The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola E-Book

Joseph A. Tetlow

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 289

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Offering an accessible translation of the classic Ignatian text The Spiritual Exercises, this reference provides step-by-step commentary that explains its meaning and relevance to the modern spiritual life. An important resource for those seeking to grow spiritually, whether Christian or not, every page provides compassionate advice for each stage of the journey and reflects the understanding of the human soul. Chronicling a spiritual work out, this resource employs stories, analogies, and approachable language to make this an ideal companion for anyone seeking divine inspiration.

Leseprobe

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 1992 by Joseph A. Tetlow, S.J.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

In continuation of our 200-year tradition of independent publishing, The Crossroad Publishing Company proudly offers a variety of books with strong, original voices and diverse perspectives. The viewpoints expressed in our books are not necessarily those of The Crossroad Publishing Company, any of its imprints, or its employees. No claims are made or responsibility assumed for any health or other benefit.

Printed in the United States of America.

The text of this book is set in 10.75/13.75 Sabon. The display face is Tiepolo.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tetlow, Joseph A.

Ignatius Loyola : spiritual exercises / Joseph A. Tetlow.

p. cm. — (The Crossroad spiritual legacy series)

ISBN 0-8245-2500-0

New arrangement, 2009:

ISBN-10: 0-8245-2539-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-8245-2539-2

1. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491–1556. Exercitia spiritualia.

2. Spiritual exercises. I. Title. II. Series.

BX2179.L8T44 1992

248.3 – dc20

92-20692

Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTION

1. The Author of Spiritual Exercises

2. The Book of Spiritual Exercises

3. The Experience of Spiritual Exercises – The Annotations

4. Spiritual Doctrine in the Spiritual Exercises

FIRST WEEK

5. The Work of the First Week

6. The Beginning Exercises

7. Meditating on Sin and Sinfulness

8. The Structure of Ignatian Meditation

9. Turning from Sin to Gratitude

SECOND WEEK

10. Turning to the Reign of God

11. The Prayer of the Second Week

12. Following and Imitating Christ

13. Elections, Choices, and Decisions

14. The Gifts and Graces of the Second Week

THIRD WEEK

15. Contemplating the Lord’s Passion

16. The First Set of Norms

17. Ending the Third Week

FOURTH WEEK

18. Entering into the Joy of the Lord

19. Three More Ways to Pray

ADDED MATERIALS FOR THE DIRECTOR

20. Scripture Passages and Points

21. Four Sets of Norms

22. Leaving the Exercises

THE IGNATIAN TEXT

Annotations

Title, Presupposition, Principle and Foundation

Daily Particular Examen

The Meditations of the First Week

Additions

The Call of the King

Incarnation and the Infancy of Jesus

Introduction to Considering States in Life

An Introduction to Determining a Way of Life

The Passion and Death of Jesus

Norms about Good Order in Eating for the Future

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

Three Methods of Praying

Norms Followed in Discerning Spirits

Chronology

Bibliography

Preface

The six Jesuits who were murdered in El Salvador in 1989 were men whose scholarship flourished in the public forum, who were deeply committed to the people’s total liberation, and who lived day to day under the threat of lethal violence.

They had been formed by St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. I hope that their spirituality informs this book, which I have thought of as homage to these Companions of Jesus.

What I have learned of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, I have learned from many men and women who have willingly let me hand on to them what had been willingly handed on to me. I owe most to the younger Jesuits whom I have accompanied through thirty-day retreats. Some of them have caught the fire and are passing it on, among them Brian F. Zinnamon, Vincent R. Malatesta, and Francis W. Huete.

Many of the insights in this study are rooted in the work of Canadian Jesuit Gilles Cusson and of American Jesuit George Ganss. The interpretations in it were honed in discourse with Dr. Eileen Raffaniello and Dr. Juan Lorenzo Hinojosa. The book could not have been written without the support of the Society of Jesus, given through Edward Arroyo; I am grateful to him and to my two fellow pilgrims, Jesuits John Padberg and Thomas Clancy.

