The Saints of The Society of Jesus
© St Aloysius College Diary, 2000.
In the year 1534, three men shared a room in the
College of St-Barbe in the University of Paris. A few
years later, they would be known as the triple column
of the Society of Jesus. The oldest, a Basque
nobleman and ex-soldier, was St Ignatius Loyola,
founder of the Society of Jesus which still today lives
in the spirit of his Spiritual Exercises and seeks what
he sought - The Greater Glory of God. The Prayer
from his Mass (31 July) runs:
Lord, in your providence you guided St
Ignatius to found the Society of Jesus.
Enrich it, we pray, with gifts of heart,
mind and spirit. Make all of us one with
you in holiness and in love, so that we
may know your will and obey it as your
faithful servants.
Of the younger men, one was the Blessed Peter
Favre, a former shepherd-boy from Savoy, and the
first priest of the Society. At the Pope’s bidding, this
gentlest of men spent his short life (he died aged 40)
in perpetual motion all over Western Europe,
showing people how to come closer to God. His
feast day is 2 August.
The third was St Francis Xavier. Like Ignatius, he
was an impoverished Basque nobleman. Born in the
same week as Peter, he died aged 46, after ten
years of incredible missionary effort in the Far East,
from western India to distant Japan. In his Mass on 3
December, the Church prays:
Lord, God of compassion and mercy,
you opened a door in the East for
St Francis when you sent him to preach
your Gospel. Send us, in our own day,
over the face of the earth, so that the joy
of our Mother, the Church, may be made
perfect.
Being one of her Patron Saints, Francis is of
particular interest to the Church in Australia. When
Peter Favre died, the Duke of Gandia, in Spain,
wrote to Ignatius asking to have the honour of taking
Peter’s place. The Duke’s wife was dead, his eight
children provided for; and so St Francis Borgia
(Feast, 3 October) joined the Society, later to
become its third General. A great organiser and
builder, he still could write, ‘We are all pilgrims: by
taking our vows we have put on our boots and spurs’.
While Borgia was General, the Society in Germany
was governed by St Peter Canisius (Feast, 27
April). Born in the Netherlands, Peter, in the 50
years he lived in the Society, became known as the
Apostle of Germany for his tireless defence of the
Church in that country. For his writings, he was, at
his canonisation, also declared a Doctor of the
Church. To him at Vienna there came a young
Polish nobleman, St Stanislaus Kostka (Feast, 13
November) who had run away from home and
walked from Poland to Vienna to join the Society.
Canisius sent him on to Borgia who admitted
Stanislaus into the noviceship where he died soon
after, aged 17. The Prayer of his Mass runs:
Lord our God, you looked on St
Stanislaus with love as he consecrated
his youth to you with such generosity of
heart. Renew us in spirit, so that we
may be eager and joyful as we walk in
your commandments. Help us fill our
days with good works and so redeem
the shortness of this life.
Meanwhile, the great missionary endeavour which
has always been a mark of the Society of Jesus was
underway, and was already being sealed with the
blood of martyrs. In 1570 some 40 Jesuit priests,
brothers, scholastics, novices, bound for the
Portuguese missions in Brazil, were slaughtered by
Calvinist pirates out of hatred for the Faith. These
men, the Blessed Ignatius de Azevedo and
Companions, share, on 19 January, a common
Feast with many other Martyrs of the Society. These
are the Blessed James Sales, priest, and William
Saultemouche, brother, who were martyred in 1593
by the Calvinists for their faith in the Real Presence;
the Hungarians, the Blessed Melchior Grodecz and
Stephen Pongracz (1619), army chaplains; and the
Blessed James Bonnaud and Companions (22
fellow Jesuits), victims of the anti-Catholicism of the
French Revolution.
