The Jesuits

More than four hundred years ago, Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque noble, was seriously injured by a cannonball while fighting to defend the Spanish garrison at Pamplona, against French invaders.As he was recuperating back in the Castle of Loyola, to ease the monotony of being bed-ridden, Ignatius read the only books available in the castle: a Life of Christ and Lives of Saints. As he read these books, the Lord converted Ignatius from a man who hankered for worldly fame and pleasure to a man who desired to distinguish himself in the service of the Eternal King. Upon recovery, Ignatius offered his knightly arms to Our Lady at her shrine in Montserrat.
He was then led by God through almost a year of prayer in Manresa where he grew in understanding of God’s will for him and became a new man in Christ. After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he decided he could serve God best by studying for the priesthood. While at the University of Paris, his manner of life, his religious views, and gift for leadership attracted followers. And later, he gathered a group of friends who vowed themselves to poverty and chastity and placed themselves at the disposal of the Pope.
The Pope entrusted various missions to their care and soon they were traveling all over Europe, for the defense and propagation of the Faith. Eventually, they decided that it was for God’s greater glory that they unite themselves into a formally constituted organization by the vow of religious obedience to a superior. They drew up a document outlining the characteristics of the religious order they had in mind. The Compañia de Jesus (Companions of Jesus) would be primarily apostolic, not hidden away in some monastery, but out in the world. Besides the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they would make a separate fourth vow to go anywhere the Pope would send them.
On Sept. 27, 1540, Pope Paul III approved their petition to form a religious order and also approved their constitution without a single word altered. And so the Society of Jesus was born. Soon, the Jesuits were all over Europe. And by the time Ignatius died in 1556, there were Jesuits who had journeyed to distant lands so that in the Imperial courts of China and Japan, among the swamis of India, in the Congo, Ethiopia, and Brazil, the Word of God could be shared.
Today there are Jesuits in every continent of the world striving to fulfill the mission entrusted to them by God through the Holy Father and their superiors: to be apostles who will bring the Good News to the ends of the earth.
The Jesuit VisionSaint Ignatius desired his men to be contemplatives-in-action, men seeking their union with God through active and total service of their fellowmen. He wanted his men to combine a total, personal commitment to Christ and His Cross, with decisive involvement in the transformation and salvation of the world.
Thus, the Jesuit is an apostle: one sent by the Father through Jesus into the world to spread the Good News. The Jesuit then is a man on a mission. He belongs to a community of friends in the Lord who have pledged to accompany Jesus on His mission.
As apostles, Jesuits must be “all things to all men”: men ready to go anywhere, live anywhere, do anything, suffer anything, be anything, in order to be instruments of God’s salvation. Thus, the Society has no one particular apostolate: there is literally no work that a Jesuit may not do, if it is for the greater glory of God.
For the greater glory of God: concretely, that means that the Society must direct its apostolates, firstly, towards whatever reaches more people and does more universal good; secondly, to whatever answers urgent needs which cannot be delayed without endangering the people of God; and lastly, to works that are neglected and that few want to do.
Today, the Society of Jesus, considering these criteria of Ignatius, and aware of the needs and hopes of men to today, focus their service of God and man on “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.

"What is it to be a Jesuit today?
It is to know that one is a sinner,
yet called to be a companion of Jesus,
as Ignatius was, who begged the Blessed
Virgin to place him with her Son,
and who then saw the Father Himself
ask Jesus, carrying His cross,
to take this pilgrim into his company…”
“It is to engage, under the standard of the cross,
in the crucial struggle of our time
the struggle for faith
and that struggle for justice
which it includes.”
- from the 32nd General Congregation Decree on “Jesuits Today”

 

The Jesuits
St. Ignatius of Loyola