The Jesuits and the world
The Society of Jesus launches a global mission
Ignatius gathers a small group of companions at the University of Paris in the 1530s — scholars, like him, who have been through his Spiritual Exercises and come out the other side as men on fire. They take vows together. They offer themselves to the pope for whatever mission he assigns.
In 1540 Pope Paul III formally approves the Society of Jesus.
The Jesuits are unlike any religious order that has existed before. They do not have a monastic home base — they go wherever they are sent. They do not have a common uniform — they dress appropriately for the culture they are in. They do not have a set daily schedule — the work determines the day. They are trained in philosophy, theology, rhetoric, sciences, languages, whatever is required for the mission.
And the mission is everywhere.
Francis Xavier goes to India and Japan. Matteo Ricci goes to China. José de Acosta goes to Peru. Peter Canisius goes to Germany to recover the university system for Catholicism. Edmund Campion goes to England in secret. Robert de Nobili immerses himself in Hindu culture in India.
The Jesuits are the Catholic Reformation's answer to the Protestant challenge — not by retreating into defensive orthodoxy but by going further into the world than Protestantism had yet reached.
By 1600 there are over eight thousand Jesuits working in five continents. The order that began with ten men in Paris has become the most consequential missionary force of the sixteenth century.
“Go, set the world on fire.”
— Ignatius of Loyola, to his companions, attributed, c. 1540 AD
“I came to throw fire on the earth, I wish it were already kindled.”
The Jesuits went into the world rather than retreating from it — into the universities, the courts, the jungles, the rice fields, wherever people were.
This is Ignatius's legacy from the convalescence: the world is not the enemy of the spiritual life. It is its mission field. Finding God in all things means going to all things — to the court of the Emperor of China, to the mountain villages of Peru, to the lecture halls of the German universities.
The God who made the world did not abandon it. The church that serves him cannot abandon it either.
The question the Jesuits put to every generation is the same one Ignatius asked from his sickbed: where is the world that needs what I have been given? And am I willing to go there regardless of what it costs?
Where is your world? And what does going there require of you?