an army, he created and commanded the Society of Jesus--the Jesuits.

This week, just 334 years after he was canonized, more than 200,000 graduates of the nation's Jesuit-run high schools, colleges and universities (69, with an enrollment of 122,418) gathered in some 150 U.S. cities and towns for special Masses and breakfasts in honor of St. Ignatius of Loyola. For U.S. Roman Catholics it was the high point of the Ignatian Year -- the 400th anniversary of Loyola's death. Since last July 31, in churches, chapels and mission stations all over the world, Roman Catholics have been honoring the memory of one of the great creative innovators and proselytizers in Christian history.

"God When I Wish." Inigo de Loyola was born the year before Columbus discovered America, to a Basque family of impoverished nobility in Spain. As a boy he was a page at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, up to his young ears in palace intrigue and frivolity. He burned to be a famous warrior and knight. But when he was 14 a court intrigue misfired, and Ignatius went out to seek his glory elsewhere.

He joined the army of the Duke of Navarra, at 30 went down in battle with a shattered leg.-The wound made Church history. While recovering, he read two books--Ludolphus of Saxony's Life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints--that opened his eyes to another career.

Ignatius gave his fine clothes to a beggar, placed his sword and dagger on the altar of the Virgin at Montserrat. and retired for eleven months to the caves of Manresa to train for God's service as he had once trained for the duke's. He disciplined his body with torture and fasting, then turned to his mind, bending it to his will according to a self-imposed manual of mental arms. Out of this arduous retreat came the famed Spiritual Exercises, the course of disciplined mysticism that all Jesuits must undergo in a concentrated form for eight days each year, with rules for posture, breathing, concentration and contemplation. "I can find God at all times, whenever I wish," said Ignatius, "and any man of good will can do the same. As the body can be exercised by going, walking and running, so the will of man can be trained by exercises to find the will of God."

All Things to All Men. At 33 he took his first lessons in Latin with a group of schoolboys, then moved on to Paris, center of European scholarship, to attend the College Saint-Barbe. There he gathered about him six of the most brilliant men, one of them Francis Xavier. From that small band grew Loyola's Society of Jesus, officially constituted six years later--in 1540--by Pope Paul III. Ignatius, ordained a priest only three years before the papal recognition, at last became a "general," for the Society of Jesus was set up like a military body. with obedience its prime article of war.

In 1556 Ignatius died, but the order he left behind, under the leadership of a new general--James Laynez, a Jew--spread around the world. Observing that in India Christians were looked down on because they worked with the poor and that Brahmans were the most influential group, Father Roberto de Nobili showed up there in 1605 in Brahman robes, proclaiming himself a Roman prince who had accepted Brahmanism and had come to India to learn its wisdom. His thorough knowledge of the Vedas, the Apastambra-Sutras and Puranas, his ability to compose religious works in Sanskrit, his scrupulous observance of Hindu dietary laws and social customs earned him such admiration and confidence that he was gradually able to introduce Christian theology and make converts among the Brahmans. By the time he left India there were 40,000 converts in Madura alone.

In Ormuz, on the Indo-Persian border, Father Caspar Barzaeus (16th century) preached to Mohammedans on their own scriptures on Thursdays, to the Jews on Saturdays, to the Brahmans on Mondays and to the Christians the rest of the time. In China the great Father Matthew Ricci, a brilliant astronomer and mathematician, sent the Emperor a clock. The Emperor was delighted, and before long the Jesuits had become the official mathematicians and astronomers of China, as well as painters, engineers, geographers and military advisers for the 17th century Chinese court. Jesuits, e.g., Marquette, Joliet, were among the first white men to explore North America.

Their great mission in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was to range Europe as the soldiers of Rome's Counter-Reformation. For example, in Lutheran Sweden, where the Polish Queen had secretly converted King John to Catholicism, a "Protestant theologian" named Lorenz Nicolai turned up in 1574, astonishing professors and seminarians by his learned expounding on Luther. Nicolai began gradually to sound as though he were attacking Luther and Protestantism. In one such disputation the King himself leaped to Luther's defense and was ignominiously worsted. The Protestant audience never suspected that Jesuit Nicolai and King John had rehearsed the whole "spontaneous" debate. Soon Father Nicolai had the satisfaction of watching a group of newly converted Swedish students leave for the Jesuit college in Rome.

Regular Swarms. Such tactics earned the Society of Jesus more enemies in high places than friends. They were called "all things to all men" and taxed with the charge that they hold, in effect, that a good end justifies the use of a less good means; to this day Webster defines "Jesuitic" as "designing; crafty; as, a Jesuitical trick." The Jesuits have as persistently and meticulously fought the charge and elucidated the oft-small but decisive difference between unprincipled expediency and principled pragmatism. The order has suffered reverses and reprisals. In 1773, under political pressure from the courts of Spain, Portugal, Naples and France, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order, and in the next 40 years it dwindled in membership from 23,000 to 600. During that time, when many Jesuits sought peace in the new U.S., John Adams warned Thomas Jefferson against them: "If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of Loyola's. Nevertheless we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them asylum."

The ban came off in 1814, and ever since then the Society of Jesus has grown in size, in works and in repute. There are now 7,751 Jesuits in the U.S. (largest contingent in any country), 123 Jesuit parishes (including 16 missions to the American Indians), and the American Jesuits edit 24 national magazines, e.g., America, Jesuit Missions. The Queen's Work.

One in every seven Roman Catholic missionaries throughout the world is a Jesuit. They labor in 71 missions, 6,640 mission stations, 4,000 schools, 350 hospitals and 16 leprosaria. Second to missions the Jesuits emphasize education, then retreats; there are 174 Jesuit retreat houses (32 in the U.S.). It is the largest order in the church today. Today there are more than 32,000 Jesuits--16,521 priests, 10,741 scholastics (students in the 13-year course leading to the priesthood) and 5,637 lay brothers--and they work in 74 nations.

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