The book was suggested to me by Dr. John Farina. Anyone who has worked with an excellent editor will know his value in making books and will understand my gratitude to him.

INTRODUCTION

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola took shape in his own religious experience and in the experiences of the women and men he helped. Ignatius made the book for himself to start with, to remember accurately what helped others to a deep and enduring experience of God in their lives. He basically created a handbook for his work as spiritual guide. He did not change this: in its final form, it presents both materials and intricate instructions for guiding another person through a structured, coherent experience of God.

Men and women have been going through these Spiritual Exercises for over 450 years. At this time, more men and women are going through them and directing others through them than at any other time during their history. Moreover, whereas until a generation ago only thoroughly trained Jesuits directed people through the experience, now many women and men, religious and lay, have been trained and use the book skillfully and with good results.

What is there in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises that makes them as accessible a religious experience today as they were 450 years ago? Is the experience the same? What do people who make thirty-day retreats hope to accomplish? What actually happens?

To answer these questions, you need to know something about Ignatius and his religious roots in late medieval and early Renaissance spirituality. You need to know how the book developed out of his personal conversion to Christ within the church and out of his work over two decades to evangelize others and reform their lives. His work, however, continues; so you also need to know how women and men now experience the Spiritual Exercises.

An Accessible Translation

This book attempts to address those questions by presenting both a fresh translation into modern English and a descriptive commentary on the past and present experience of the Spiritual Exercises.

The translation is not literal in the ordinary sense of that word, but what Jesuit scholar George Ganss calls “a functional equivalence.” In point of fact, compared with other current translations, it moves further away from Latinisms and the inelegant sentence structures of Ignatius’s Spanish and further into the idiom and structures of modern English. For this translation aims more at making readily available the basic sense of Ignatius’s Spanish that interested readers expect and less at preserving the sacrosanct technical terminology that directors must know and master. The difference, however, is not an opposition, but a stress.

In making the translation, I used what scholars call the “autograph text,” which they consider entirely authentic because, though it was made by a copyist, Ignatius corrected it and added to it in his own hand. The definitive edition of this text, along with the three most important Latin translations, was published by José Calveras, S.J., and Cándido de Dalmases, S.J., Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Exercitia Spiritualia, Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, vol. 100 (Rome: Historical Institute of the Society of Jesus, 1969).

In any such translation, the matter of sexually inclusive language rises, which is important in this particular text. The Spiritual Exercises has been well translated into non-sexist language, serving a sound purpose. The changes required, however, exacted the price of not preserving a strong focus on the individual who is going through the Spiritual Exercises, the structured prayer experience the book guides. Inclusive expressions like “he or she” or “they” make the book sound as though Ignatius were talking about Everyperson. He is not; he was careful whom he invited into this experience and always mindful of that unique individual. That mindfulness must not be lost to inclusive language.

Furthermore, Ignatius is a masculine author and his spirituality begins in the masculine. His Spiritual Exercises are logically ordered, charged with vision and idealism, fixed in hierarchical authority, full of masculine images, and submit experience to abstract ratiocination. These are the more masculine traits. Carl Gustav Jung noted this and wondered why Ignatius did not lean less on animus and more on anima.

The truth is that Ignatius did indeed rely on anima, which in him was fully developed, contrary to his current plaster-cast image as drily military. He fills his book with emotions and feelings, a large sense of harmony, intimacy, intense personal relations, tenderness, and a prime concern for each person’s gifts and desires. These are the more feminine traits. They indicate, among other things, that Ignatius learned from the many women who befriended him and also from the ones (no small number) he guided through the Spiritual Exercises.

This dual source of energies makes it equally possible for women and men to go through and to direct others through the Exercises. In view of all this, in the translation I keep the singular pronoun and keep it masculine where Ignatius writes it masculine (which does not make his language sexually exclusive). I have chosen to use sexually inclusive language in the commentary.

A Descriptive Commentary

A description of the experience of the Spiritual Exercises and a commentary on the spirituality they embody requires attention to the history and theology behind them and to current experience as well. It asks the fairly direct question, What is it like to go through the Exercises?

