Founding of the Jesuits (1540): Ignatius of Loyola's Society

The founding of the Jesuits, formally the Society of Jesus, came on 27 September 1540, when Pope Paul III approved a new religious order formed by the Basque former soldier Ignatius of Loyola and a small group of companions from the University of Paris. Within a few decades the Jesuits had become the Catholic Church’s leading teachers, missionaries and preachers, active from Brazil to Japan. Their founding was a key moment in the Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Background: a Church in crisis

By the 1530s the Western Church was deeply divided. The movement begun by Martin Luther in 1517 had spread across much of Germany and Scandinavia, Zurich and other Swiss cities had broken with Rome, and England was moving away from papal authority. Many Catholics also called for reform from within, criticising poorly educated clergy, absent bishops and worldly popes.

New religious groups emerged to answer these needs, such as the Theatines (1524) and the Capuchins (1528). The Jesuits were born in this atmosphere of renewal, although their founder’s own journey began far from questions of church politics.

Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion

Íñigo López de Loyola was born in 1491 at the family castle of Loyola, near Azpeitia in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa. He grew up as a courtier and soldier. In May 1521, while defending the fortress of Pamplona against a French army, his leg was shattered by a cannonball.

During a long convalescence at Loyola he read a life of Christ and a collection of saints’ lives, and experienced a religious conversion. In 1522 he left his sword at the shrine of Montserrat and spent many months in prayer and penance at nearby Manresa. There he began to write down the method of prayer and self-examination that became the Spiritual Exercises, a programme of meditation, normally lasting about four weeks, that is still widely used.

After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1523, Ignatius decided that he needed education to help others. He studied in Barcelona, Alcalá and Salamanca, where he was questioned more than once by church authorities suspicious of his informal preaching. In 1528 he moved to the University of Paris.

The companions of Paris

In Paris Ignatius shared lodgings with two students who became his first companions: the Savoyard Peter Faber (Pierre Favre) and the Navarrese nobleman Francis Xavier. Others joined them, including the Spaniards Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón and Nicolás Bobadilla and the Portuguese Simão Rodrigues. Each made the Spiritual Exercises under Ignatius’s guidance.

On 15 August 1534, in a chapel on the hill of Montmartre, the seven men vowed to live in poverty and to travel to Jerusalem to work among the people there. If that proved impossible, they would place themselves at the disposal of the pope. Three more companions joined them in the following two years.

The group gathered in Venice in 1537, where most of them were ordained priests in June, but war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire made the voyage to the Holy Land impossible. On his way to Rome later that year, Ignatius had a vision at La Storta in which he felt that God had placed him with Christ carrying the cross, an experience that confirmed the name the companions had chosen: the Company, or Society, of Jesus.

Papal approval in 1540

In Rome the companions preached, taught children and cared for the poor and sick, and Paul III began to use them for missions in Italy. In 1539 they decided, after long discussion, to form a permanent religious order with a superior to whom they would owe obedience. They summarised their plan in a short document, the Formula of the Institute.

The proposal met resistance from some cardinals who thought the Church already had too many religious orders. With the support of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, the pope gave oral approval in September 1539. On 27 September 1540 he issued the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, which formally established the Society of Jesus. At first membership was limited to sixty professed members, but this restriction was removed in 1544.

In April 1541 the companions elected Ignatius as their first Superior General, and he accepted after initial refusals. He spent the rest of his life in Rome directing the order and writing its Constitutions, which were approved after his death.

What made the Jesuits different

The Jesuits broke with several traditions of older orders. They did not sing the daily offices together in choir and did not wear a distinctive habit, so that they could move freely and devote their time to work outside the house. Their training was long and demanding, and their government was centralised under a Superior General elected for life.

The professed fathers took, besides the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a fourth vow of special obedience to the pope concerning missions. This made the Society a highly mobile force that could be sent wherever the Church needed it. Their motto, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, “For the greater glory of God”, summed up their aim.

The Spiritual Exercises lay at the heart of Jesuit life. Every recruit made them in full, usually in a retreat of about thirty days, and Jesuits guided lay people through shorter versions. Paul III gave the book formal papal approval in 1548, the year it was first printed. The Exercises aimed to help a person reflect on his or her life, choose freely and serve God in the world, an approach often summed up in the later Jesuit phrase “finding God in all things”.

Growth: schools and missions

Education quickly became the Jesuits’ main work, although it had not been part of the original plan. In 1548 they opened a college at Messina in Sicily for lay students, and the model spread rapidly. The Roman College, founded in 1551, became a leading university, and the German College trained priests for central Europe. Jesuit schools offered free education based on the humanist classics, and their curriculum was later codified in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599.

Missions began almost at once. In April 1541 Francis Xavier sailed from Lisbon for Portuguese India; he later worked in South-East Asia and in 1549 reached Japan, as told in Francis Xavier in Japan. Later Jesuits included Matteo Ricci, whose mission to China brought European learning to the Ming court, and the founders of the Jesuit Reductions of Paraguay among the Guaraní.

In Europe, Jesuits such as Peter Canisius worked to strengthen Catholicism in Germany and Austria, and Laínez and Salmerón served as papal theologians at the Council of Trent. When Ignatius died on 31 July 1556, the Society had roughly 1,000 members and many colleges across Europe, as well as missions in Asia and Brazil.

Key people

• Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556): founder and first Superior General, author of the Spiritual Exercises; canonised in 1622.
• Francis Xavier (1506–1552): one of the first companions and the order’s most famous missionary in Asia; canonised in 1622.
• Peter Faber (1506–1546): the first of the companions to be ordained, an influential preacher in Germany.
• Diego Laínez (1512–1565): theologian at the Council of Trent and Ignatius’s successor as Superior General.
• Pope Paul III (1468–1549): the pope who approved the Society and also summoned the Council of Trent.

Legacy

By the mid-eighteenth century the Society had grown to more than 20,000 members and ran hundreds of colleges. Its success also made enemies. Critics such as the French writer Blaise Pascal attacked Jesuit moral theology, and Catholic governments resented its wealth, its influence at court and its loyalty to Rome. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, France in 1764 and Spain and its empire in 1767, and in 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order altogether. It survived in the Russian Empire and was restored worldwide by Pius VII in 1814.

The order’s enemies also left lasting myths. The saying “the end justifies the means” is often attributed to the Jesuits, but it is not a Jesuit motto; it reflects hostile caricatures of their casuistry, the method of judging moral cases by circumstances, popularised by Pascal’s Provincial Letters of 1656–1657. Forged documents such as the Monita Secreta, published in 1614 and claiming to reveal secret Jesuit instructions, fed suspicion for centuries.

Today the Society of Jesus remains the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church and runs many schools and universities around the world. In 2013 a Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, became Pope Francis, the first member of the order to be elected pope.

Timeline

• 1521, May: Íñigo of Loyola is wounded at the siege of Pamplona.
• 1522–1523: conversion, prayer at Manresa and pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
• 1528: Ignatius begins studying in Paris.
• 1534, 15 August: the first companions take vows at Montmartre.
• 1537, June: most of the companions are ordained in Venice.
• 1540, 27 September: Paul III approves the Society in Regimini militantis Ecclesiae.
• 1541, April: Ignatius elected first Superior General; Xavier sails for India.
• 1548: first Jesuit college for lay students opens at Messina.
• 1556, 31 July: death of Ignatius in Rome.

Why it matters

The Society of Jesus became one of the most influential institutions of the early modern world. It revived Catholic education and preaching in Europe, spread Christianity and European learning across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and created a network of schools whose influence on teaching and scholarship lasts to this day.