The Founding of the Society of Jesus (1521–1556)

The religious context: a fractured Christendom

The founding of the Society belongs to the context of a twofold crisis unprecedented since the Western Schism (1378–1417). In 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses at Wittenberg; in 1521, at the Diet of Worms, he broke definitively with Rome. Protected by Elector Frederick the Wise in Saxony, Lutheranism gained several territories of the German Empire in the 1520s. At Zurich, Zwingli had been preaching a radical evangelism since 1519; in the 1530s the rupture spread: England under Henry VIII separated from Rome by the Act of Supremacy (adopted 3 November 1534, royal assent 18 December 1534)^[3], while at Geneva William Farel prepared the ground for Calvin, who arrived in 1536. The millennial cohesion of Latin Christendom was collapsing.

Added to this external crisis was an internal crisis: absentee bishops, accumulation of benefices, theological ignorance of the lower clergy, curial venality. The report Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia drafted in 1537 by Cardinals Contarini, Carafa, Pole and Sadolet at the request of Paul III drew an unsparing picture of the abuses of the Curia^[4]. No doctrinal manual carried authority; the Council of Trent had not yet opened.

It was in this climate that there appeared almost simultaneously, between 1524 and 1540, several new institutes of an unprecedented type: the Theatines (1524) and the Barnabites (1530), clerks regular; the Capuchins (1525, approved in 1528), a Franciscan mendicant reform; the Ursulines (1535), a company of women without enclosure; and finally the Society of Jesus (1540)^[5]. All shared a common demand: common life without strict monastic enclosure, itinerant preaching, mobile apostolic action.

The geographical context: the first Catholic globalisation

In 1521, the very year Ignatius was wounded at Pamplona, Hernán Cortés completed the conquest of the Aztec Empire; in 1532–1533, Francisco Pizarro subdued the Inca Empire; in 1542, Francis Xavier landed at Goa. The Iberian crowns demanded missionaries from the Holy See in quantity, but the old orders — Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians — were already engaged on every front.

From the outset Ignatius conceived his project as worldwide. During the Roman deliberation of 1539, the first companions decided "to go to any place in the world, among the faithful or the infidels, without excuse or delay", wherever the Pope would send them^[6]. That was precisely the novelty: an order that was non-territorial, ready to be dispatched from Rome to Goa, from Naples to Hokkaido, from Coimbra to Brazil.

The Basque gentleman wounded at Pamplona (20 May 1521)

Íñigo López de Loyola was born at the Casa-Torre de Loyola, in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa (Spain), most likely in 1491^[7]. Thirteenth child of a noble family allied to the great Castilian houses, he was raised at the court of the Grand Treasurer of Castile Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar at Arévalo (around 1506–1517), then served in the army of the Duke of Nájera, Viceroy of Navarre.

On 20 May 1521 — Whit Monday — a French cannonball shattered his right leg during the siege of Pamplona^[8]. Carried by litter to the Casa-Torre, he underwent, without anaesthesia, two successive surgical operations that left him at death's door. During the long convalescence (June 1521 — February 1522), he asked for romances of chivalry; there was in the household library only the Vita Christi of the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony (14th century) and the Golden Legend of James of Voragine (13th century).

This was the double trigger of his conversion. For weeks Ignatius alternated reading lives of saints with chivalric daydreams. He noticed that the former left a lasting joy, the latter a bitterness — the first personal example of the discernment of spirits that would become the backbone of the Spiritual Exercises^[9].

"When he thought of the things of the world, he found great pleasure in them; but when he grew weary of them and left them aside, he felt dry and discontented. When on the contrary he thought of going to Jerusalem barefoot [...] not only was he consoled while thinking of them, but after leaving them he remained content and joyful." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Pilgrim's Narrative, no. 8, dictated in 1553–1555 to Luís Gonçalves da Câmara^[10]

Loyola and Montserrat: the break (February–March 1522)

Convalescent but lame for life, Ignatius left Loyola in February 1522 for the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat (Catalonia). On 24 March 1522, the eve of the Annunciation, he made a general confession to a French confessor, Fr Jean Chanon, laid down his sword at the altar of the Black Virgin, exchanged his noble clothes for a pilgrim's sackcloth and spent the night in a spiritual vigil of arms, a liturgical transposition of the chivalric dubbing^[11].

