It was a cannonball like any other at a battle between France and Spain. Ignatius of Loyola was on the front lines defending Pamplona for Spain. But the cannonball that hit him on Thursday, 20th May 1521 shattered his right leg, and with it, his hope of becoming a famous warrior.
What is not simple in this ordinary story is that the impact of that cannonball is being felt even today, five centuries later, in the form of the Jesuits or the Society of Jesus. It was born because of this accident.
Ignatius was not a man to abandon his dream, so he went through the agony of surgery and pain that was required to become whole again. It meant a long and lonely convalescence in the Castle of Loyola. To keep himself busy during this time, he read the only books preserved in the library of the castle; and all of them about the lives of saints. That was the turning point. His shattered leg had shattered his dream of being the king’s knight, but his chivalry came alive as he read the books. He asked himself, “if saints like Dominic and Benedict could accomplish such heroic deeds for God their king why can’t I?”
There was no looking back after it. The knight of the king turned himself into a knight of the Divine Master.
That is where the new story begins. At 30, he learned Latin and landed up at the Sorbonne, the best university in Europe to study for the Master’s degree – the highest level of education one could dream of in those days.
There he met other men doing their Masters, and seven of them formed a group that came together regularly as ‘friends in the Lord’ though they did not know what they would do in the future. They spent the day at the university and the evenings in the hospitals, cleaning the wounds of the sick and serving the poor, thus combining intellectual life with the service of the poor.
Slowly, they thought of missions like an intellectual response to the Reformation of the Church (or revolt, as others called it) launched by Martin Luther in 1517 or of going to Jerusalem to defend the Holy Land. Ignatius even reached Jerusalem but was ordered by the Basilica-in-charge to return to Europe or be ex-communicated. They only knew that as a group they had to be available to serve the Church. What were they to call themselves? They were friends with no superior other than Jesus, their Master. So, they called themselves the Society of Jesus.
Eventually, they formed themselves into a religious order with the same name and Pope Paul III approved it on 29th September 1540. In the context of the Reformation and other events of that age, they had to be pioneers. Religious orders till then were monastery bound. The Jesuits decided that they would move out of the monastery, be contemplative in action and be available for any mission for which the Church needed them. To ensure such availability, to their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience they added a fourth vow of obedience to the Pope and accept any mission which he would entrust to them.
The first mission entrusted to them was a response to the Reformation and Jesuit theologians were prominent at the Council of Trent called to deal with it. They had to go beyond countering the Reformation. The Catholic Church had to be reformed and freed from abuses. They worked in areas such as clergy formation, which was poor. Fight for ecclesiastical honours was a major abuse, and they vowed to avoid all ecclesiastical benefices unless the Pope ordered them under Holy Obedience. In reality, such orders have not been infrequent and one of them has ended up as the Pope!
Availability involved being constantly mobile and not be institutionalised. But the rulers of the day insisted on the Jesuits educating their children. Education till then was inside the monastery so they had to pioneer the development of a system of schools and a syllabus (known as ratio studiorum) that was unknown till then but have become the norm today.
Other demands came for intellectual life, initially to counter the Reformation and later on, in other areas. They have remained prominent in research in every field, from botany and chemistry to archaeology, philosophy, theology and Indology. The moon, for instance, has 38 craters named after Jesuits who discovered them. Teilhard de Chardin is a prominent paleontologist. India has produced among others, great botanists like Fr Santapau (who became Director-General of the Botanical Survey of India), Fr Cecil Saldanha with whom the flora and fauna of Karnataka are identified, and K. M. Mathew known for his work on the environment of the Palani Hills.
It has not always been smooth sailing. Their pioneering spirit has often landed them in trouble. Beginning with Francis Xavier, they responded to the call of the missions at a time when the Portuguese rulers identified the church with their own culture and power. But people like Roberto de Nobili felt that the Church in India had to be Indian. Beschi is recognised as an important Tamil scholar. Matteo Ricci gave Chinese garb to the church in China. Such initiatives were a threat to the imperialist forces. In Latin America, a group of Jesuits began the Reductions of Paraguay (see the film ‘The Mission’) to protect the indigenous tribes from the Spanish conquerors who were there to conquer and enslave them. Such actions became a threat to the powerful rulers, and under pressure from them, the Pope suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1973. It was restored in August 1814. Thus, like Jesus, his society experienced death and resurrection. Working with the poor and combining intellectual life with a commitment to social justice is a priority of many of them and they continue to pay a high price for it. An example today is Stan Swamy, who works for the rights of the tribes of Jharkhand and is incarcerated because of it on false charges of being an urban Naxalite.
In recent decades, Europe and North America have experienced a decline in their numbers. So their total number has declined from a high of 36,000 in the mid-1960s to less than 15,000 today. They are growing mainly in Asia and Africa. India has 4,000 of them and 300 more are in the neighbouring South Asian countries.
In the Northeast, their mission in Nagaland began on 22nd April 1970. Today there are around 170 of them in the Kohima Region that covers the Seven Sisters, and 30 more in the Assam Mission of Ranchi in its tea garden areas. Around sixty per cent of them are of North Eastern origin. They run four colleges, over 30 high schools, a dozen parishes, a research centre, a legal cell, a language centre, a novitiate and other institutions.
Today the Jesuits world over realise that they have to change with the times and have to reform themselves. So, they keep asking themselves “Where does our availability take us?”