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St
Ignatius, Before and After His Conversion.
Iñigo López
de Loyola was born in the Tower-House of Loyola in 1491,
one year before Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada,
the last Moorish bastion in the Peninsula, and also one
year before Christopher Columbus set out for the discovery
of the Americas.
Iñigo, the last
child of a large family of the minor nobility, was sent
at the age of 17 to the house of the Finance Minister of
Castile, Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, in Arévalo,
Ávila, so that he might be initiated in the life
of the court, the secrets of administration, and the arms
career.
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In 1516, when Iñigo was
25, his host and protector fell in disgrace with
Charles I of Spain, and lost his post in court
and the palace in Arévalo, and died shortly
thereafter. His widow, unable to give employment
to Iñigo, introduced him to her relative
the Duke of Nájera, who was the Viceroy
of Navarre, and Iñigo settled as his gentleman-at-arms.
The visit to the Tower-House
will give us the opportunity to tell in greater
detail about Iñigo’s birth, childhood
and youth until his conversion in 1521. The importance
of his conversion lies in the fact that, from
then on,
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he began shaping into a charismatic
leader, a spiritual master, the founder of a religious
Order destined to have a decisive influence in
the life of the Church
At the end of our visit
to the Holy House we shall see Iñigo leave
Loyola with the intention to go to Jerusalem searching
for Christ. After keeping a vigil in Montserrat
with a coarse sackcloth and a pilgrim staff as
his new arms, he retired to Manresa for eleven
months (May 1522-March 1523) and there he began
to develop the method for seeking God’s
will that he would enshrine in his Book of
the Spiritual Exercises.
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Wounded in
Pamplona |
The vigil in
Montserrat |
The cave of
Manresa |
In the Sorbonne |
The vow of
Montmartre |
The approval of
the Society |
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In April 1523 Iñigo traveled
to the Holy Land, then under the dominion of Soliman
II the Magnificent. Prevented from remaining there
and convinced that he could do good to others, he
undertook a belated but long course of studies that
would take him to Barcelona, Alcalá, Salamanca
and Paris. In the latter university, he latinized
his name and began to call himself Ignatius. The
group of seven companions gathered around him took
the vow to go to Jerusalem as missionaries or, if
they could not make it within a year, place themselves
at the disposal of the Pope. Soon the group increased
to ten. Ordained priests in Venice while waiting
for the opportunity to go to the Holy Land, they
fulfilled the second part of their vow and offered
their services to Pope Paul III, who approved the
Society of Jesus in 1540.
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Ignatius was elected Superior of
the Order and devoted the remaining 16 years of
his life to governing it and writing its Constitutions.
His style of government and the Constitutions he
wrote marked for ever the Order he founded.
When he died in 1556 at age 65,
the Society had a membership of 1,000 Jesuits, about
a hundred houses and colleges, and 12 religious
provinces.
In 1609, Pope Paul V declared Ignatius
and Francis Xavier Blessed, and Pope Gregory XV
declared them Saints in 1622.
This is a short summary of the
human adventure of that “reckless and vain
soldier” who became the Founder of the Society
of Jesus.
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