St. Ignatius of Loyola: The Cannonball Saint

Podcast: Download

HTM004: The cannonball came in low and hit him below the right knee. It shattered the bone, tore through the muscle, and ended the only career he had ever wanted. He was 30, a minor Basque nobleman with a temper and a talent for dancing, and on that morning in May 1521 the most important thing that would ever happen to him had just happened. It took him months to work that out.

Dom Bettinelli tells the story of Iñigo López de Loyola, the vain soldier the world remembers as Ignatius, and of what he built out of the rubble of a wrecked leg.

If you want to know who St. Ignatius of Loyola was before all that, the answer isn’t flattering. He spent his twenties on gaming, affairs, dueling, and armed scuffles. He read chivalric romances the way kids today binge fantasy series. And when the surgeons set his leg crooked, he ordered them to break it and do it again, then saw off the protruding bone with no anesthetic, because a courtier has to fit his stockings.

Then came the boredom. He asked for romances and the castle didn’t have any, so he read a Life of Christ and a book of saints’ lives instead. Lying there, he started noticing that his knight daydreams left him dry and restless afterward, while his saint daydreams left him peaceful and wanting more. He sat with that difference and asked what it meant. That question is the seed of the whole Ignatian discernment of spirits, and it came from a bored man in a sickbed paying attention to his own moods.

The St. Ignatius of Loyola conversion story runs from there through a vigil of arms at Montserrat, 11 months in a cave above Manresa, and an hour on the bank of the Cardoner River that he later said taught him more than the rest of his life put together. Out of the notes he started keeping came the Spiritual Exercises. Four weeks of prayer you live through rather than read: your sins, the life of Christ, the Passion, the Resurrection. People still take a month off work for it, almost 500 years on.

There are two Inquisition imprisonments in here too, and a grown veteran going back to learn his Latin declensions next to schoolboys at 33.

Then Paris, where the thing he is famous for actually started. Anyone asking who founded the Jesuits gets a short answer and a long one. The short answer is Ignatius. The long one involves a roommate from Savoy named Pierre Favre, a competitive young Basque named Francis Xavier who resisted for months, and five more men who climbed a hill at Montmartre in 1534 and made private vows with no idea what they were starting.

Dom follows it to the end: papal approval in 1540, 16 years in a small set of rooms in Rome, 7,000 surviving letters, and a death on July 31, 1556 without the blessing he’d asked for. He left behind about 1,000 Jesuits in 12 provinces on 4 continents. Everything after that grew out of a bad afternoon on a city wall.

The episode closes with the Suscipe and a question worth pondering.

Get all new episodes automatically and for free:
Follow by Email | Listen to this episode and subscribe on YouTube.

Help us continue to offer Holy Troublemakers. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

YouTube license code: OUMMQYRELFBNCZJF

by
Holy Troublemakers Holy Troublemakers 1-300