Manresa: the cave and the mystical conversion (March 1522 — February 1523)

The next day, Ignatius went down to the small town of Manresa; he would remain there eleven months, which he would later call his "primitive school". He lived on alms, nursed the sick at St Lucy's hospital, prayed up to seven hours a day on his knees, fasted, neither combed his hair nor shaved. In a cave on the bank of the Cardener, he alternated mystical ecstasies with suicidal scruples.

It was at Manresa that the illumination known as the Cardener burst forth: seated by the riverside, "the eyes of his understanding began to open [...] so that all things appeared new to him"^[12]. This grace, which Ignatius himself described as the most important of his life, is the mystical source of all that followed. It was at Manresa too that he began to write down the meditations that would form, twenty-six years later, the book of the Spiritual Exercises.

"What he learned in that single moment, in many matters both of faith and of learning, seemed to him greater than all that, until the age of sixty-two, he had received from God." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Pilgrim's Narrative, no. 30, on the grace of the Cardener (1522)^[13]

The pilgrimage to Jerusalem (1523)

Ignatius's original plan was neither preaching nor founding: he wanted to live and die in Jerusalem in imitation of Christ. In September 1523, after a gruelling crossing via Rome and Venice, he arrived in the Holy Land. But the Franciscan Custos of the Holy Places forbade him to remain, fearing that this headstrong pilgrim might provoke a diplomatic incident with the Ottoman authorities (the Turks) and oblige the Franciscans to pay his ransom^[14]. Ignatius had to return to Spain. "There, he asked himself apart what he should do; he finally decided to study for some time, so as to be able to help souls"^[15].

Studies: Barcelona, Alcalá, Salamanca, Paris (1524–1535)

This simple resolve — "to study in order to help souls" — explains the institutional originality of the future Society. At 33, Ignatius sat on school benches beside children. He learned Latin at Barcelona (1524–1526) under the grammarian Jerónimo Ardévol, then followed the provincial Sorbonne of Alcalá de Henares founded by Cardinal Cisneros (1526–1527). Suspected of illuminism by the Spanish Inquisition, he was imprisoned for forty-two days then acquitted without penalty. At Salamanca (1527), fresh inquisitorial concern: "He was forbidden to speak of matters of faith until he had studied four more years"^[16].

Exasperated, Ignatius decided in 1528 to leave for Paris, then the foremost university in Europe. He would remain there seven years (1528–1535), enrolled successively at Montaigu (where Calvin had studied a few years earlier), at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and at the Collège des Lombards. He obtained his licence (licentia docendi) on 13 March 1533, then the Master of Arts (magister artium) on 14 March 1535^[17]. Parisian intellectual rigour forged a new Ignatius: less exalted than at Manresa, more disciplined, more universalist.

Peter Faber, Francis Xavier and the decisive cohabitation (1529)

In autumn 1529, the Collège Sainte-Barbe assigned Ignatius a room shared with two students already in residence: a pious, timid Savoyard, Peter Faber (Pierre Lefèvre), born 13 April 1506 at Villaret, and a brilliant, worldly Navarrese, Francisco de Jasso y Xavier, born 7 April 1506 at Xavier Castle^[18]. Faber became the tutor of the newcomer, fifteen years older than them; Xavier, at first mocking toward this limping pilgrim who spent his bursaries on the poor, was gradually won over by the Spiritual Exercises which Ignatius had him make in the years 1532–1534.

As the Jesuit historian William V. Bangert writes, "Ignatius's strategy at Paris was to attract one by one, through the Exercises and through spiritual conversation, companions capable of sharing his dream of Jerusalem"^[19].

The meeting with Diego Laínez and the Spanish companions (1532–1533)

From 1532 other young Spaniards arrived at Paris: Diego Laínez (1512–1565), from a family of conversos at Almazán (Castile), who would become the second Superior General of the Society (1558–1565); Alfonso Salmerón (1515–1585), from Toledo; Nicolás Bobadilla (c. 1509–1590); the Portuguese Simão Rodrigues (1510–1579). All made the Exercises of Ignatius, generally at the Carthusian monastery of Vauvert, just outside the walls of Paris.

To this first nucleus were added in 1535, after the Montmartre vow, three Parisians: Claude Jay (Savoyard, c. 1504–1552), Paschase Broët (Picard, 1500–1562) and Jean Codure (from the Dauphiné, 1508–1541). These are the ten "first Fathers" (primorum patrum) cited by the primitive Jesuit sources^[20].

