AN UNUSUAL LIFE STORY
St Ignatius is a well-known figure in the Catholic Church. He was a Spanish theologian and mystic and one of most influential figures in the Roman Catholic counter-reformation in the 16th Century and founder of the “Jesuits”( friends of Jesus).
Ignatius was born in the ancestral castle of the Loyolas, in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, Spain. He was the youngest of 13 children of a noble and wealthy family; his mother died when he was seven years old.
In 1506 Ignatius became a page in the service of a relative, Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, treasurer of the kingdom of Castile. In 1517 Ignatius became a knight in the service of another relative, Antonio Manrique de Lara, duke of Nájera and viceroy of Navarre, who employed him in military undertakings and on a diplomatic mission.
While defending the citadel of Pamplona against the French, (where still today each year in July, they stage the ‘running of the bulls’). Ignatius was hit by a cannonball on May 20, 1521, sustaining a bad fracture of his right leg and damage to his left. This event closed the first period of his life, during which he was, on his own admission, “a man given to the vanities of the world, whose chief delight consisted in martial exercises, with a great and vain desire to win renown”. Although his morals were far from stainless, Ignatius was in his early years a proud rather than sensual man. He stood just under five feet two inches in height and had in his youth an abundance of hair of a reddish tint. He delighted in music, especially sacred hymns.
It is the second period of Ignatius’s life that is better known, where he turned toward a saintly life. After treatment at Pamplona, he was transported to Loyola in June 1521. There his condition became so serious that for a time it was thought he would die. When out of danger, he chose to undergo painful surgery to correct blunders made when the bone was first set. The result was a convalescence of many weeks, during which he read ‘The life of Christ’ and a book on the lives of the saints….the only reading matter the castle afforded. He also passed time in recalling tales of martial valour, and in thinking of a great lady whom he admired. In the early stages of this enforced reading, his attention was centred on the saints. The version of the lives of the saints he was reading contained prologues to the various lives by a Cistercian monk who conceived the service of God as a holy chivalry. This view of life profoundly moved and attracted Ignatius. After much reflection, he resolved to imitate the holy austerities of the saints in order to do penance for his sins.
The final period of Loyola’s life was spent in Rome or it’s vicinity. In 1539 the companions decided to form a permanent union, adding a vow of obedience to a superior elected by themselves to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Roman pontiff, that they had already taken. In 1540 Pope Paul III approved the plan of the new order. Loyola was the choice of his companions for the office of general.
