(“Mastery of the World and the Kingdom of God” in Writings in Time of War, 83–91)
To live in the world without sensing God in it damns us. While St. Ignatius rejected this sinful sense of worldliness in his own life, he was a practical mystic who nevertheless loved all that is good and beautiful in human experience. He rejected “the world” as corrupted by human sin, but he also loved “the world” as God creates, sustains, and calls it — including all of us — to be.
The need to discern prayerfully between creation’s goodness as redeemed by the Trinity’s saving action (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together in collaboration with us for our good) and its distortion by sin continues to inform the spiritual vocabulary of Jesuits today. Pope Francis, the most prominent Jesuit of our time, evokes this Ignatian view of “the world” whenever he preaches about the either-or choice between God and mammon, service and consumerism. He described “the world” in its negative sense in his speech to the poor at Assisi, Italy, lamenting the deaths of more than 360 refugees in a shipwreck:
Of what must the Church divest herself? Today she must strip herself of a very grave danger, which threatens every person in the Church, everyone: the danger of worldliness. The Christian cannot coexist with the spirit of the world, with the worldliness that leads us to vanity, to arrogance, to pride. And this is an idol; it is not God. It is an idol! And idolatry is the gravest of sins!
(Speech in the Room of Renunciation in the Archbishop’s Residence, October 4, 2013)
If the pope calls us to reject worldliness, he also calls us to embrace the spirit of God that lies at the heart of Ignatian spirituality. We find that spirit rooted in the virtue of humility, the good habit of seeing ourselves and the realities around us through Christ’s eyes rather than through the lens of self-centered distortions. Later in this same speech on the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the Holy Father distinguished this Christlike humility that forms the hinge of all saintly virtues from the worldly self-interest that makes us oblivious to the suffering of others:
And Jesus made himself a servant for our sake, and the spirit of the world has nothing to do with this. Today I am here with you. Many of you have been stripped by this callous world that offers no work, no help. To this world it doesn’t matter that there are children dying of hunger; it doesn’t matter if many families have nothing to eat, do not have the dignity of bringing bread home; it doesn’t matter that many people are forced to flee slavery, hunger, and flee in search of freedom. With how much pain, how often don’t we see that they meet death, as in Lampedusa; today is a day of tears! The spirit of the world causes these things.
It is unthinkable that a Christian — a true Christian — be it a priest, a sister, a bishop, a cardinal, or a pope, would want to go down this path of worldliness, which is a homicidal attitude. Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the person! It kills the Church!
This radical invitation to shift our focus from self-centered to Christ-centered living has not only marked the spirituality of St. Ignatius and Pope Francis, but has influenced many centuries of Christian believers down to the present. Thanks to the publicity of the global media, it has become particularly visible in the papacy of Francis. Yet over the past five centuries, we can see the characteristic humility of this spirituality at work in countless Jesuit saints and others throughout the world, from the famous to the forgotten.
St. Ignatius and Pope Francis
In a homily on the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola at the Gesu, the Jesuit mother church in Rome, Pope Francis emphasized three hallmarks of Ignatian humility: putting Christ and the Catholic Church at the center; letting ourselves be won over by him in order to serve; and feeling ashamed of our shortcomings and sins so as to be humble in God’s eyes and in those of our brothers and sisters.
To help visualize what it means to de-center ourselves and put Jesus Christ at the center of our lives, Francis prayerfully contemplated in his homily the image of the “IHS” seal of the Society of Jesus. This monogram — typically surrounded by a sunburst and featuring the three nails from Christ’s crucifixion beneath it — adorns his own papal coat of arms:
Our Jesuit coat of arms is a monogram bearing the acronym of “Iesus Hominum Salvator” (IHS). Each one of you could say to me: we know that very well! But this coat of arms constantly reminds us of a reality we must never forget: the centrality of Christ, for each one of us and for the whole Society which St. Ignatius wanted to call, precisely, “of Jesus” to indicate its point of reference. Moreover, at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises we also place ourselves before Our Lord Jesus Christ, our Creator and Savior (cf. EE, 6).
(Homily on the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Church of the Gesù, Rome, July 31, 2013)
All the great Jesuit saints, following Ignatius, strove to make Jesus Christ the commander-in-chief of their lives. The Holy Father, recognizing that true humility sees Jesus rather than ourselves at the center of our existence, wants all of us to do the same. Regarding his second point about surrendering oneself to Christ’s loving invitation, Francis noted how this humbling dynamic plays out in the conversion experiences of both St. Ignatius and St. Paul:
Let us look at the experience of St. Paul which was also the experience of St. Ignatius. In the Second Reading which we have just heard, the Apostle wrote: I press on toward the perfection of Christ, because “Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Phil 3:12). For Paul it happened on the road to Damascus, for Ignatius in the Loyola family home, but they have in common a fundamental point: they both let Christ make them his own. I seek Jesus, I serve Jesus because he sought me first, because I was won over by him: and this is the heart of our experience.
In his third point, the pope explores the Ignatian image of “healthy shame” for our sins, by which he means guilt as a natural and healthy response to our hurtful actions, as opposed to psychologically damaging self-hatred. Healthy shame works as a corrective to human egoism:
We should ask for the grace to be ashamed; shame that comes from the continuous conversation of mercy with him; shame that makes us blush before Jesus Christ; shame that attunes us to the heart of Christ who made himself sin for me; shame that harmonizes each heart through tears and accompanies us in the daily “sequela” of “my Lord.”
And this always brings us, as individuals and as the Society, to humility, to living this great virtue. Humility which every day makes us aware that it is not we who build the Kingdom of God but always the Lord’s grace which acts within us; a humility that spurs us to put our whole self not into serving ourselves or our own ideas, but into the service of Christ and of the Church, as clay vessels, fragile, inadequate and insufficient, yet which contain an immense treasure that we bear and communicate (cf. 2 Cor 4:7).
Following a Jesuit tradition, Pope Francis preaches “in threes.” Here he explores three aspects of humility in Ignatian spirituality: putting Christ at the center, surrendering to Christ’s loving service, and feeling healthy shame over sin. But he does not present these aspects as exhaustive of Ignatian spirituality. Instead, he develops them as points for meditation which he sees in the Mass readings for St. Ignatius Day — as images for prayer which strike him as applicable to our own lives. In addition to these points, there are many other virtues in Ignatian spirituality which inform the language of this pope and the way he relates to God.
Spirituality in Action
While many people have noticed the popularity of Pope Francis, few casual observers may realize that the Ignatian spirituality driving his papacy precedes him and will endure long after he is gone. It is the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola that formed Francis, not Francis who formed Ignatian spirituality. If knowing someone’s family helps us to know that person, then we must understand Francis as a son of St. Ignatius to appreciate the sources of his spiritual fire, and we must look at how the Jesuit saints lived to fully grasp how Francis strives