The Montmartre vow (15 August 1534)

On the morning of 15 August 1534, feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the seven companions — Ignatius, Faber, Xavier, Laínez, Salmerón, Bobadilla and Rodrigues — climbed the hill of Montmartre, outside the walls of Paris. In the crypt of the martyrium of Saint Denis, memorial of the first bishop of Paris, Peter Faber, the only priest of the group (ordained a few months earlier, on 30 May 1534), celebrated Mass^[21].

During communion, the seven pronounced the following three vows:

1. of poverty: to renounce all personal income after their studies;
2. of perpetual chastity;
3. of pilgrimage to Jerusalem within two years of the end of their studies; if the journey proved impossible (war, plague, refusal of the Franciscan Custos), of going to the Sovereign Pontiff to place themselves at his disposal.

"They vowed to serve Our Lord, leaving all the things of the world, and they determined what they should do: that is, to go to Venice and to Jerusalem, and there spend their life helping souls; and if they were not given the means to go to Jerusalem, they would return to Rome and present themselves to the Vicar of Christ, so that he might employ them wherever he judged it would be for the greater glory of God and the good of souls." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Pilgrim's Narrative, no. 85, on the Montmartre vow^[22]

This twofold vow of Jerusalem or obedience to the Pope is the juridical embryo of the future Society. It would be renewed each 15 August for two years, extended in 1535–1536 to three new companions, and finally transformed in 1540 into a written rule approved by the Holy See.

The Venice ordinations (24 June 1537)

Their Paris studies finished, the companions dispersed provisionally, then regrouped at Venice in January 1537. The Venetian-Ottoman war forbade embarkation for the Holy Land; the pilgrimage plan was postponed. On 24 June 1537, feast of Saint John the Baptist, six of the companions — including Ignatius himself — were ordained priests at Venice, titulo paupertatis, by Vincenzo Negusanti, Bishop of Arbe (Rab, in Dalmatia), in the presence of the apostolic nuncio Girolamo Verallo^[23].

For a year and a half they preached in the cities of Italy (Ferrara, Bologna, Vicenza, Siena) while awaiting a possible passage to Palestine. Ignatius delayed his first Mass — he would finally celebrate it at Rome eighteen months later, at Christmas 1538, at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, before the chapel of the Manger.

The vision of La Storta (November 1537)

In mid-November 1537, on the road to Rome, Ignatius stopped to pray in a pilgrims' chapel at La Storta, the last staging post on the Via Cassia. There he received the most famous vision of his life after that of the Cardener: he saw God the Father placing his Son Jesus, bearing the Cross, beside him; he heard the Father say to the Son: "I will that thou take this man for thy servant" — then Jesus address to him these words: "I will that thou serve us"^[24] / "Ego vobis Romae propitius ero" — "I will be favourable to you at Rome". This assurance sealed the decision to place the group under the direct jurisdiction of the Pope, and — as the Jesuit historian John W. O'Malley notes — "gave the Society its name to come: the Society of Jesus, that is, the company of those who go with Jesus bearing the Cross"^[25].

The Deliberation of the first Fathers (spring 1539)

At Rome, in 1538–1539, Pope Paul III Farnese entrusted the companions with several missions (Siena, Parma, Lipari) and considered dispersing them as secular priests. Before letting themselves be dispersed, the group met for a formal deliberation lasting from Lent to June 1539, in the house they occupied near the Torre del Melangolo^[26].

Two fundamental questions were put to the vote:

1. Should they constitute themselves a stable body, or remain a group of friends dispersed at the whim of missions?
2. Should they make a vow of obedience to an elected superior among them?

After several weeks of discernment, they answered yes to both questions. This is the institutional birth certificate of the Society: they would be neither a mere confraternity nor a network of autonomous priests, but a true religious order endowed with an internal hierarchy and a single superior.

The "Five Chapters" of the Formula Instituti (1539)

At the close of the deliberation, Ignatius and Jean Codure drafted a short text — five chapters or five paragraphs — summarising the master idea of the future order. This document, preserved under the name Prima Summa Instituti or Quinque capitula, was presented to Paul III through Cardinal Gasparo Contarini on 3 September 1539. The Pope is said to have received it with a formula that has remained famous, reported by Polanco: "Digitus Dei est hic" — "The finger of God is here"^[27].

