Who is ignatius

The details of Ignatius's death are lost to history, but not his desire to have his life count for something: "Now I begin to be a disciple … Let fire and cross, flocks of beasts, broken bones, dismemberment … come upon me, so long as I attain to Jesus Christ.

Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Christian History Archives Eras Home. More People Martyrs. The sixth letter was to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who was later martyred for the faith.

The final letter begs the Christians in Rome not to try to stop his martyrdom. I am the wheat of the Lord; may I be ground by the teeth of the beasts to become the immaculate bread of Christ. Cancer treatment does that. I had…. Most people would assume that water beads as tiny as pinheads are useless and worthless. But add water, and they fluff up to be…. About Contact More.

Home Ignatian Voices St. Ignatius Loyola. Biographies of St. Ignatius Loyola, produced by Marquette University. Works by St. Reflections on St. Gretchen Crowder. Loretta Pehanich. Most were guided by Ignatius himself. In a deep sense, they all became "companions of Jesus" and companions of one another. Ignatius also shared with them his dream of going on mission to the Holy Land; yet this time he was a bit wiser and more practical.

If the Holy Land dream fell through, they would go to Rome and put themselves at the disposition of the pope. The pope, as universal pastor, should know where the greatest needs were. They waited in Venice a whole year for a ship to take them to the Holy Land. As Providence would have it, just that one year, because of war between Venice and the Turks, no ship sailed. So they went to Rome, and there they entered into an extended period of communal discernment.

They were about to be sent all over Europe and all over the world. Spread out like that, how would they secure the bond among them?

Their decision was to form themselves into a religious order. They called it the Company meaning the companionship or Society of Jesus. Outsiders disparagingly nicknamed them the " Jesuits " but the name caught-on and eventually was used by all alike. Ignatius was elected their first leader. He declined after the first vote.

He felt unworthy for the position because of the vanity and licentiousness of his earlier life and because he felt that others were more theologically knowledgeable. After much discernment , he accepted the position and served until his death sixteen years later. As the Superior General , he sent companions all over Europe and around the world. He called them to "hurry to any part of the world where He wrote to high and low in church and state and to women as well as men.

But most of these letters were to his Jesuit companions, thus forming a vast communication network of friendship, love, and care. At the time of his death, there were 1, Jesuits , a good number of them involved in the 35 schools that had been founded.

Twenty-five years later the number of schools rose to , and another 35 years after that, it approached In contrast to the ambitions of his early days, the fundamental philosophy of the mature Ignatius was that we ought to desire and choose only that which is more conducive to the end for which we are created - to praise, reverence, and serve God through serving other human beings.

Teach us, good Lord, to serve you as you deserve; to give, and not to count the cost, to fight, and not to heed the wounds, to toil, and not to seek for rest, to labor, and not to ask for reward, except that of knowing that we are doing your will.

The great 20th-century British historian Dom David Knowles summed up his sense of the early Jesuits in these words: "That mighty impulse from Manresa which spread over Europe and to the ends of the earth -- perhaps the greatest single religious impulse [in Christianity] since the preaching of the apostles.