YOU may have noticed, as you live your life in Spain, that the name ‘Ignatius Loyola’ keeps popping up all over the place.
A school here, a town square there.
Obviously, he was important. But why?
There are two reasons, really: first, he was Spanish – we all love a local boy who makes good – and second, he shaped the Counter-Reformation.
The what?
When Iñigo Lopez de Oñaz y Loyola was born on October 23, 1491, the Catholic Church was in trouble. North Europe was tired of the Latins dominating the papacy, and worse still, totally corrupt popes like the Valencian Rodrigo Borgia were heaping disgrace on religion.
Popes were not supposed to have children. Borgia had several. He even seduced his own teenage daughter!
Trouble was brewing. Over the next few years, Europe north of the Alps (led by Martin Luther and Henry VIII) would break away from Rome.
It looked like the Catholic Church might collapse completely – but its unlikely saviour was growing up alongside his 12 siblings in the Basque provinces: a belligerent youth named Ignatius Loyola was coming to the rescue!
He was tonsured when he was seven years old. That circular bald patch that monks used to have at the crown of their heads – that’s a tonsure. The idea is, it makes them unattractive to women, thus helping them to stay ‘pure’.
Why shave the head of a seven-year-old? It may be that he was being steered towards a life in the Church – but in an age when the only education available was reserved for the clergy, perhaps he was simply being singled-out as exceptionally intelligent, and therefore worth educating.
The teenage Ignatius (in the Basque language, ‘Iñigo’ means ‘my little one’, but at some point he changed over to the Latin ‘Ignatius’, probably to avoid having to explain his Basque origins) was far more interested in non-Church activities.
He wanted to be a soldier, and wandered around ‘dressed to the nines, with a dagger in his waistband, dancing with the girls, trying hard to take offence at anything a boy said, so that he could use his sword’.
On May 20, 1521, at the Battle of Pamplona, a cannonball shattered his right leg. There was no anaesthetic in those days, and he went through agony (and months in bed) as his thigh bone was re-broken and re-set. His soldiering days were over.
This is when Ignatius found religion.
A natural leader, once he was back on his feet, he gathered a group of six followers around him, and they spent their time praying, going without food, and wearing sackcloth instead of nice clothes. Ignatius called his group The Society of Jesus. They are still going strong today – we know them as the ‘Jesuits’.
Among themselves the Jesuits made the traditional monk-like promises: no money, no women. Crucially, Ignatius added another vow – loyalty to the pope.
That small addition changed the course of human history.
The Jesuits grew in number, and here – when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb – the pope had a ‘squad’ of servants who would follow any order he gave them.
Thanks to the Jesuits, the papacy bounced back.
Ignatius was especially keen on education and missionary work. In next to no time, Jesuit monks were showing up in Spain’s new colonies (South America, the Philippines), converting the natives, and teaching them that they must obey the pope.
Hence the Counter-Reformation. Between 1530 and 1650, the Catholic Church experienced a new flowering of self-confidence, and became the first truly global faith.
To punish himself for his youthful arrogance, Ignatius imposed several personal humiliations. He begged in the street, he went back to school in his forties, and endured the ridicule of the other students.
As a crowning privation, he undertook the seven years of preparation required to qualify as a priest.
When he died in 1556 at the age of 65, Ignatius had founded a highly-successful religious movement, and had saved Catholicism from ruin.
Was he a saint, a holy man doing vital work, or a slightly-unhinged fanatic?
We now know that the illness that killed him was malaria. Perhaps it’s fitting that, in Loyola’s day, this little-understood condition was known as Roman Fever.
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