St. Ignatius of Loyola

1. The Cannonball Moment

Íñigo López de Loyola was a courtier and soldier who, by his own later account, was given over to the vanities of the world and wanted above all to win a great name. On 20 May 1521 he was defending the citadel of Pamplona against a French force when a cannonball passed between his legs, shattering one and wounding the other. The French treated him well and carried him home to the castle of Loyola.

The leg was set badly and had to be broken and reset, and a protruding bone sawn off, all without anaesthetic, because he wanted to wear the close-fitting boots of a courtier again. He limped for life.

Bored during a long recovery, he asked for the chivalric romances he loved. The house had none, and he was given a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and a collection of lives of the saints. He read them because there was nothing else, and he began daydreaming in two directions: about the great deeds he would do to impress a certain noble lady, and about what it would take to do what Francis of Assisi and Dominic had done. His thought, more or less, was that if they could do this, so could he.

2. Discernment of Spirits

Lying there, he noticed a difference in the aftertaste of his two daydreams. Thinking about worldly glory entertained him while it lasted and left him dry, restless and dissatisfied when he put it down. Thinking about serving God entertained him too, and left him content and at peace afterwards. Nobody had taught him this. He observed it, and it became the seed of everything he wrote.

The mature version is the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits in the Spiritual Exercises. A few of them are worth stating plainly, because they are usable by anyone.

• Consolation and desolation are conditions, not verdicts. Consolation draws you toward God, increases faith, hope and love, and leaves peace. Desolation is darkness, agitation and a pull away from prayer. Both happen to people who are doing well.
• Never make a change during desolation. Decisions taken in darkness are taken by the darkness. Hold to what you decided in the light, and change the amount of prayer and penance instead of the direction of your life.
• The enemy demands secrecy. Ignatius compares it to a false lover who insists that nothing be told to anyone. Bringing a temptation or a scruple into the open with a confessor or a director breaks most of its force. Our page on confession covers the sacramental side of that.
• Trace the whole train of thought to its end. The enemy can enter under the appearance of good, and Paul says that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). A suggestion that begins well and ends in something disordered has shown its origin.

Ignatius did not treat these as private intuitions. The tests are the same ones the New Testament gives: test the spirits (1 John 4:1), test everything and hold what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and judge by the fruit, which Paul lists as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22 to 23).

3. The Jesuits

Ignatius founded the Society of Jesus with a small group of companions from the University of Paris, and Pope Paul III approved it on 27 September 1540. The Society's members take the three religious vows and, in the case of the professed, a fourth vow concerning missions: to go wherever the pope sends them, without arguing about the destination or the conditions. That fourth vow is the distinctive thing about them.

The original plan was different from what the order became. The companions vowed at Montmartre in 1534 to go to Jerusalem and work there, and to place themselves at the pope's disposal if they could not get passage. War with the Ottomans closed the route, so they went to Rome instead. The Society was constituted for preaching, teaching, hearing confessions and the help of souls, and the schools and colleges that came to define it grew out of that mandate rather than being part of the original design.

One common claim should be corrected. The Society was not founded to fight the Reformation. Its founding documents are about the help of souls and the Jerusalem mission, and the anti-Protestant work belongs to the following decades, when the Society was directed into it. Ignatius sent Francis Xavier to India and Japan, opened colleges across Europe, and in Rome founded a house for women leaving prostitution and a home for orphans.

The motto usually attached to the Jesuits, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God, is a phrase Ignatius used repeatedly and is the standard summary of the whole approach: choose the option that gives God more glory.

4. The Life: Loyola to Rome

Ignatius was born in 1491 at the family castle in Azpeitia, in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, the youngest of a large noble family. He was raised as a page in a treasurer's household and then in the service of the Duke of Nájera, and he was a soldier and a courtier until he was thirty.

After the cannonball, in 1522, he went to the shrine of Montserrat, made a general confession over three days, hung his sword and dagger before the altar of the Black Madonna, gave his fine clothes to a beggar and put on rough sackcloth. He intended to go on to Jerusalem, and was delayed at the town of Manresa for what turned into most of a year.

He reached Jerusalem in 1523 and wanted to stay permanently. The Franciscan superior with authority over the holy places ordered him home. He came back convinced that he needed an education, and started Latin grammar in Barcelona in his thirties, sitting with schoolboys. At Alcalá and Salamanca his habit of speaking to people about their spiritual lives without a theology degree drew the attention of the Inquisition. He was investigated and briefly imprisoned at each, and cleared both times, with instructions not to teach on certain matters until he had studied properly.

So he went to the University of Paris in 1528 and stayed seven years, taking a master's degree and the Latin form of his name, Ignatius. There he gathered the companions who mattered: Peter Faber, Francis Xavier, Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Simão Rodrigues and Nicolás Bobadilla. On 15 August 1534 the seven made vows together at Montmartre. He was ordained a priest in Venice in 1537.

Elected the first superior general in 1541 against his own wishes, he spent his last fifteen years at a desk in Rome, writing the Constitutions and roughly seven thousand letters, administering an order that grew to about a thousand men by the time he died on 31 July 1556. He is buried in the Church of the Gesù in Rome.

5. Manresa and the Spiritual Exercises

The eleven months at Manresa in 1522 and 1523 were the hardest of his life and the most productive. He lived on alms, prayed for hours in a cave outside the town, fasted severely, and let his hair and nails grow as a rejection of his former vanity. He was then hit by scruples: an obsessive conviction that his past sins were not really forgiven and that he had failed to confess them properly. It went far enough that he was tempted to throw himself out of a window. He came out of it by deciding to stop repeating past confessions altogether, which is still standard pastoral advice for scrupulosity.

After that came a period of intense clarity, including an experience by the river Cardoner that he later said taught him more than everything else in his life put together. The notes he made in this period became the Spiritual Exercises.

What the Exercises are

The Spiritual Exercises is a handbook for the person guiding a retreat rather than a book to read straight through. It lays out a thirty-day programme in four movements, called weeks.

• First week: the purpose of a human life, sin, mercy, and a thorough reckoning with one's own history.
• Second week: the life of Christ, contemplated scene by scene, with the retreatant asked to place themselves in the scene using the senses. This week contains the meditations on the Kingdom and the Two Standards, and it is where a decision about one's life is normally made.
• Third week: the Passion.
• Fourth week: the Resurrection, ending with the Contemplation to Attain Love.

Ignatius also provided for people who cannot leave their work for a month: the nineteenth annotation allows the whole retreat to be made over months in daily life. That is how most people make it today.

The prayer that closes the Exercises is the one people remember: take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will, all that I have and possess; you gave it to me and I return it to you; dispose of it entirely according to your will; give me only your love and your grace, and that is enough for me.

6. The Daily Examen, and How to Use It

Ignatius held that the examen was the practice a Jesuit should keep even if everything else had to go. It takes about fifteen minutes and it works for anyone.

1. Give thanks for specific things in the day just past.
2. Ask God for light to see the day as it actually was.
3. Walk through the day hour by hour, noticing where you were drawn toward God and where you were pulled away, and what you felt at each point.
4. Ask forgiveness for what went wrong, naming it plainly.
5. Decide one concrete thing for tomorrow.

The third step is the Ignatian contribution. Most people examine their conscience by checking a list of rules. Ignatius has you examine your feelings and desires as evidence, because that is where the movements he wrote about show up. Our page on Catholic prayer places the examen among the other forms.

7. What the Record Shows and What Is Legend

Ignatius is unusually well documented. He dictated an account of his own life to a companion, Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, in his last years, speaking of himself in the third person; it survives as the Autobiography, sometimes called the Pilgrim's Testament. His spiritual diary and thousands of his letters survive as well.

On the record

• The wound at Pamplona in 1521, the surgeries, and the reading during convalescence.
• Montserrat, Manresa, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the studies, the two Inquisition investigations.
• The vows at Montmartre in 1534 and the approval of the Society in 1540.
• The mule story he tells against himself: riding to Montserrat he fell into an argument with a Moorish traveller about the perpetual virginity of Mary, and afterwards seriously debated going back to stab him. He could not decide, so he let the mule choose at a fork in the road. The mule took the other path. He tells it to show what his judgment was like before it was trained.

Later additions and misunderstandings

• The description of the Jesuits as soldiers or shock troops of the Church is a later image, much of it from opponents. Ignatius used the language of service and mission, and the military metaphor in the Exercises is one image among several.
• The claim that he founded the order to combat Protestantism is not supported by the founding documents.
• Popular retellings sometimes make the conversion instantaneous. His own account describes months of reading and years of trial and error, including a long stretch when he badly overdid the fasting and had to be corrected.

8. Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

Pius XI named him patron of spiritual exercises and retreats in 1922, which is the patronage with the clearest origin: it names what he actually produced. He was canonised in 1622 on the same day as Francis Xavier, Teresa of Ávila, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer, one of the most remarkable single days in the history of canonisation.

Pilgrims visit the sanctuary built around the castle at Loyola, the cave at Manresa, and the Gesù in Rome, where the rooms he lived and worked in are preserved.

9. What a Reader Can Take From Ignatius

Pay attention to the aftertaste

The whole method begins with one observation any person can make: what does this leave behind an hour later? Track it for a week on the things you actually spend your evenings on. The results are usually uncomfortable and immediately useful.

Do not decide in the dark

The single most practical rule Ignatius wrote is to make no change of direction while in desolation. Job, marriage, vocation, parish: if the impulse to walk away arrives with agitation and darkness, wait it out and decide later.

Say it out loud to someone

He held that what is hidden grows and what is spoken shrinks. A confessor, a spiritual director or a trustworthy Christian friend costs nothing at a parish, and it is the first thing to do rather than the last.

10. Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius?

They are a structured retreat of about thirty days, set out as a manual for the person guiding it, moving through four stages: sin and mercy, the life of Christ, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Ignatius also provided a version, the nineteenth annotation, that spreads the same material over several months in daily life for people who cannot leave their work.

What is the discernment of spirits?

It is the practice of examining interior movements to see which lead toward God and which away. Ignatius set out rules for it: watch what a thought leaves behind, never make a change during desolation, expose what wants to stay secret, and follow a train of thought to its end, because the enemy can enter under the appearance of good (2 Corinthians 11:14).

When is the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola?

31 July, the day of his death in 1556. It is a memorial in the general calendar and a solemnity in Jesuit churches and institutions.

Why is St. Ignatius the patron saint of retreats?

Pius XI declared him patron of spiritual exercises and retreats in 1922, because the retreat as Catholics know it comes largely from the book he wrote. The patronage names his actual work rather than a legend.

Was St. Ignatius a soldier?

Yes. He served in the household of a Spanish noble and fought at the defence of Pamplona in 1521, where he was wounded. He was about thirty at the time, and his conversion began during the recovery from that wound.

How do I pray the Ignatian Examen?

Take fifteen minutes at the end of the day. Give thanks for specific things, ask for light, walk back through the hours noticing where you were drawn toward God and where you were pulled away, ask forgiveness for what went wrong, and choose one concrete thing for tomorrow. Do it daily rather than perfectly.