For most other sources in this book, particularly for quotations that do not appear in multiple places under public domain, I used in-text citations. I also consulted various lives of the saints and encyclopedias, often uncited, to confirm dates and other information where some sources were unclear. In cases where birth dates or other facts differed in several sources, I chose what seemed best in the Lord. In a special way, I want to thank Joseph McAuley, an assistant editor and colleague at America, for editing my first draft. And thank you to St. Athanasius the Great Byzantine Catholic Church in Indianapolis for hosting me while I wrote it.
In addition to these acknowledgments, I wish to dedicate this work to all the holy Jesuits who have preceded me in this least Society of Jesus, from St. Ignatius of Loyola to Pope Francis. Without their blood, sweat, and tears, I would have nothing to write about. It is because of these men that I have often noticed the loving action of Jesus Christ in my life.
Finally, I want to dedicate this book to all the people I have taught as a Jesuit in catechism, grade school, junior high, high school, and university settings. Thank you for the witness you have shown in sharing your own journeys to God. Without you, I would only know the saints from the books we studied in class.
Contents
Chapter 1: Immersed in the World
This book will use the lives of Jesuit saints and others to illustrate six virtues in the Jesuit spirituality of Pope Francis, inviting readers to grow in relationship with God.
Chapter 2: Trust
Saints who surrendered themselves profoundly to God
Chapter 3: Openness
Saints who dreamed big, listened to God, and went outside the box
Chapter 4: Generosity
Saints who gave without counting the cost
Chapter 5: Simplicity
Saints who learned to have or not have things, insofar as it served God
Chapter 6: Dedication
Saints who followed Jesus even when things got tough
Chapter 7: Gratitude
Saints who saw everything, including themselves, as a gift from God
Conclusion: Transformation
So we’re not saints yet: Now what?
Chapter One
Immersed in the World
And may we be accompanied on our way by the fatherly intercession of St. Ignatius and of all the Jesuit Saints who continue to teach us to do all things, with humility, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of our Lord God.
— Pope Francis, homily on the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, July 31, 2013
Desperate and unemployed, the wild-eyed young Spaniard fell to his knees in a cave by the Cardoner River, tears streaming down his face as he begged Jesus to give him a sign.
Convinced by a recent career-ending injury that God was punishing him for years of uncaring selfishness, the young man whipped himself on the back repeatedly, returning to the cave each day for ten months from a flophouse in Manresa where he was staying. His fingernails grew long and nasty, his hair dirty and flowing, but he didn’t care — his life had fallen apart.
Fasting to an extreme, the guilt-ridden man ate nothing for days on end, nearly starving himself to death despite the protests of his confessor. Resisting even the smallest comforts, he went barefoot in all seasons. Despite his beard and rags, he wasn’t much older than thirty, and he was obsessed with rethinking where his life was headed.
Perhaps if he punished himself enough, the young man thought, it would please his angry image of God and put things back the way they were before the injury that nearly killed him.
Only a year earlier, this same man had been physically fit and happily employed, leading a pleasure-seeking life without a care in the world. The privileged youngest child of a large well-off family, he had never really known what it meant to suffer or to struggle, and he had spent much of his life avoiding people who did. As a worldly soldier in his twenties, he thought he had figured out the recipe for happiness: Take whatever you want from others to satisfy your appetites — just don’t get caught. With this attitude, it hadn’t taken him long to become a womanizer, a gambler, and a violent brawler.
This way of life had ended in a battle at the city of Pamplona, where an enemy shell shattered his leg. After the injury terminated his military command and left him with a permanent limp, resulting in surgeries that almost killed him, the young captain had spent several months in bed at his family home, slowly recovering his strength and ability to walk. Filled with shame and confusion on his sickbed, he read the life of Christ and the lives of the saints, struggling to understand what God was saying to him through the recent events of his life.
Several questions now haunted him. What did he really want out of life? Why had God let this happen to him? And where would he be in five or ten years if he went back to his old self-seeking habits?
There didn’t seem to be any rational answers, let alone easy ones. The young man hadn’t spent much of his life thinking about God before Pamplona, but the battle wound and religious books suddenly made his childhood Catholicism feel very meaningful to him. Convinced that his injury was some kind of divine punishment or message, he took a long time to realize God was speaking more through his sufferings than through the vain self-flatteries of his mind.
After getting back on his feet and leaving the care of his family, the young man resigned his military commission, even though his superior insisted he could be promoted to a more comfortable and limited role. Refusing his family’s help and sending their money back, he went to the mountaintop Benedictine abbey of Montserrat to renounce his old life and then made his way to the cave at Manresa. At Montserrat he traded his clothing for rags and became a street person, carrying a walking staff as he proceeded to beg from town to town, sleeping under the open sky and in homeless shelters.
In the riverside cave at Manresa, the young man spent several hours a day contemplating the Gospels and the lives of the saints, imagining himself present with Jesus and with holy men like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic. As he prayed in this way with Jesus and with the Lord’s saints, different thoughts and feelings came up within him, giving him the signs he sought. Gradually, he discerned that God was inviting him to help others rather than to punish his own body, and he left the cave to begin a new life as a Christian street preacher. Although his family was embarrassed by his behavior, he felt certain for the first time in his life that God was not.
An Unlikely Saint
To his family and friends, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) was the most unlikely person in the world to become a canonized Catholic saint, let alone establish a worldwide religious order. But he is the same young man I have just been talking about — a professional soldier whose battlefield encounter with God’s grace transformed him from a self-centered playboy into a beggar, a priest, and finally the founder of a religious order that exists to this day: the Jesuits.
While Ignatius may not have been as flagrant a sinner as St. Augustine or St. Paul, his conversion was just as dramatic to those who knew him best. As a symbol of this change in life, he even changed his first name from Íñigo to Ignatius in honor of St. Ignatius of Antioch (A.D. c. 35 – c. 108), the early bishop and Church father who was martyred by being fed to wild beasts. But even though he eventually started the Jesuit order (Society of Jesus) to which Pope Francis, many others,