Every mission field of the Society has been watered
by the blood of Martyrs. In India, the Blessed
Rudolph Aquaviva and Four Companions were
martyred in 1583, and St John de Brito in 1693. In
Japan, a young Samurai, St Paul Miki, scholastic,
would have been the first Japanese priest; instead, in
1697, he became his people’s first Martyr, crucified at
Nagasaki together with his fellow-countrymen,
St John Soan and St James Kisai, catechists and
new recruits in the Society (Feast, 6 February). In
later persecutions between 1617 and 1628, the
Blessed Jesuit Martyrs of Japan, both European
and Japanese, would come to number over thirty.
All the Martyrs mentioned above, except Paul, John
and James, have their Feast on 4 February, together
with the Blessed James Berthieu, martyred in
Madagascar in 1896, and Blessed Leo Mangin and
three Companions, martyred in China in 1900.
Also, on the Island of Guam, the Blessed Diego de
Sanvitores was martyred in 1671.
Apart from the Martyrs of Brazil, the South American
missions boast of the Sts Roch Gonzalez,
Alphonsus Rodriguez and John del Castillo,
savagely done to death by the natives of Paraguay
whom they had so strenuously defended against their
Spanish colonial oppressors. These martyrdoms of
1628 are celebrated on 16 November. As well, there
is the St Joseph de Anchieta, the ‘Apostle of Brazil’.
North America, too, has its heroes. On 19 October,
we celebrate the Feast of eight French Jesuits, all of
them missionaries to the Indians. Five of the priests,
were martyred in what is now Canada, and three of
them, a priest and two brothers, in what is now the
United States of America, between the years 1646
and 1649. They are Sts John de Brebeuf, Isaac
Jogues, Anthony Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant,
Charles Garnier, Noel Chabanel, Rene Goupil and
Jean de la Lande.
All these missionaries spent their lives among the
cruelties of savage and superstitious tribes, in
constant danger of their lives as they strove to bring
them to the knowledge of Christ. Isaac Jogues,
especially, loved them greatly and suffered terribly at
their hands. Taken by the Mohawks, he was beaten
with sticks and stabbed with knives; his nails were
torn from his fingers, his hair from his head; his
fingers themselves were in part chewed from his
hand. The cruelties he survived, and returned to
France. Nothing daunted, he returned to his mission,
and to a most barbarous martyrdom.
In the year of St Stanislaus’ death, another
remarkable young man entered the Society, although
in order to do so he had to renounce his title to the
Marquisate of Castiglione in Italy in favour of his most
unsatisfactory younger brother, who was eventually
murdered. This was St Aloysius Gonzaga, the
Church’s Patron of Youth, whose feast day is 21
June. Full of promise for the future, he achieved
nothing but great holiness of life, dying aged only 23
and still a student when, nursing the plague-stricken,
he himself contracted the fatal disease. The Prayer
of his Mass runs:
Lord God, help us to be like our brother,
St Aloysius, who gave up honour and
riches to serve you. Keep us untouched
by the spirit of this world, so that we may
seek your glory in all things.
Aloysius died in 1591. In 1561, there entered the
society from the Netherlands the third of the Society’s
trio of young Saints. He was St John Berchmans
(Feast, 26 November; born 1599) who achieved
great holiness simply by being a cheerful, kindly,
prayerful student. He died in 1621, aged only 22.
The same year St Robert Bellarmine died after over
60 years in the Society. He had been a model
Bishop and Cardinal; and, because of his writings in
defence of the Faith, has been declared a Doctor of
the Church (Feast, 17 September).
A contemporary of Bellarmine’s illustrates a totally
different path to God. St Alphonsus Rodriguez
(Feast, 31 October) joined the Society as a Brother
when he was already nearing the age of 40. His wife
and children had all died, and by selling his not very
successful business he had been able to provide for
his unmarried sister. For over 40 years, he acted as
doorman at the Jesuit college in Majorca, greeting
every caller as he would Christ. He died in 1617, a
great mystic.
Perhaps the most providential thing Alphonsus did
was to turn the thoughts of a young scholastic, timid
and uncertain of his vocation, to consider the plight of
the hundreds of African slaves kidnapped to work the
plantations of the Spanish conquerors of South
America. St Peter Claver, the young man in
question, took fire; and vowing himself to be ‘the
slave of the slaves for ever’, devoted himself to their
service until his death in his mid-seventies in 1654.
The prayer of his Mass on 9 September reads:
Lord God, you called St Peter to be the
servant of slaves and an heroic example
of patience and charity. Grant through
his prayer that we may seek what
belongs to Christ, and may love our
neighbour not in word only but in our
whole lives.
The care of the under-privileged has always
appealed strongly to the men of the Society of Jesus,
great numbers of whom, beginning with the First
Companions, have devoted themselves to prison and
hospital work, and to the instruction of whole
populations of neglected country-dwellers in the
knowledge and love of Christ our Lord. 2 July is kept
for those who in this way served God. They are St
Bernadino Realino (1616), the Blessed Anthony
Baldinucci (1717) and St Francis Jerome (1716) in
Italy; and, in France, St John Francis Regis (1640)
and the Blessed Julian Maunior (1683).
Remarkable among this band of remarkable men is
St Andrew Bobola whose 40 years of service to the
sick and ignorant among the Polish peasantry was
crowned with martyrdom. In 1657, at the age of 66,
he fell into the hands of the fiercely anti-Catholic
Cossacks. Beaten up, he was dragged some miles
behind his tormentors’ horses to the nearest town.
Here he was scourged and crowned with metal
spikes; the skin was flayed from his body and fire
applied to the raw flesh. His eyes were put out, his
ears and nose cut off; and as he continued to
proclaim his faith and pardon his murderers, his
tongue was cut out, and he himself finally dispatched
with thrusts of the sabre. His Feast is on 16 May, the
day of this confession of Christ.
When the Blessed Charles Spinola set out for
Japan he was not to know that it would take him over
six years to reach that distant land. Among the
things which delayed him was a spell in England after
his ship had been captured. Another European
Jesuit who was to experience the hospitality of
English prisons was St Claude de la Colombiere,
whose Feast is on 15 February. A quiet man, as
unyielding as steel, he was the great support of St
Margaret Mary in promoting the modern form of
devotion to the Sacred Heart. Sent to London as
Chaplain to the future Catholic Queen (wife of James
II) of a Protestant country, he was an easy target for
insults, imprisonment, and finally banishment. He
died back in the peace of his native France in 1682.
While Loyola, Xavier and Favre roomed together at
the university of Paris in 1534, there began in
England a persecution of the Catholics which would
still be going on over a hundred and fifty years later.
In 1579, the Society resolved to send men to the aid
of the English Catholics, and the first arrived in 1580.
In the course of the next hundred years, dozens of
Jesuits would die for the Faith. Of these, sixteen now
bear the title, Blessed, while ten have been declared
Saint. Their Feast is kept on 1 December. Of
particular interest are St Edmund Campion (1581),
St Robert Southwell (1595) and St Nicholas Owen
(1606), together with the martyr in Scotland, St John
Ogilvie (1616).
On 21 July, 1773, the Pope disbanded the Society of
Jesus, and 23,000 Jesuits found themselves without
a name or home. This final blow had long been
coming. Five years earlier, the Jesuits had been
expelled from Spain, and a young priest, St Joseph
Pignatelli (Feast, 14 November) had guided them in
the intervening years of hardship and exile. For
twenty-four years he was the support and inspiration
of the remnants of the Society. He died in 1811,
having lived to see another Pope restore the Society
in some parts, but before its universal restoration in
1814.
From among the restored Society we venerate the
Blessed Jose Rubio y Peralta, the ‘Apostle of
Madrid’, who died in 1929 and the Blessed Francis
Garate, like Alphonsus Rodriguez, a Spanish
Brother and Doorkeeper, who died in 1929.