Ignatius elaborated his spirituality in a considerable number of documents, and an extraordinary number of his writings are extant and published. He wrote the Constitutions of the Company of Jesus (the Jesuits) and many brief essays and instructions. We have some of his personal records concerning the founding of the Company and his prayer, and “the pilgrim’s story,” a brief autobiographical narrative that he dictated in his last years. We also have about seven thousand letters. All of these, deriving from the Spiritual Exercises and reflecting that experience, give valuable help in interpreting that book.

I have therefore woven the history of the book and its basic spirituality into a narrative description of the experience. In the narrative, I tried to introduce experiences and materials at the points at which they commonly occur in the thirty-day retreat or in the Exercises done at home (formats explained presently). In a sense, I have tried to describe a typical experience of the Exercises, a fairly optimistic undertaking. The narrative depends on the stories of the first Companions of Ignatius of Loyola and of Jesuits through history. But even more than that, it reflects the experiences of the many men and women I have been privileged to accompany through the Exercises in all the ways of going through them.

1

The Author of Spiritual Exercises

Iñigo López de Loyola, the Basque gentilhombre who would become Ignatius of Loyola and the author of Spiritual Exercises, lived through a massive tide in human history. Within a year of his birth in 1491, Columbus reached the Western Hemisphere and marked the ripening of European exploration into colonization and worldwide trade. All of his life, Ignatius would hear of further horizons and yet further dreams of wealth and glory. One of his brothers signed the usual papers declaring himself dead (explorers usually died as explorers) and sailed to die in what is now Central America.

His own family had fought to drive the Moors from Spain, which los Reyes Católicos (the Catholic Kings) achieved the year after Iñigo’s birth. All his life, his world was divided into two immovably hostile forces, Christianity and Islam. Shortly after Ignatius’s death in 1556, the thousand-year-old flood of Islam into Christian Europe began to ebb with the Battle of Lepanto.

By the time Iñigo had reached the age of reason, the Iberian peninsula had come out of a century of political and economic chaos. The cities and towns had focused power, so that Iñigo’s brother, head of a great estate, had a simple one-man vote in the local council that his father and grandfather had dominated. The great dynastic powers, like Ferdinand and Isabella’s, had been established in much of Europe, making liegemen of the heads of families like Iñigo’s and creating a class of courtiers. Iñigo was one of them. The dynasties warred incessantly, much as our world does, and Iñigo dreamed as a boy of heroic service as the king’s loyal man.

He dreamed from the bottom. He was the youngest of seven sons and one of thirteen children. He was farmed out to a wet-nurse for rearing, and his mother died early on in his life. His father bequeathed him only instruction in Spanish and a blessing, so at age seven the Basque-speaking boy started learning Spanish. Helped by connections in his mother’s family, he was sent to the court of the king’s treasurer, Don Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, whose memory he was to cherish the rest of his life.

Iñigo went as a venturesome rascal and took to court life wholeheartedly. He learned weapons and loved to use them, and he learned the poetry of courtly love and of Christian devotion. In his time, gentlemen listened carefully, spoke deliberately, kept the faith inviolate, and loved the Mother of God, Holy Mother the Church, and their own honor. Real men did not go much to church, but they believed fiercely and loved ardently. And they knew how to be friends and loyal companions, gifts that shone in Iñigo.

When his first protector fell into disgrace with the king and died, his lady saw to it that Iñigo had horse, weapons, and a bagful of gold. He had no trouble finding service under the Duque de Nájera, governor of his home ground. And he had no trouble continuing, he would later say “out of force of habit,” to gamble, carry on romantic affairs with women, brawl, and provoke swordplay on points of honor. He served the duke well in a couple of armed skirmishes in the unending wars between France and Spain, the only grounds for calling him a soldier. The truth is that Iñigo, really a courtier graced with great tact and comprehension, gave more valuable service as an arbitrator and peacemaker.

