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Will the Real Ignatius Please Stand

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Will the Real Ignatius Please Stand Will the Real Ignatius Please Stand Up? Ron Darwen SJ As the Society of Jesus prepares to celebrate the feast of its founder on 31 July, Ron Darwen SJ explores two different portrayals of St Ignatius of Loyola, and describes how the Jesuits’ first General continues to accompany them on their spiritual journeys, as they strive to follow his example. On the 31st of July the Church quite a contemporary view of celebrates the feast of St the man and very far from the Ignatius of Loyola, one of the Ignatius I was introduced to founding fathers of the Society when I entered Jesuit life. of Jesus and its first Superior General. Earlier this year the Of course it is not at all Jesuits held a General Cong- surprising that each generation egation, the 35th in their has a different slant on an history, at which they elected Fr admittedly complex character. Adolfo Nicolás of the Japanese To some extent we probably all Province to replace the out- see in Ignatius things that are going and much loved Fr Peter- important to us. But the foun- Hans Kolvenbach as their new der’s character has, on occasion, General and latest successor to Photo by Vicky Chen, MD been the victim of rather less Ignatius. innocent attempts to mould Jesuit identity. A few years ago, the late Irish Jesuit, After that election, the Congregation took some time Joe Veale wrote of the interpretations of Ignatius' life. to reflect about the role of the Society in today's Most of our popular images, he points out, go back to world. The Congregation was trying to "rediscover its the first official biographies, written towards the end charism", "reaffirm its mission today" and examine of the sixteenth century by Pedro de Ribadeneira and "the governance needed for the service of its universal Gian Pietro Maffei. But there is a source which pre- mission". What, I wonder, would Ignatius have made dates them, an Autobiography consisting of the of their conclusions? Would he have felt at home in personal reminiscences of Ignatius dictated to, and their discussions? And would he have been able to written up by, an early Jesuit companion, Gonsalves recognize “the Jesuit” they described? da Camara. This narrative has to be the seminal portrayal of the personality of Ignatius. Knowing the Mind of Ignatius Not everyone appreciated the picture of Ignatius which emerged from da Camara’s pen. In 1567, The answer to those questions depends on what you Francis Borgia, the Jesuits’ third General, recalled all think he was like. And that is problematic, since the the copies of the Autobiography so as to clear the way picture we have of Ignatius has changed significantly for Ribadeneira's "true" account of the founder’s life: over the years. If you were to put that question to a Jesuit novice or to a member of the Christian Life The Provincials are to make a good job of gathering in Communities, likely as not they would describe a what Fr Louis Gonsalves [da Camara] wrote, or any man who could “find God in all things”, who other writing about the life of our Father, and they are developed a way of following God’s will in everyday to keep them and not permit them to be read or to be life, someone who used his imagination in his prayer circulated among our people or others. For being an imperfect thing, it is not appropriate that it cause and who liked nothing better than to converse with problems. people about “the things of God”. But that is actually The instruction seems to have worked. Some months reformers of the Church’s history? Certainly, such a later Ribadeneira, answering a query from Ignatius’ re-telling of his life was to forge a powerful myth, that friend and companion Jerome Nadal, comments that: of a kind of clerical Errol Flynn, and generations of young Jesuits would be inspired (and, one imagines, the gathering in of Fr Louis Gonsalves writings about occasionally brow-beaten) by fervorinos from their the life of our Father did not originate with me, but novice masters exhorting them to imitate the heroic from the fathers who remembered our Father. And it knight. Joe Veale, remarks: seemed a good idea to his paternity so that when what is written gets published it should not appear that there The St Ignatius we inherited from the 19th Century be divergence or contradiction or that the work not was stern, more than a little inhuman, a soldier, have as much authority as what was written almost militant, militaristic, a martinet expecting prompt from the mouth of the Father. This although very unquestioning execution, the proposer of blind obed- faithful in substance is short on the details of some ience, not greatly given to feeling or affection, rational, a