The five chapters affirmed:

• The goal: "to serve as soldiers for God under the banner of the Cross", through the teaching of Christian doctrine, preaching, the spiritual exercises and works of charity;
• The special vow of obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff circa missiones: "to go wherever he shall judge it expedient to send them, without asking for travelling money";
• The three ordinary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to an elected superior;
• The abolition of the choral office recited in common (a major break with monastic tradition);
• The election of a Superior General (praepositus generalis) for life.

"Whoever wishes to serve as a soldier for God under the banner of the Cross, in our Society [...] must, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, remember that he is a member of a Society instituted chiefly for this: to work for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, through the propagation of the faith, through public sermons, the ministry of the word of God, the spiritual exercises and works of charity." — Formula Instituti, chap. 1, 1540 version, in the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae^[28]

The text of the bull

On 27 September 1540, Paul III promulgated by the motu proprio Regimini militantis Ecclesiae the canonical approval of the Society of Jesus^[29]. The text of the bull reproduces word for word the five chapters drafted by Ignatius and Codure, inserting them into the long curial formula. The bull:

• recognises the Society of Jesus as a religious order in its own right;
• approves its provisional constitutions;
• grants its professed members the privilege of preaching, hearing confessions and teaching wherever the superior sends them, without prior permission from the local bishops (with their benevolent consent);
• limits however the number of professed to sixty — a cautious clause which Paul III would lift three years later.

The name and the identity

The name Societas Iesu — "Society" or "Company of Jesus" — was chosen by the founders themselves, in memory of the vision of La Storta where Jesus had said "Ego vobis Romae propitius ero". The choice of the Holy Name of Jesus met resistance at Rome: several cardinals found it presumptuous for an order to arrogate the very Name of Christ as its standard. Paul III decided in favour of the proposed name. The monogram IHS — Greek abbreviation of the name IHΣOYΣ (Jesus) — became the seal of the Society, beneath three nails set in a radiant sun^[30].

The lifting of the sixty limit: Iniunctum nobis (1543)

Only three years after Regimini militantis, faced with the success of the first preachings and the urgent need for missionaries to the Indies (Francis Xavier embarked for Goa in April 1541) and to Germany (Peter Faber became apostle of Worms and Speyer), Paul III lifted the sixty-professed limit by the bull Iniunctum nobis of 14 March 1543^[31]. The Society could henceforth grow without ceiling: at Ignatius's death in 1556 it would count some 1,000 members; in 1615, 13,000; in 1773, 22,589^[32].

The ballot of 5–8 April 1541

Once approval was secured, the first Superior General (praepositus generalis) had to be elected. The companions present at Rome — six in all: Ignatius, Laínez, Salmerón, Bobadilla, Codure, Broët — met from 5 to 8 April 1541 in the house of the Vergine della Strada. The others (Xavier already gone toward Portugal, Faber at Worms, Rodrigues at Lisbon, Jay at Regensburg) sent their ballot by post.

Unanimously minus one vote — his own — Ignatius was elected. He refused for three days, asked for a fresh ballot to be held, took refuge with his confessor the Franciscan Theodosius of Lodi, and finally accepted, at the insistence of his confessor and under formal order, only on 19 April 1541 — the date publicly retained as that of his election^[33]. On 22 April 1541, Friday of Easter week, the six Roman companions went together to the basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls and there pronounced their solemn vows before the altar of Our Lady, in the chapel of the relics of the apostle^[34].

The Roman residence and the Domus Professa

Ignatius would never leave Rome in his last fifteen years. The Society set up its mother house near the church of Santa Maria della Strada, an old parish ceded by Paul III in 1541. From 1551 began, in the immediate vicinity, the construction of the Casa Professa del Gesù and, from 1568, under Vignola then Della Porta, of the Church of the Gesù — Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù — which would become the architectural model for hundreds of Jesuit churches across the world.

Ten years' experience at the head of the order led Ignatius to revise the initial text. On 21 July 1550, Pope Julius III promulgated the bull Exposcit debitum, which re-approved the Society according to an expanded Formula Instituti^[35]. The most notable changes:

• the introduction of spiritual coadjutors (zealous but little-lettered priests) and temporal coadjutors (lay brothers serving the community), alongside the professed of the four vows;
• the addition of the defence of the faith as an explicit goal of the Society, alongside the "propagation of the faith" of 1540 — a formulation directly linked to the anti-Protestant struggle then in full swing;
• the explicit confirmation of the absence of choral office and of the absolute obligation to obey the Pope circa missiones.

