Ignatius of Loyola

Inigo Lopez de Loyola, later known as Ignatius, was born in 1491 in the Basque country of the Kingdom of Castile, the youngest of thirteen children of the Lord of Loyola. Orphaned at seven and raised as a page in the Castilian royal treasury, he received a nobleman's education and entered military service, devoted to courtly life and chivalric romance. The turning point came in 1521 at the Battle of Pamplona, when a French cannonball shattered his right leg. During a long convalescence at Loyola Castle, the only books available were a life of Christ and lives of the saints. Comparing two competing inner desires—worldly glory and service to God—he began the self-observation that would become his Spiritual Exercises. In 1522 he laid down his arms before the Virgin at Montserrat, then spent about eleven months at a cave in Manresa in prayer and asceticism, redefining himself as a soldier for Christ. After an attempted pilgrimage to Jerusalem he resumed studies in his mid-thirties at Barcelona, Alcala and finally Paris from 1528. There he gathered six companions, including Peter Faber, Francis Xavier and Diego Lainez, and on 15 August 1534 they vowed at Montmartre to go wherever the pope might send them. Pope Paul III formally approved the Jesuits in 1540. As first Superior General, Loyola used military instincts to build a pyramidal order with absolute obedience, a global missionary network and a rapidly expanding chain of colleges beginning with Messina in 1548. His motto, Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, became the order's. Xavier's mission to Asia, the Roman College and Jesuit work at Trent made the Society a central engine of the Counter-Reformation. He died in Rome on 31 July 1556 and was canonized in 1622; the Spiritual Exercises remain a method of structured self-observation that resonates with modern psychotherapy.