Born into the minor nobility as Íñigo López de Loyola in the Basque region of Spain, the youngest of thirteen children, Ignatius spent the first three decades of his life as a self-appointed tough guy who rarely darkened the doorway of a church. Professing a basic belief in God and knowledge of popular pieties, he was what we might today call a “cultural Catholic.” He was “spiritual but not religious.”
For the young St. Ignatius, God was best kept at a distance, locked up somewhere in a family strongbox marked “open in case of emergency.” As long as God didn’t ask anything of him while he sought his pleasures in life, Íñigo didn’t ask anything of God, and he liked it that way. When life was good, he took God for granted and prayed on his own instead of going to church, because he thought he didn’t need anyone other than himself. He never considered what might happen if life got difficult.
After reaching maturity, Ignatius joined the military service of a duke, hoping to find personal glory in Spain’s expanding global empire during an age of exploration. A self-styled hidalgo, or member of the Spanish nobility, he wore the finest clothing: tight-fitting hose, buckled leather boots, a ruffled shirt, and a gaudy hat with feather on top. This gaudy “look at me” outfit came complete with a buckler, dagger, and sword.
The young Ignatius was Catholic in the sense that many sixteenth-century Spaniards were Catholic, knowing his basic prayers and receiving Communion twice a year. But his faith was completely externalized, being as far from touching his heart as his behavior was from a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ. His real passions involved satisfying his own wild appetites for life, dancing well and talking big, and seeking to impress the ladies at court and in the taverns. At one point, he was jailed briefly for beating up a priest who owed his family some money, but was released on a technicality.
While Ignatius had great desires for worldly success, his romanticized fantasies about life were turned inward, and it would be an understatement to say he was self-obsessed. His awareness of the world started and ended with himself: He was the writer, director, and star of his own heroic epic. But his life, like so many of our lives today, did not turn out the way he scripted it.
By all accounts, he should not have survived his youth, let alone become a saint to whom Jesuit schoolboys would pray before high school football games some five hundred years later. Ignatius was ill-tempered and unstable, a self-styled soldier of fortune who stared people down in public, looking for any excuse to start a fight. Modern historians believe he fathered at least one child out of wedlock, but later generations of Jesuits seem to have scrubbed the records, and Ignatius himself remains intentionally vague about his early life in his extant writings.
It hardly matters. Like too many of us since the dawn of human history, it’s enough to know that St. Ignatius before his conversion was a man who took what he wanted from life without giving a thought to the suffering of others. He was a man who lived by the illusion that he, not God, was in control of his world and his life.
As Ignatius himself summarized his youth in a third-person autobiography, he was a young man “given over to the vanities of the world, and took a special delight in the exercise of arms, with a great and vain desire of winning glory” (Autobiography of St. Ignatius of Loyola, English translation by Fr. William J. Young, S.J.). But in a gunshot that echoed throughout history, all of that changed when the cannonball smashed his leg during a French military siege at the walled city of Pamplona in 1521.
After barely surviving a series of barbaric surgeries that led him to receive the Last Rites, Ignatius reconsidered the direction of his life on his sickbed, reading the life of Christ and the lives of the saints during his long medical rehab only because there were literally no other books in the family castle to keep his restless mind occupied. Throughout his suffering, and in the pages of these books, he learned compassion and began to open his heart to God’s healing.
These books told him about the selfless love of Jesus Christ, but also about the adventures of great saints like Dominic and Francis of Assisi. It was because God’s love pierced his broken heart through their pages that Ignatius gradually became a penitent, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and finally a priest who founded the Society of Jesus under Pope Paul III in 1540. Through its missionary outreach, this Society has gone on to establish a vast global network of schools for laypeople, essentially founding modern education as we know it today.
Yet the biggest legacy St. Ignatius left to the world, as far as he was concerned, was the example of his own life and spiritual journey as a path to God. Jesus Christ met Ignatius in his brokenness with mercy and transformed him into a new man. His life would never be the same.
One story in particular captures for me how dramatically God changed the direction of St. Ignatius’s life. Several years after the cannonball wound of Pamplona, a man who had known Ignatius in his younger days happened to encounter the saint begging in the streets. Ignatius’s changed attitude shook him deeply. Unable to believe the holy beggar in front of him and the violent young soldier he had once known were the same person, the distinguished gentleman burst into tears.
Ignatian Spirituality
Today we continue to reap the fruits of St. Ignatius’s gift of Ignatian spirituality to the Catholic Church, a way of finding God in the world rather than in withdrawing from it. Through the directed retreat movement inspired by Ignatius, who wrote the Spiritual Exercises (based on notes he jotted down about his experiences in the cave at Manresa) as a manual for retreat directors, we Jesuits have spread this practical spirituality to laypeople and clergy of all Christian backgrounds worldwide for nearly five hundred years.
Ignatian spirituality, as we Jesuits use the term, refers broadly to a particular way of relating to God in prayer, a way rooted in the experiences of Ignatius and the many Jesuit saints who have followed him. It invites people to embrace a Christ-centered vision of reality rather than a self-centered perspective that leads to anxiety and despair. The question that drives an Ignatian worldview isn’t “how do I see God?” but “how does God see me?” How does God see my family, friends, and the world around me? What is God doing in the concrete circumstances of my life?
The goal of this kind of reflection is not intellectual knowledge or insight, but “felt knowledge” that burns itself into the heart like a red-hot iron, forging a deep personal bond. Ignatian prayer is like sitting wordlessly before a sunset, savoring what we notice about its presence, and applying it to ourselves in conversation with God; it’s not like thinking about the sunset and talking to ourselves about it. It invites us to encounter the living presence of Jesus Christ in prayer, not to remain trapped in our own thoughts. Can I sit with an image of God from Scripture and notice where it stirs me? Can I talk to God about what’s really going on inside of me without presenting only my “good” or idealized side to him?
Many ordinary people have valued the Ignatian focus on discerning God’s presence in our religious experiences rather than in the clouds of theological abstraction. Despite the reputation of Jesuits for being over-educated, St. Ignatius was a practical mystic whose approach to the spiritual life was based on encountering God in our everyday experiences, not on fleeing from them into intellectual fortresses built on the sand of our mental constructs. Ignatius invites us to bring whatever is happening in our lives to prayer, ask God for what we want, and listen to how the Lord responds.
Following his conversion, St. Ignatius embraced Jesus Christ’s call to hate the world, but not in the sense that he rejected God’s creation as inherently evil, splitting earth and heaven into two unrelated realities. For St. Ignatius, the Christian who “hates his life in this world” (Jn 12:25) turns away from selfishness, but not from the messiness of life. So “the world” in this negative sense refers to God’s creation as we’ve corrupted it through our selfish ways rather than to God’s creation in and of itself. If Ignatius knew anything from his own experiences, it was the difference between human selfishness and self-giving love.
Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881–1955), the French Jesuit geologist and mystic, expresses with particular clarity the Ignatian invitation to embrace God’s creation as good:
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