It is the 1550 text — not that of 1540 — which remains the fundamental charter of the Society of Jesus to this day. The 32nd General Congregation (1974–1975) would explicitly reaffirm it.

The appointment of Polanco as secretary (1547)

The Exposcit debitum set the charter; the Constitutions unfold its practical detail in more than three hundred articles. On 26 March 1547, Ignatius appointed as secretary general a young man from Burgos from a family of conversos, Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–1576), trained at Padua, jurist and theologian. Polanco became Ignatius's principal literary collaborator for the drafting of the Constitutions: he took the notes, gave them form, proposed amendments, and archived the thousands of administrative letters that today form the Epistolae Ignatianae^[36].

The successive drafts (1547–1556)

The drafting spanned nine years. Three main stages have been identified by Jesuit historians since Astrain (1902):

• Text A (1547–1550): first draft, submitted to the six fathers present at Rome in 1551 for discussion.
• Text B (1552–1556): version corrected by Ignatius and his collaborators, read paragraph by paragraph in several houses of the Society. At his death, Ignatius was in the course of drafting the explanatory declarations on the tenth part.
• Definitive text: adopted by the 1st General Congregation in June 1558 and promulgated in all the provinces on 31 July of the same year^[37].

The work comprises the General Examen, then ten Parts covering admission, dismissal, the novitiate, formation, profession, the vows, the missions, the congregations, the superiors and the preservation and growth of the whole body.

The character of juridical innovation

The Constitutions are hailed as a major juridical innovation of the 16th century. The Jesuit historian Antonio M. de Aldama analyses them as a text "in which apostolic experience precedes the norm": Ignatius first recorded what had worked in the practice of the first ten years, and only then codified it^[38]. According to John O'Malley, "the Ignatian Constitutions are perhaps the first body of private canon law explicitly to give more importance to the spirit than to the letter, to the end than to the rule, and to the prudence of the superior than to mechanical observance"^[39]. This flexibility partly explains the longevity of the text: it would be amended by successive General Congregations but never rewritten.

The fourth vow circa missiones

The fourth vow is the most singular element of the Society. It consists, for the solemnly professed, in promising the Pope a special obedience concerning missions: to go, without excuse, wherever he sends them, to the faithful or the infidels. As Ignatius writes in the seventh part of the Constitutions:

"Seeing that the Sovereign Pontiff is, on earth, the visible superior of the whole Church militant, it is more than fitting and necessary that we place ourselves, by a particular vow, at his full disposal for missions, so that going to the Turks, the Indies, the heretics, or among the faithful, be for His Holiness an act with nothing out of the very ordinary about it; and for us, a service for which we are ready at any hour." — Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Constitutions, seventh part, no. 605^[40]

This vow neither absorbs nor supplants the three ordinary vows (poverty, chastity, obedience to the Superior General): it is added to them, as an act of specifically papal availability at the heart of the worldwide missionary project that defines the Society.

The breaks with monastic tradition

Three major traits distinguish the Ignatian institute from the old orders: the absence of choral office recited in common, the absence of monastic enclosure, and the absence of a distinctive religious habit (Jesuits wear the black cassock of the secular clergy of their country). Each of these choices was controversial in the 16th century. As the great Jesuit canonist Jerome Nadal (1507–1580), sent by Ignatius to every province to interpret the Constitutions, explains:

Fr Jerome Nadal S.J. (1507–1580), charged by Ignatius with explaining the Constitutions in every province, thus sums up the spirit of the institute: for Jesuits, no enclosure and no habit of their own — their enclosure is the streets of the cities, and the whole world is their house^[41].

This "world-enclosure" is the most contested aspect by rival orders. The Dominican theologian Melchor Cano (1509–1560), future Bishop of the Canaries, condemned the Society in 1548 as "a dangerous novelty, a knighthood without armour, a monasticism without monastery"^[42]. Pope Paul IV Carafa (1555–1559), himself founder of the Theatines and well disposed toward the new institutes, attempted in 1558 to impose the choral office and the limitation of the generalate to three years — orders not renewed by his successor Pius IV after the death of Paul IV (18 August 1559): Laínez, on the advice of canonists, discontinued the choir and kept to the Constitutions for the generalate^[43].

