Ignatius of Loyola
Íñigo López de Loyola
- Lived
- 1491–1556
- Era
- Reformation
- Where
- Spain and Rome
- Tradition
- Roman Catholic
The Jesuits, and the Spiritual Exercises
A Basque soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball at Pamplona, and who during a long convalescence with nothing to read but lives of the saints redirected himself entirely. He studied alongside teenagers at Paris in his thirties and gathered the companions who became the Society of Jesus.
Why it matters
The Exercises are a structured four-week retreat, still in use, built around disciplined attention to one's own motives. The Society he founded was mobile, educated and answerable directly to the pope rather than tied to a monastery, and it became the schoolmaster of Catholic Europe and the spearhead of Catholic missions from Japan to Paraguay. It was suppressed by the papacy for forty years in the eighteenth century, then restored.
In the record
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1545–1563 AD Council
Council of Trent
The Society he founded became the instrument of its reforms
All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.