The Fall at Pamplona

It was in the duke’s service that he rode thundering into the little town of Pamplona in May of 1521. Once more, the French had moved south of the Pyrenees and once more the Spanish had countered. Iñigo galvanized the citadel to a frankly hopeless defense, impressing the French but not thwarting them. As he stood on the parapet directing the fight, a cannon ball the size of a big man’s fist cut him down at the knees.

He was helped back to Loyola by the admiring French. The ensuing surgeries, once to reset his right knee and again, at his insistence, to saw off a protruding bone, were savage. Iñigo made no sound. In June he seemed about to die, but on the eve of St. Peter’s feast took a turn for the better. Then he lay there week after week for seven months.

In his boredom, he turned from daydreaming romances to spiritual books offered him by his sister-in-law, now mistress of the house. Day by day, he lay reading Spanish translations of the century-old Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and of the Lives of the Saints, written two centuries earlier by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine. Ludolph calls Jesus Christ our “foundation,” and Voragine pictures Christ in life-and-death battle with the Enemy, both of which Iñigo grasped at and wrote into his Exercises. Having learned from chivalric romances, he dreamed of heroic deeds, fame, and a splendid marriage. Now as he read about the ascetical and evangelical exploits of St. Dominic and St. Francis, he began dreaming different dreams. God seized him in the midst of this, one of the great conversions recorded in human history. Iñigo took copious notes in an exquisite hand as he learned to see himself and his life world differently: a different nobility, a different service, a different Lord.

He began keeping a record of what touched him, a practice he kept for the rest of his life to honor the gifts God lavished on him and to grow in spiritual maturity. He told a Companion that he had written three hundred sheets during these months; few doubt that he would later put some of that into the Spiritual Exercises. During these months, he had supernatural visions. One night, the Lady Mary appeared to him carrying the Child; from that experience came a steadiness in sexuality that never left him, and he remained profoundly and peacefully chaste.

He discovered Christ as his Lord and he identified sin as his defeat. He knew that he would have to live penitent for a time, perhaps living like Francis of Assisi. Then he began to hope to go to live and work in Jerusalem among the infidel. He kept all this to himself, partly to avoid family opposition (it came) and partly out of the reticence of the gentleman.

The Pilgrim Begins

He left home in March of 1522, dressed properly and mounted like a gentleman, at his brother’s insistence, but with his leg still in bandages. He went to the Duque de Nájera asking for his back pay, from which he paid debts and very possibly made some provision for women. Along with all the good points, Iñigo’s culture condoned concubinage, and his ideal of courtly love furthered marital infidelity. He had left behind him in Loyola a priest-brother living with the mother of his three acknowledged children and his oldest living brother, head of the family, with a concubine who visited regularly. He had kept part of the money to pay for the repair of a shrine of the Mother of God, who was from now on the Lady of his life.

Now he felt himself free to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that he had determined on. To prepare for it, he went to the reformed Benedictine monastery at Montserrat. There he made a complete confession of his life, taking three days to finish, and told his confessor about his secret purpose of finding a new life in Jerusalem. After his confession and under cover of night, he stripped off his courtier’s clothes and gave them to a beggar. Then, dressed in a pilgrim’s rough gown and following proper courtly ways, Iñigo kept a night watch at the shrine of Our Lady. He stood and knelt through the vigil of the feast of the Annunciation, knee or no knee. In the morning, he left his sword there before his Lady and went down the mountain.

As the newly elected pope, Adrian of Utrecht, the last non-Italian until John Paul II, traveled the same roads, Iñigo started toward Rome. He thought to spend a brief time of fasting and praying in a little town named Manresa, where he lodged first in the poor house and then with the Dominicans in a spare back room. His mind-set was that of the armed courtier exploring savagely wild ground. He did what he thought he had to do. He began living like a beggar, eating as a vegetarian, and drinking no wine. A fastidious man, he chose to attack his vanity directly by leaving his fingernails filthy and his tawny hair in greasy tangles. His physical penances, which very likely included scourging himself and wearing sackcloth (townsfolk at first called him “the sack man”), damaged his health, and he would later on include in a little note in the Spiritual Exercises the advice he regularly gave against excess in penances. He visited monks and priests all the time. Weeks passed. He confessed weekly, conferred regularly, attended Mass daily, and prayed for seven hours in each twenty-four. He was to spend a year at Manresa while God taught him, in his own expression, “like a little schoolboy.”