The lightning expansion in fifteen years

At Ignatius's death, on 31 July 1556, the Society already counted twelve provinces:

• Italy (Province of Italy later subdivided into Lombardy, Naples, Rome, Sicily, Venice);
• Spain (three provinces: Aragon, Castile, Andalusia);
• Portugal;
• France;
• Upper Germany (Vienna, Ingolstadt, Munich);
• Lower Germany (Cologne, Mainz, Trier);
• India (province of the East Indies, created for Xavier in 1549);
• Brazil (Salvador de Bahia, since 1549);
• Ethiopia (1555, mission project to the Negus);
• Sicily.

Many colleges were opened (Messina 1548, Palermo 1549, Rome 1551 — the future Collegio Romano, ancestor of the Gregorian University — Vienna 1552, Cologne 1556, Coimbra). The common language was Latin; the network was unified by the weekly correspondence converging on Rome^[44].

Francis Xavier in Asia (1541–1552)

The sending of Francis Xavier to the East Indies is the most emblematic missionary episode of the early years. Designated in April 1540 following a withdrawal (Nicolás Bobadilla, planned for the voyage, fell ill), Xavier embarked at Lisbon on 7 April 1541 and arrived at Goa on 6 May 1542. In ten years he evangelised the Fishery Coast (South India), the Moluccas, Malacca, then landed in Japan on 15 August 1549 at Kagoshima. He remained there two years and founded the first Japanese Christendom, which would count 300,000 faithful before the great persecution of 1614. He died on 3 December 1552 on the island of Sancian, off the Chinese mainland, at the age of 46, without having been able to enter China^[45].

As Cándido de Dalmases sums it up, "Xavier alone symbolises Jesuit globalisation: a Navarrese Basque ordained at Venice, sent by the King of Portugal, became apostle of the Tamils and founded Japanese Christendom"^[46].

Peter Faber in Germany (1540–1546)

The European counterpart of Xavier's Asian voyage was the ministry of Peter Faber in Germany. Sent by Paul III to the Diet of Worms (January 1541) then to Regensburg (April–May 1541) as assistant theologian to Cardinal Morone, Faber fought the progress of Protestantism through spiritual direction rather than public controversy. He gave the Spiritual Exercises to the Archbishop of Mainz, to Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg, and above all to Peter Canisius (1521–1597), the future first German Jesuit and future Doctor of the Church^[47]. Dead of exhaustion at Rome on 1 August 1546 at 40, Faber left the Society a lasting pastoral strategy: no brutal polemic, but the long formation of local relays. He was canonised in 2013 by Pope Francis — the first Jesuit pope in history.

Diego Laínez and Salmerón at Trent

Four of the ten first Fathers were sent to the Council of Trent as papal theologians: Laínez and Salmerón for all three periods (1546–1547, 1551–1552, 1562–1563), Le Jay and Canisius for the second. Laínez intervened with decisive weight at the decree on justification (Session VI, 13 January 1547) where he delivered a three-hour marathon speech which would be published separately. Salmerón, at 31 in 1547, was the youngest theologian of the whole council^[48].

The first martyrs

From this first generation, the Society counted martyrs. In Brazil, Inácio de Azevedo and 39 companions (15 July 1570 off La Palma, surprised by the Huguenot corsairs of Jacques de Sores), in Japan Paulo Miki and companions (5 February 1597, but of the second generation), in India Blessed Rodolfo Acquaviva and companions (1583). The Society inherited, in its DNA, the "sicut agnos inter lupos" — "like lambs among wolves" (Lk 10:3) — which the Five Chapters had inscribed at the heart of its project.

In the early hours of 31 July 1556, in the poor room adjoining the professed house of the Strada, Ignatius of Loyola died at 65, with almost no one around him: Polanco had just left to fetch the apostolic blessing. No particular ceremony; he dictated nothing from his bed; he did not even ask for extreme unction. His correspondence ends with a letter of 27 July to his brother, begging 200 ducats for the Brazil mission^[49].

At his death, the Society counted about 1,000 members in twelve provinces, with a network of colleges in full growth and missions on four continents. The Constitutions were essentially drafted. The election of his successor — Diego Laínez, on 2 July 1558 — would confirm the electoral machinery provided by Ignatius. The founding was juridically, spiritually and institutionally accomplished.

