and I am moved by the desire to serve you.
I vow to your divine majesty, before the most holy Virgin
Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual poverty,
chastity, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.
I promise that I will enter this same Society to spend
my life in it forever.
I understand all these things according to the
Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
Therefore, by your boundless goodness and mercy
and through the blood of Jesus Christ,
I humbly ask that you judge this total commitment
of myself acceptable;
and, as you have freely given me the desire to make
this offering,
so also may you give me the abundant grace
to fulfill it.
St. Charles College, Grand Coteau, Louisiana,
August 15, 2007
Pope Francis, whose behavior as Holy Father continues to manifest the radical trust of a Jesuit’s lifelong commitment to God, took these same vows on March 12, 1960, and they sustained him up to his final profession of vows following ordination to the priesthood. They are the same first vows that every Jesuit has professed in various languages since the time of St. Ignatius, whose name now forms part of my own.
All of the saints in my name are part of my life’s story. I know them through their relics and writings, through biographies and films like Paolo Dy’s 2016 movie Ignatius of Loyola, and through my experiences of reflecting on the images of their lives in prayer. And if Pope Benedict XVI is right that the best arguments for Catholicism are its saints and the art it has produced, then the artwork depicting my “name saints” manifests God’s love to me in a unique way. In my room, as I write these words, hanging on the wall above my bed are the following icons: St. John the Evangelist, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Joseph, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Our Lady of the Assumption. Each image has a distinctive iconography or set of artistic features identifying that saint, such as St. Joseph holding the baby Jesus or Mary rising from earth into heaven.
In addition to my icon of Mary, I have a large icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an image dear to our religious order that bears his name. And I have a framed portrait of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope who, like many others and me, got to know the great Jesuit saints as he underwent our infamously long training program (it took him eleven years; twelve years for me) in preparation for ordination to the priesthood.
When my life feels like a failure, when I struggle to find God, and when nobody is nearby to talk with me about it, I can always look at these icons and talk with these saints. Their images pull me out of myself and remind me that I am never alone.
Surrendering to God
To live my vocation as a Jesuit, in this day and age, requires a lot of trust. At age twenty-five, I left a career as a newspaper reporter behind, selling a house and giving away a car to enter the Society of Jesus. But in the course of my formation for the priesthood from 2005 to 2017, it helped that I was surrounded by peers who were all making the same commitment, aging and struggling together with me as we grew into our Jesuit lives and priestly vocations.
It also helped that I had my patron saints, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, to help me grow closer to God in moments of struggle.
On his first All Saints’ Day as supreme pontiff, Pope Francis put his finger on what makes the saints so accessible in drawing us to God:
The Saints are not supermen, nor were they born perfect. They are like us, like each one of us. They are people who, before reaching the glory of heaven, lived normal lives with joys and sorrows, struggles and hopes. What changed their lives? When they recognized God’s love, they followed it with all their heart without reserve or hypocrisy. They spent their lives serving others, they endured suffering and adversity without hatred and responded to evil with good, spreading joy and peace.
This is the life of a Saint. Saints are people who for love of God did not put conditions on him in their life; they were not hypocrites; they spent their lives at the service of others. They suffered much adversity but without hate.
(Angelus address, Solemnity of All Saints, November 1, 2013)
The saints lead all of us to God through their example of holiness. We may not always believe in God very strongly, but the love of his saints feels hard to ignore. If we believe in the reality of their love for God and neighbor, visible in the virtues of their lives, it gets easier for us to believe in God’s love as the cause of theirs. As St. Ignatius says, when we don’t feel any desire to get closer to God, we can at least express a desire for the desire.
Even as a Jesuit, there are times in my prayer when communication dries up and I have trouble visualizing God. At these moments, the Father seems to be away in the sky somewhere, sustaining creation. The Spirit appears to be in my heart, inspiring my religious experiences in a way hidden to me. And Jesus, whom outside of prayer I mostly know from the Bible, where his appearance is not described, and from images painted centuries after his death, is “always” with me somehow in a way that often seems vague.
Even when God feels distant or absent, though, I am able to talk with his friends. The saints lived in time and space, like Jesus, but they left clearer human traces in this world than he did. We have their bodies and relics, their personal effects and baptismal records, copies of their high school report cards and writings, and the testimonies of their friends. They lived ordinary lives like I am doing, without rising from the grave or ascending to heaven, and that makes them feel a little closer to my own human reality.
Many of God’s friends live among us. They are the saints-to-be in my life who remind me of his presence and love. They are the people close to me in daily life, doing their best to get by in this world. Manifesting God’s hands and heart and voice on earth, they make the faith come alive.
All of the saints pray for me, including the long black line of Jesuit saints beginning with Ignatius as well as the saints whose names form part of my own name: Ignatius, John the Evangelist, Joseph, Michael the Archangel, and Mary (Our Lady of the Assumption). All of these witnesses to faith, living and dead, have helped me entrust the messiness of my life to God in prayer. Just as we have different friends for different areas of our lives, there is a different saint for each virtue I desire and for each issue I struggle to bring before God.
The First Jesuit Saints
St. Ignatius had his own small circle of friends who inspired him and were inspired by him. As he studied for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Paris following his conversion, Ignatius guided his two young college roommates to greater spiritual freedom by directing them in the Spiritual Exercises. Both of these men, Peter Faber (also known as Pierre Favre) and Francis Xavier, eventually joined him on the list of canonized saints.
St. Peter Faber (1506–1546), a pious Frenchman from rural Savoy who was studying for the priesthood when he met St. Ignatius, was the first recruit for what became the Society of Jesus. Scrupulous and deeply spiritual, he learned to trust in God’s merciful love for him through prayer, becoming the first acknowledged master of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius, recalling his own scrupulosity, led Faber into a deep awareness of God’s love for him as a sinner.
Pope Francis canonized Faber, a personal role model in his life, as a saint in 2014. The pope knew that a peaceful and free surrender to God’s will in discernment marked Faber as much as it did Ignatius. In this brief prayer, Faber expresses a trusting desire for God to lead his life:
Show, O Lord, Thy ways to me,
and teach me Thy paths.
Direct me in Thy truth, and teach me;
for