Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Priest

Feast Day

July 31

Life

1491–1556

Canonized

1622

Order

Society of Jesus (Jesuits, S.J.)

Born

Loyola Castle, Azpeitia, Basque Country, Crown of Castile

Saint Ignatius of Loyola was born Inigo Lopez de Onaz y Loyola at the family castle near Azpeitia in the Basque Country in 1491, the youngest of thirteen children of a noble family. He was raised at the court of King Ferdinand the Catholic and entered the military service of the Duke of Najera. On May 20, 1521, defending the citadel of Pamplona against a French invasion, he was struck by a cannonball that shattered his right leg. During his long convalescence at Loyola the only books available were a Life of Christ and a collection of Lives of the Saints (the Flos Sanctorum), the reading of which produced the radical conversion he later described in his Autobiography.

From Loyola he made pilgrimage to the abbey of Montserrat (March 1522), where he laid down his sword before the image of Our Lady, and then settled at Manresa for almost a year in penitential prayer. The decisive mystical experience by the river Cardoner gave him the principles he later codified as the Spiritual Exercises (final form 1548), the structured thirty-day retreat that has remained the principal Jesuit instrument of evangelization. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1523-1524) he undertook formal studies in Latin grammar at Barcelona alongside schoolboys at age thirty-three, then philosophy and theology at Alcala, Salamanca, and finally Paris, where he took his Master of Arts in 1535.

At Paris he gathered around himself the first companions, including Saints Peter Faber, Francis Xavier, Diego Lainez, and Alfonso Salmeron. On August 15, 1534, in the chapel of Saint-Denys at Montmartre, the seven made vows of poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When war made the Holy Land mission impossible, the group placed itself at the disposal of the Pope. Ordained priest in Venice on June 24, 1537, Ignatius and his companions journeyed to Rome and were received by Pope Paul III, who gave oral approval to the new order in 1539 and formal canonical approval by the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae on September 27, 1540.

Elected first Superior General in April 1541, Ignatius governed the Society of Jesus from Rome until his death. Under his direction the Society grew from ten to one thousand members in fifteen years, and he composed the Constitutions of the Society, finalized in 1556. He died at the Jesuit professed house in Rome on July 31, 1556. Pope Gregory XV canonized him together with Saints Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri, and Isidore the Farmer on March 12, 1622, the famous canonization of five at Saint Peter's. His tomb is in the Church of the Gesu, the Jesuit mother church in Rome.