Ignatius of Loyola SJ was a Spanish Basque Catholic priest and theologian, who, with six companions, founded the Jesuit religious order.

He was born in 1491 in the castle at Loyola, in Gipuzkoa in the Basque country. His family were minor nobility and had been active in the Basque separatist movement of their day. As a result, their manor house had been demolished on the orders of the King of Castile back in 1456 and Ignatius’ paternal grandfather expelled to Andalucia.

At the age of 17 Ignatius joined the army and was badly injured at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521 when a French cannonball ricocheting off a nearby wall and fractured his right leg. It left him with a limp for the rest of his life and ended his military career.

While healing, Ignatius read the lives of the saints, and this inspired him to dedicate his life to God. After he had recovered sufficiently to walk again, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to "kiss the earth where our Lord had walked".

He returned to Barcelona and at the age of 33 and studied theology and Latin at the University of Alcalá before moving to Paris to study for a master's degree at the Collège Sainte-Barbe. Here he met St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Faber, and together they founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, as a missionary and teaching order. In addition to the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty of other religious orders in the church, Ignatius instituted a fourth vow for Jesuits of obedience to the Pope. As a result, the Jesuits were instrumental in leading the Counter-Reformation. 

As a former soldier, Ignatius paid particular attention to the spiritual formation of his recruits and recorded his method in the Spiritual Exercises, which have become known as Ignatian spirituality.

Ignatius died in Rome on 31 July 1556, of a type of malaria which was endemic in Rome at the time. His body was dressed in his priestly robes, placed in a wooden coffin and buried in the crypt of the Maria della Strada church. He was beatified in 1609 and was canonised as a saint in 1622.

His feast day is 31 July, the day that he died. He is venerated as the patron saint of Catholic soldiers, the Military Ordinariate of the Philippines, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Basque provinces of Gipuzkoa and Biscay and the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Antwerp, Belo Horizonte, Junín and Rome.

Picture above: Painting of St Ignatius of Loyola from the Loyola Academy

Attribution: ecastro, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons