The saints

Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Founder · Feast day July 31 · 1491 to 1556 · Spain and Rome · Also known as Inigo, Ignatius

Saint Ignatius of Loyola was a proud Spanish soldier whose leg was shattered by a cannonball, and who, during his long recovery, was converted from dreams of glory to the service of Christ. He founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, and gave the church the Spiritual Exercises, a school of prayer and decision that still forms souls today.

Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.1 Corinthians 10:31 (KJV)

The wounded soldier

Ignatius was born the youngest son of a noble Basque family and grew up hungry for honor, a courtier and a soldier dreaming of great deeds and the favor of great ladies. At the siege of Pamplona in 1521 a cannonball tore through his legs, ending his military career and beginning, without his knowing it, his real life.

Bedridden for months, he asked for tales of chivalry to pass the time, but the only books at hand were a life of Christ and a book of the saints. As he read, he noticed something: dreams of worldly glory left him restless and empty afterward, while thoughts of following Christ and the saints left him with a lasting peace. Learning to read those inner movements became the key to his whole spiritual teaching.

The Spiritual Exercises

Rising from his sickbed a changed man, Ignatius laid down his sword before an image of Mary and went to live in a cave near Manresa, where he prayed, fasted, and passed through both consolation and near despair, learning the ways of the soul in the crucible of his own experience. Out of it came the Spiritual Exercises, a carefully ordered month of prayer and meditation on the life of Christ, designed to free a person from disordered attachments and to help them find and choose the will of God.

The Exercises are not a book to be read but a retreat to be lived, and for five centuries they have guided countless people to conversion, to clarity, and to a deeper love of Christ, teaching them to find God in all things and to choose whatever leads more surely to his service and praise.

The Society of Jesus

To be better equipped, the former soldier went back to school beside boys, learning Latin in his thirties, and then studied at the University of Paris, where he gathered a band of companions, among them Francis Xavier, who bound themselves to poverty, chastity, and the service of the church. In 1540 the pope approved their new order, the Society of Jesus.

The Jesuits became a new kind of order: not cloistered but sent out into the world, into schools, universities, and mission fields across the globe, from India and Japan to the Americas. Ignatius, made the first superior, governed the fast-growing society from Rome by a stream of letters, insisting always on obedience, discernment, and doing everything for the greater glory of God.

For the greater glory of God

Ignatius poured his old soldier's discipline into the service of Christ, and his motto became the watchword of his order: Ad majorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God. He founded schools that educated Europe, sent missionaries to the ends of the earth, and cared for the poor and the outcast in Rome, all while continuing his own deep life of prayer, weeping often at the goodness of God.

He died quietly in Rome in 1556, almost unnoticed on the day, having built one of the most influential religious orders in history and left a spirituality that still shapes millions.

Why Ignatius still matters

Ignatius teaches that our very desires, rightly read, can lead us to God, and that the great question of life is not what wins us glory but what serves God's greater glory and the good of others. His Exercises still help people at every crossroads to quiet the noise, weigh the movements of the heart, and choose Christ, finding God, as he loved to say, in all things.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Francis Xavier · Saint Benedict · Saints for July 31 · Saint of the day