Winter softened and Iñigo’s penitence matured in the spring toward love of God. He was daily at Mass, reading the Passion, and he doted on conversation about spiritual things with the learned and the unlearned both. The desiccate summer set in, and with it came a dryness and emptiness of spirit that puzzled Iñigo. It swirled into a mistral of self-doubt and scruple, a ferocious desert of temptation. His sins seemed ineradicable. He confessed them again and again, always finding some detail that could spell damnation but never finding any help. At the edge of sanity, he stood near an excavation and saw peace in its dark depths: suicide. He cried out to God in anguish, “Help me, Lord, for I find no relief in other people or in any creature.” The once arrogant courtier vowed he would follow a puppy did it lead to peace.

He woke one day realizing that this way led from God, not to God. He judged that his confessor ought to have instructed him to stop raking through the past. He began grooming himself and eating meat, all the time keeping up his prayer. He also kept talking with people about God, at first because he enjoyed it and then because he saw that he was, in a stock phrase he used the rest of his life, “helping souls.”

The Illumination at the Cardoner

One day he walked along the town’s little river, Cardoner, toward a roadside shrine. With no warning, he found himself stopped and immersed in God — not just his freedom, so that he yearned and loved, but his understanding, so that he knew and comprehended. He was given a deep sense of how all creatures emanate from God and, in Christ, return to God; how Jesus Christ completes human nature in taking our flesh; and how Christ is present in the Sacrament. He grasped that God’s plan is really a project that each person on earth contributes to, and how what God hopes in us rises in our consciousness and, by God’s grace, to free enactment.

Iñigo would later say that he learned more in this time than in all the rest of his life together and that he would offend God were he to deny the reality of any of it. In its afterglow, he shaped his spiritual conversations in the plaza and in people’s homes more positively. At first he could not talk enough about the Blessed Trinity; but then he noted that he enjoyed this more than the people he was talking to did. So he grew bold enough to start talking with them on topics they needed to hear about: the waste of any sinful action, the names of our daily evildoing, the threat of living lost forever. An almost extravagantly systematic man, he noted down what helped them among lessons of his own spiritual experience (having no schooling in theology to draw on). Gradually, he had talked through the whole burden of revelation. Gradually, he was creating in his notes the Spiritual Exercises.

When, after a year, he left Manresa to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he carried with him the beginnings of his book. He would work on it from 1522 until 1540, but its outline was already clear. So was his fundamental insight into who God really is: His ship to Genoa nearly foundered, and he felt, not fear of God’s vengeance and not remorse before the Father, but regret that he had not used his gifts more in God’s project.

Having made his way to Jerusalem absolutely destitute, he labored to absorb every physical detail of stone and sky. He had determined to stay there, praying in the holy places and helping souls, available mostly as Turks. The Franciscans, guardians of the Holy Land and used to pilgrim zeal, knew that he would risk slavery or death should he go proselytizing. Iñigo told the ones in charge that he would stay anyhow and risk consequences. The Franciscans felt obliged to let him know about their authority to excommunicate him if he refused to leave. Iñigo did not argue but promptly took ship from Jaffa and after bitter cold and misadventures at sea, arrived in Venice. From there, weaving calmly through battle lines, he returned to Spain, settling in Barcelona.

Paris and the Study of Theology

Now came a time of waiting and a ten-year period of study. Iñigo felt the need to know more theology. Since that entailed knowing Latin, he sat in grammar school at the age of thirty-three and studied with boys. He continued his lay apostolate of helping souls, sometimes discoursing to small groups and sometimes helping individuals with the Spiritual Exercises. When the friend who was teaching him (and one other; Iñigo appreciated others’ opinions) thought he knew enough Latin, he matriculated to the universities at Alcalá and at Salamanca, where he took a hodgepodge of courses and also continued to “help souls.” One result was that he gathered a small group of friends.

