Youngest child of a noble Basque family fiercely loyal to the Spanish crown (Ferdinand and Isabella), he was named Inigo after a local saint. Raised to be a courtier, he was trying valiantly to defend the fortress town of Pamplona in 1521 when a French cannonball shattered his leg. During a long convalescence, he found himself drawn away from the romances of chivalry that had filled his imagination from an early age to more spiritual reading–an illustrated life of Christ and a collection of saints’ lives.
After his recovery, he set out for the Holy Land to realize a dream of “converting the infidel.” On the way he stopped in the little town of Manresa* and wound up spending nearly a year there during which he experienced both the depths of despair and great times of enlightenment.
Ordered to leave Palestine after being there little more than a month, Ignatius decided that he needed an education in order to be able to “help souls.” In Barcelona, he went to school with boys a quarter his age to learn the rudiments of Latin grammar, and then moved on to several other Spanish university cities. In each he was imprisoned and interrogated by the Inquisition, because he kept speaking to people about “spiritual* things,” having neither a theology degree nor priestly ordination.Finally, turning his back on his homeland, he went to the foremost university of the time, the University of Paris, where he began his education all over again and with diligence, after five years, was finally awarded the degree “Master of Arts.” It was here at Paris that he changed his Basque name to the Latin Ignatius and its Spanish equivalent Ignacio.
While at the University, he had roomed with and become good friends with a fellow Basque named Francis Xavier* and a Savoyard named Peter Faber.* After graduation, these three, together with several other Paris graduates, undertook a process of communal discernment* and decided to bind themselves together in an apostolic* community that became the Society of Jesus.* Unanimously elected superior by his companions, Ignatius spent the last 16 years of his life in Rome directing the fledgling order, while the others went all over Europe, to the Far East, and eventually to the New World. And wherever they went they founded schools as a means of helping people to “find God in all things.”*
