How seven Paris students became the Catholic Church's largest men's order
In a crypt at Montmartre in August 1534, a wounded Basque ex-soldier and six fellow students at the University of Paris promised poverty, chastity and obedience. Their decision to name the group after Jesus himself offended rival orders, and a pope once signed a brief to change it. The name, and the Jesuits, survived.
Ignatius of Loyola found his vocation while recovering from a wound received at the Battle of Pamplona. His companions included Francis Xavier and Peter Faber. In 1537 they went to Italy hoping to reach Jerusalem, but war between the emperor Charles V, Venice, the papacy and the Ottomans blocked the way, so they were ordained in Venice and turned to preaching and charity instead. On 27 September 1540 Pope Paul III approved them with the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, capping membership at sixty, a limit lifted in 1550.
Older orders carried founders' names, like Franciscans and Dominicans. Claiming the name of Jesus struck critics as presumptuous or even blasphemous, and the label Jesuit began as an insult before members took it up. The military flavour was deliberate: Ignatius had been a captain, and the founding charter addresses whoever wishes to serve as a soldier of God, which earned the order nicknames such as God's marines.
The early Jesuits concentrated on three things. They built schools that paired classical learning and theology with mathematics. They sent missionaries to places as far apart as Paraguay, Japan, Ontario and Ethiopia, with one founder reaching India in 1541. And they worked to halt Protestantism, with notable effect in southern Germany and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their core spiritual tool, the Spiritual Exercises, is a four-week silent retreat of guided meditation, designed to bring contemplative practice to people living active lives.
Frequent clashes with governments followed. From 1759 Jesuits were expelled from most of Catholic Europe and its colonies, and Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order in 1773. It was restored in 1814 and now works in 112 countries under a superior general in Rome, keeping the motto For the greater glory of God.
Source: Jesuits