Another was that, for the first two of a dozen times, he ran afoul of the Inquisition. In later encounters, he would insist on exoneration; now, he overcame by cheerfully remaining in jail and continuing to teach catechism and to give the Spiritual Exercises (Alcalá) and by refusing to escape when all the other prisoners did (Salamanca). The inquisitors examined the book of the Spiritual Exercises for the first time and found no harm in it, but were bothered that Iñigo, who freely admitted knowing no theology, taught people to distinguish between deadly and venial sins.

Iñigo received their sentence characteristically: He would not teach people about sin, he said, as long as he remained in their jurisdiction, but their mandate was groundless.

Under this restraint, his earlier decision to study clarified and he chose to go to the center of learning, Paris. Through dead winter in early 1528, once again threading through battle lines, he walked to Paris (he left friends in Barcelona anguished by the rumor that the French were roasting Spaniards on spits). He enrolled at a conservative college, Montaigu, using a name he chose as the Latin equivalent of his own (it is not). More than half way through his life, at thirty-seven, he became Ignatius of Loyola.

At first he somehow found a way to hold spiritual conversations, no doubt often in rough Latin. But he came to recognize that serious study takes time and absorption and renewed his determination to learn. He also came to see that hodgepodge courses lead into confusion; he needed more system. So he moved to a college known for good system, Sainte Barbe, and there completed his study of humanities. He and his Companions, in a matter of fifty years, were to take the seedling of system from Sainte Barbe and cover Europe and the new world with a forest of schools. Ignatius of Loyola would turn out to be one of the world’s great educators, his name inscribed in lists along with Maria Montessori and John Dewey.

At Sainte Barbe, he shared rooms with a professor and two others, students who became his first permanent Companions, Pierre Favre of Savoy and Francis Xavier of Navarre. They helped him, half a generation older, to learn philosophy and theology; he helped them learn what they yearned for most. They formed a colleagueship and began attracting others. In 1534, Ignatius directed them through the Spiritual Exercises. Each of them (six by now) lived for a month in a secluded room, except Simón Rodrigues, who spent an hour and a half on the Exercises daily in the midst of his everyday academic life. Each of them elected to do what they had all been talking about for a long time: to live an evangelical life in poverty. Ignatius described the Companions in a letter to a friend simply as “friends in the Lord.”

Friends in the Lord

On August 15, 1534, the Companions gathered on Montmartre and vowed to labor for others while living in poverty. They vowed, further, to go together to Jerusalem and, should that prove impossible, to ask the pope (who would know better?) to send them wherever he thought they could do the most good. Pierre Favre, the only priest among them, celebrated the Mass. Their academic life in this holy fellowship was coming to its end. Ignatius planned to return to Spain (physicians thought his native air would help chronic internal ailments) and then to go wait for the Companions at Venice, the gateway to the Holy Land.

He was getting ready to leave Paris when word came that the Spiritual Exercises had once again been denounced to the Inquisition. Ignatius brought his manuscript book to the Inquisitor, a brilliant Dominican to whom Ignatius had presented several reformed people to recant heretical opinions. Having read the manuscript book, the Inquisitor told Ignatius he saw no need for a formal process. Ignatius would not rest but asked him to wait, fetched a scribe, and repeated the whole conversation for the scribe to write out and the Inquisitor to seal.

Then he traveled back to Spain, riding a chestnut horse given him by his friends. He visited his own and some of the Companions’ families, made amends in his home for his past sins, preached and mediated disputes, and tried to persuade his priest-brother to live chastely.

Then he left Spain for Venice to wait for the others so that they could make their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Shaking off the absorption of study, he begged, worked for the poor and the sick, and gave Spiritual Exercises. He also began his deep contemplation again and had spiritual consolations and visions, which had ceased during the years of concentrated study. He was entering on the last part of his life, which he would spend entirely in Italy and, once he reached it, in Rome.