"No one, save God, can count the souls which this little Society will save from perdition through the grace of His mercy, in the present time and in the centuries to come." — Saint Peter Faber, Memorial (Memoriale), no. 213, May 1543^[50]

Immediate recognition, early challenges

The Society was supported from the outset by the Iberian kings (John III of Portugal, Charles V, Philip II), by several cardinals (Contarini, Pole, Morone, Borgia), by the Italian dukes (Cosimo I de' Medici opened Florence to it as early as 1546). But it also aroused resistance:

• The Dominican theologian Melchor Cano published in 1548 the Memorial sobre la Compañía de Jesús condemning seven points he judged incompatible with tradition (cf. above).
• The Sorbonne of Paris condemned it on 1 December 1554 — the Society was received in France following the Colloquy of Poissy (1561), under the name "Société du Collège de Clermont"^[51].
• The Parlement of Paris would fight it on several occasions; French political Gallicanism would find in the Society the perfect embodiment of the "ultramontane party".

Anti-Jesuit controversies would never die out completely and would culminate in the suppression of the order by Clement XIV in 1773 (brief Dominus ac Redemptor), before its restoration by Pius VII in 1814 (bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum).

The Catholic answer to the criticisms of Cano and the Sorbonne rests on three facts. First the repeated approvals of the Holy See: Paul III lifted as early as 1543 the sixty-professed limit (Iniunctum nobis)^[52], then Julius III solemnly re-approved the institute in 1550 (Exposcit debitum)^[53] — two pontifical confirmations which decide, in law, the incompatibility suits brought against the Society. Then the fruits: twelve provinces, a network of colleges in full expansion and missions on four continents in fifteen years^[54], with Laínez and Salmerón among the most heeded theologians of the Council of Trent^[55]. Finally sanctity: Ignatius and Xavier were canonised together as early as 12 March 1622^[56], and Faber was canonised in 2013 — the Church's judgment on the fruits of the institute, against the condemnations of the 16th century.

Modern historiography

The primary sources of the founding are gathered in the monumental collection Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI), launched at Madrid in 1894 by the Spanish Jesuits and continued at Rome after 1929: 157 volumes published from 1894 to 2005, with the Epistolae et instructiones of Ignatius (12 volumes), of Xavier, Laínez, Polanco, and the acts of the first General Congregations. It is the basis of all modern work^[57].

The reference works for the founding period are:

• Pedro de Ribadeneira S.J. (1527–1611), Vita Ignatii Loiolae, Naples, 1572 — the first "authorised" biography of Ignatius, written by one of his young companions^[58].
• Cándido de Dalmases S.J., El padre maestro Ignacio: la vida y la obra de san Ignacio de Loyola, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid, 1979 — an erudite, chronological synthesis.
• William V. Bangert S.J., A History of the Society of Jesus, Institute of Jesuit Sources, Saint Louis (Mo.), 2nd ed. 1986 — an academic reference in English.
• John W. O'Malley S.J., The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1993, 480 pp., ISBN 978-0-674-30312-2 — a renewed analysis, taking as its thread the six ministries of Ignatius: Exercises, sacraments, preaching, schools, works of charity, controversy.
• André Ravier S.J., Ignace de Loyola fonde la Compagnie de Jésus, Desclée De Brouwer, Paris, 1973 — a classic French study of the founding process.
• Philippe Lécrivain S.J. (ed.), Les Jésuites — une histoire en cinq grandes batailles, Lessius, Brussels, 2010 — an accessible recent synthesis.

"The first Jesuits did not know, in signing the* Formula *in 1539, that they were giving the Church the most effective instrument of the Catholic Reformation. But they knew that they were giving God, without condition and without geographical limit, their whole life." — John W. O'Malley S.J., The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 376^[59]

• Read the biography of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) — life, spirituality, exercises.
• Read The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1517–1648) — an overview of the Catholic Reformation of which the Society is one of the principal actors.
• Read The Protestant Reformation (1517–1555) — the adverse context of the founding.
• Read The Council of Trent (1545–1563) — the council in which Laínez and Salmerón played a leading theological role.
• Consult the freely accessible collection Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu on archive.org (157 volumes, since 1894).
• Visit the shrine of Loyola (Azpeitia, Guipúzcoa) and the Cova de Sant Ignasi at Manresa — stages of the Ignatian way.