Ignatius of Loyola

📍Santuario de Loyola, Jauregi Kalea 15, 20730 Azpeitia, Gipuzkoa, Spain

“I was born Íñigo López de Loyola around 1491 at Loyola Castle in the Basque Country, a vain and ambitious young nobleman fond of military adventure. A French cannonball shattered my leg at the siege of Pamplona in 1521. Confined to bed with nothing to read but the lives of the saints, I underwent a conversion. I pilgrimaged to Montserrat and Manresa, and at Manresa wrote the Spiritual Exercises — the systematic method of prayer and discernment that became the Jesuits' founding text. I studied in Paris, gathered companions, and founded the Society of Jesus in 1540. The Loyola castle, the cannonball, the recovery books — these were the conditions of a conversion that produced one of the most effective organisations in Christian history.”

Sources: Meissner, W. Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (1992), Yale University Press; O'Malley, J. The First Jesuits (1993), Harvard University Press