On the 20th of May 1521, a cannonball shattered the right leg of Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, ending a life dedicated to martial glory and leaving him with a permanent limp. Born in the castle at Loyola in the Basque region of Spain, Íñigo was the youngest of thirteen children in a minor noble family deeply entangled in the Basque war of the bands. His father, Don Beltrán Ibáñez de Oñaz y Loyola, and his mother, Doña María Sáenz de Licona y Balda, had lost their manor house in 1456 for their depredations, and his grandfather had been expelled to Andalusia by Henry IV. Despite this turbulent lineage, Íñigo grew up to become a page in the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, where he mastered dancing, fencing, and gambling while pursuing a life of chivalry inspired by romances like Amadís de Gaula. He joined the army at seventeen, strutting about with his cape flying open to reveal tight-fitting hose and boots, a fancy dresser and expert dancer who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes. His military career ended abruptly at the Battle of Pamplona when a French-Navarrese expedition force stormed the fortress, causing a cannonball to ricochet off a nearby wall and fracture his leg. In an era before anesthetics, he underwent several surgical operations to repair the leg, with his bones set and rebroken, leaving him with a shorter right leg and a permanent limp that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The Cave of Visions
While recovering from surgery, Íñigo underwent a profound spiritual conversion that began when his sister-in-law, Magdalena de Araoz, brought him the lives of Christ and the saints instead of the romances of chivalry he had requested. The religious work that struck him most was the De Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, a commentary on the Gospels that took Ludolph forty years to complete and quoted extensively from Church Fathers like St Gregory the Great and St Augustine. This book inspired him to devote himself to God and follow the example of Francis of Assisi, proposing a method of meditation where the reader places himself mentally at the scene of the Gospel story. He experienced desolation and dissatisfaction when his romantic heroism dreams ended, but the saintly dreams ended with joy and peace, teaching him the first principles of discernment. After recovering sufficiently to walk again, he resolved to begin a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to kiss the earth where our Lord had walked, confirmed by a vision of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. In March 1522, he visited the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat, where he examined his past sins, confessed, gave his fine clothes to the poor, and wore a garment of sackcloth before hanging his sword and dagger at the Virgin's altar. From Montserrat, he walked to Manresa, where he lived for about a year, begging for his keep and doing chores at a local hospital. For several months, he spent much of his time praying in a cave nearby, practicing rigorous asceticism and praying for seven hours a day, formulating the fundamentals of his Spiritual Exercises. He also experienced a series of visions in full daylight while at the hospital, appearing as a form in the air that gave him much consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful, yet when the object vanished, he became disconsolate, leading him to interpret the vision as diabolical in nature.
In September 1523, Íñigo made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with the aim of settling there, but he was sent back to Europe by the Franciscans after only twenty days. He returned to Barcelona and at the age of thirty-three attended a free public grammar school in preparation for university entrance, eventually moving to the University of Alcalá to study theology and Latin from 1526 to 1527. There he encountered a number of devout women who had been called before the Inquisition, considered alumbrados and linked in their zeal and spirituality to Franciscan reforms. Once when Íñigo was preaching on the street, three of these devout women began to experience ecstatic states, with one falling senseless, another rolling about on the ground, and another seen in the grip of convulsions or shuddering and sweating in anguish. The suspicious activity took place while Íñigo had preached without a degree in theology, leading to his interrogation by the Inquisition before he was later released. Following these risky activities, he adopted the surname de Loyola in reference to the Basque village of Loyola where he was born and moved to France to study at the University of Paris. He attended first the ascetic Collège de Montaigu, moving on to the Collège Sainte-Barbe to study for a master's degree. He arrived in France at a time of anti-Protestant turmoil which had forced John Calvin to flee France, and very soon after, Ignatius had gathered around him six companions, all of them fellow students at the university. They were the Spaniards Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Laynez, Francis Xavier and Nicholas Bobadilla, with the Portuguese Simão Rodrigues and Peter Faber, a Savoyard, the latter two becoming his first companions and his closest associates in the foundation of the future Jesuit order. Ignatius gained a Magisterium from the University of Paris at the age of forty-three in 1535, and in later life, he would often be called Master Ignatius because of this.
The Vow of Obedience
On the morning of the 15th of August 1534, in the chapel of the Martyrium of Saint Denis in Montmartre, Loyola and his six companions met and took upon themselves the solemn vows of their lifelong work. In 1539, with Peter Faber and Francis Xavier, Ignatius formed the Society of Jesus, which was approved in 1540 by Pope Paul III. He was chosen as the first Superior General of the order and invested with the title of Father General by the Jesuits. Ignatius sent his companions on missions across Europe to create schools, colleges, and seminaries. Juan de Vega, then ambassador of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in Rome, met Ignatius there and having formed a good impression of the Jesuits, invited them to travel with him to his new appointment as Viceroy of Sicily. As a result, a Jesuit college was opened in Messina, which proved a success, so that its rules and methods were later copied in subsequent colleges. In a letter to Francis Xavier before his departure to India in 1541, Ignatius famously used the Latin phrase Ite, inflammate omnia, meaning Go, set the world on fire, a phrase used in the Jesuit order to this day. With the assistance of his secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Ignatius wrote the Jesuit Constitutions, which were adopted in 1553. They created a centralised organisation of the order, and stressed absolute self-denial and obedience to the Pope and to superiors in the Church hierarchy. This was summarised in the motto perinde ac cadaver, as if a dead body, meaning that a Jesuit should be as empty of ego as is a corpse. However the overarching Jesuit principle became Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God. In addition to the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty of other religious orders in the church, Loyola instituted a fourth vow for Jesuits of obedience to the Pope, to engage in projects ordained by the pontiff. Jesuits were instrumental in leading the Counter-Reformation.
The Death of a Saint
By 1553 Ignatius' health had begun to fail, and he decided to dictate a testament of his life to a Jesuit named Louis Gonzalez. The work was later published as an autobiography in 1555, recounting Ignatius' life during the 1520s and 1530s, starting with his convalescence and religious conversion. Ignatius died in Rome on the 31st of July 1556, probably of the Roman Fever, a severe variant of malaria which was endemic in Rome throughout medieval history. An autopsy revealed that he also had kidney and bladder stones, a probable cause of the abdominal pains he suffered from in later life. The anatomist Matteo Colombo was present at the necropsy of St. Ignatius, describing the results in a report that noted the stones in the kidneys, ureters, urinary bladder and gall bladder appeared to indicate nephrolithiasis and cholelithiasis, while the so-called stones in the veins appeared to be thrombosed haemorrhoids. Those mentioned in the colon, liver, and lungs suggested the possibility of a malignant gastro-intestinal growth with metastases to the liver and lungs. Because of the inadequacy of the protocols of the sixteenth century, the exact final anatomical diagnosis on the autopsy of Ignatius cannot be established beyond doubt. His body was dressed in his priestly robes, placed in a wooden coffin and buried in the crypt of the Maria della Strada Church on the 1st of August 1556. In 1568 the church was demolished and replaced with the Church of the Gesù, and Ignatius' remains were reinterred in the new church in a new coffin. Ignatius was beatified by Pope Paul V on the 27th of July 1609, and canonized by Pope Gregory XV on the 12th of March 1622. His feast day is celebrated annually on the 31st of July, the day he died. He is venerated as the patron saint of Catholic soldiers, the Military Ordinariate of the Philippines, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, in his native Basque Country, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Antwerp, Belo Horizonte, Junín, and Rome.