A wounded Basque soldier founded the Jesuit order
Ignatius of Loyola—baptised under a Basque family name in the 1490s and dead in 1556—left soldiering for priesthood and, with six companions, founded the Society of Jesus. In Paris in 1541 he became the Jesuits’ first Superior General, binding the order to mission, teaching and a special vow of obedience to the pope.
Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola was born in the family castle at Loyola, in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, to minor nobles. His mother died soon after, and a blacksmith's wife nursed him. As a teenage page to Castile's royal treasurer he took up fencing, dancing, gambling, duelling and chasing women, modelling himself on tales of chivalry. At 18, in 1509, he began serving the Duke of Nájera, and biographers describe a vain, quick-tempered swordsman.
His turning point came at Pamplona on 20 May 1521, when French-Navarrese forces stormed the fortress and a cannonball bounced off a wall and broke his right leg. Back at Loyola, without anaesthetic, surgeons set and rebroke the bones; he limped for life and never soldiered again. Denied his favourite romances, he read lives of Christ and the saints brought by his sister-in-law Magdalena. Ludolph of Saxony's De Vita Christi, which asks readers to picture themselves inside Gospel scenes, shaped his later way of praying. He noticed that daydreams of knightly glory left him empty while dreams of sainthood left him joyful.
He spent about a year at Manresa praying up to seven hours a day in a nearby cave and drafting the Spiritual Exercises. A 1523 trip to Jerusalem ended when the Franciscans sent him home. At 33 he sat in a Barcelona grammar school, then studied at Alcalá, drew scrutiny from the Inquisition, and moved to Paris, taking the name Ignatius. On 15 August 1534 he and six fellow students, including Francis Xavier and Peter Faber, took vows at Montmartre; Pope Paul III approved the Society in 1540.
Jesuits soon opened schools and colleges across Europe, starting with a successful college in Messina. The Constitutions, written with his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco and adopted in 1553, demanded obedience summed up as perinde ac cadaver, like a corpse. He was beatified in 1609.
Source: Ignatius of Loyola