things and in relating of times by then well past, his man of ruthless will-power, hard in endurance, of a memory was failing him owing to his old age. sensibility (if it were there at all) under stern control, heroic. That was when he was not a superhuman, The Autobiography duly fell into oblivion. It is true Olympian figure, just this side of apotheosis, remote that the Bollandists included a Latin translation in the among baroque clouds and shafts of light and 1731 Acta Sanctorum but the original Spanish gambolling cherubs. remained unedited until the first edition of Ignatian biographica in 1904. However you read these goings- This Ignatius, who survives in the popular on, two things are for sure. First, the image of the imagination of many Catholics today for whom the founder mattered then, just as it does now. Second, Jesuits are something like a spiritual SAS, the Pope’s Ignatius’ own self-understanding, as it was handed on shock troops, was pre-eminently a doer. And surp- to his spiritual sons in the Autobiography , was to be rising as it may seem, I have to admit that it was this marginalised and effectively lost for centuries to the Ignatius that led me to enter the Jesuit Novitiate in great impoverishment of the Society at large and its Roehampton 1949. I had been brought up in Preston spirituality in particular. in the heart of Catholic Lancashire, a descendant of St Edmund Arrowsmith, and a member of the Gerard family – John being the only Jesuit to have escaped Ignatius, Man of Action from the Tower of London. The blood of the martyrs flowed through my veins, and I was privileged to be So how did that crucial depiction of Ignatius as it accepted as a Jesuit novice. As a descendant of one of appears in the work of Ribadeneira impact on the the forty martyrs, I thought I would give my life to identity and mission of Jesuits? Like any historian, the conversion of England, teaching for the rest of my Ribadeneira had his own preoccupations, many of days in one of "our schools" with Ignatius as guide them dictated by the age and culture in which he and mentor. lived. His biography of Ignatius appeared in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, and so is marked decisively by the ethos of the Counter-Reformation Ignatius, Mystical Master and its aggressive stance towards Protestantism. It is not surprising to find that Ribadeneira’s Ignatius is a That said, the Ignatius I have come to know since great soldier saint. Spinning such an image hardly then tells a different story and that shift echoes a required a huge amount of invention. There was general change in the way Jesuits understand already much in the life of Ignatius to suggest a themselves. It is above all the rediscovery of the penchant for swash-buckling derring-do. His Autobiography which has put the Society back in touch upbringing had been that of a minor aristocrat and his with Ignatius, the man of prayer, someone with an almost exaggerated sense of chivalry got him into hot extraordinary capacity for sensitivity to his interior water in Pamplona, famously resulting in his leg life, keenly aware of the motions of the spirits, good being shattered by an enemy cannon-ball. Was such a and bad, able to taste the sweetness of the Trinity man not destined to take his place among the great even in the most challenging of environments, and Will the Real Ignatius Please Stand Up? 2 Ron Darwen SJ www.thinkingfaith.org Copyright © Jesuit Media Initiatives 30 July 2008 gifted with a visionary insight which created and rare nowadays. Everything that Ignatius did and wrote responded to a wealth of apostolic opportunities is traced back to his mystical experiences on Manresa, at aimed at helping others to experience Jesus Christ as La Storta and in Rome. Hence the strong interest in the he had. Joe Veale again: Autobiography and the Spiritual Journal . As always there is truth in both, that he was both a doer and a mystic. The challenge of his life to present day Jesuits has been There we see a man of feeling often given to tears; a to hold together a spirituality that does justice to both. spirit of soaring imagination; a dreamer with sensitive Today's Jesuit should have a foot in both camps. self awareness, attentive to the subtle movements of his sensibility; a man of strong affectivity with a gift for friendship and affection; a companionable person. Having a foot in both camps is no mean feat (if you’ll pardon the pun). In fact, if there is a new challenge It has been one of the great privileges of my Jesuit life, emerging for Jesuits in the early years of this new straddling the Vatican Council and enjoying the great century it seems to be precisely that of deepening the rediscovery of Jesuit identity which followed it, to see integration of prayer and action.
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