As the Companions completed their degrees or their teaching in Paris, they set out to join him in Venice, traveling through the dangers of the Alpine winter and the battle lines of yet another war. The reunion after nearly two years was very warm. They quickly set to work in the so-called hospitals and poor houses (more like Mother Teresa’s hostels for the hopeless dying than our clinics) and started directing others in the Spiritual Exercises and preaching in the churches and even in piazzas. They also befriended the papal legate to Venice and a local bishop. It was the latter who ordained Ignatius and the six others who were not yet priests, in June of 1537. The bishop, Vicenzo Nigusanti, said that no ordination had ever moved him as deeply.

The Founding of the Company of Jesus

They waited, as they had planned, for a year and then a little more for a ship to sail to the Holy Land. But Christians and Turks were in open war again, and for the first time in thirty years, none sailed. So they fulfilled the last part of their common vow and started for Rome, traveling in trios through the clear Italian fall of 1537.

On the road from Siena down to Rome, at a small shrine always referred to as La Storta, Ignatius and two others stopped to celebrate the Eucharist. As he received Communion (Ignatius would not celebrate Mass until the coming Christmas night), he was given an extraordinary vision that confirmed the decision they had made before leaving Venice to tell anyone who asked that they were the Company of Jesus, like a company of fur traders or of gold seekers or of the king’s honor guard. In his vision, Ignatius saw God the Father place him with the Son, accepting them into His service. Ignatius heard the Father promise, “I will be favorable to you all in Rome,” which Ignatius thought perhaps meant that they might be crucified there, literally or figuratively. In retrospect, the promise seems to have had less to do with Rome as the place of an event than with Rome as the center of a web of cities newly open to Europeans, like Goa, Kyoto, and Mexico; and of cities just being founded, like Québec, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá. In these other cities, within extraordinarily few years, Companions shaped by the Spiritual Exercises would be working.

The pope, the reformer Paul III, received the Companions and put them to work. Ignatius immediately began inviting legates, high churchmen, and leading lay Romans into the Spiritual Exercises. His Companions also got very active using them, and that gave Ignatius occasion to finish the set of pre-notes he had put together, which he called the “Annotations,” and some of the “Norms” in his book.

Two Companions began teaching theology at the request of the pope and all of them went tirelessly to various churches on weekends to hear confessions and to preach. They also began organizing the wealthy for the support of the poor, who were still desperate after the sack of Rome a generation earlier. Particularly during the first winter, 1537–38, severe itself and coming after poor harvests, the Companions helped house, clothe, and feed hundreds of people (a significant percentage of the city’s population). Before long, they had launched an orphanage, a home for prostitutes trying to start over and another for girls in danger of turning to prostitution, a refuge for persecuted Jews, and a school to teach everything from the alphabet through the humanities. The school, to the astonishment of the Romans, was free. These efforts for the marginalized and poor emerged from the experience of the Spiritual Exercises.

Ignatius began to understand after they had been in Rome just some months that the pope would send the Companions separately out of Rome to perform tasks he judged important. Faced with this prospect, the Companions (now ten) began considering how they would handle separation, which as “friends in the Lord” they appear not to have envisioned. Every day through the Lent of 1539, they prayed and reflected individually and then worked through a sophisticated format for group decision making. They decided to join in a vow to obey the Supreme Pontiff in the place of Christ and to elect one of their own number (for life) whom all would obey as superior general under the pope. They drew up a brief statement of their plan of life, and in the late summer the pope gave it verbal approval. The Vatican took a year to process the decision, since it meant forming another religious order and many opposed that, believing that the reform of existing orders should come first.

Once Pope Paul III gave official approval, in the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae of July 31, 1540, the Companions elected Ignatius superior general. He turned down the first election, so they elected him again, writing the same kind of ballot with a solemn declaration that their candidate was the best before God and men. He turned down the second election, too, and one of the Companions suggested that somebody was resisting the Holy Spirit. Ignatius then went to his Franciscan confessor. He spent the last three days of Holy Week making a confession like the one he began with at Montserrat, and on Easter Sunday he heard the advice to accept.

The General of the Jesuits

With this, he began fifteen years of administrative life in Rome, years during which his spirituality and mystical prayer came to full maturity. He was commissioned by the Companions to compose the Constitutions,