It was the age of humanism, the Renaissance, conquistadores, reformers.
Europe was undergoing profound political change.
It was the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, Suleiman the Magnificent, Charles V,
John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola.
A man who walked a different path, but whose legacy may be even greater.
This is Stoneyhurst.
Stoneyhurst College in northwestern England.
And the construction was begun by Sir Richard Shireburn in 1592.
And 200 years later, his heirs gave the estate to the Jesuits.
And this grand property became the new home of Stoneyhurst College.
And for another 200 years, countless young men, or boys as they were affectionately
known, have studied here.
Now Stoneyhurst, at first glance, resembles any of the English boarding
schools, or public schools, as they were known.
Like others of its kind, the buildings are old, austere and isolated, and gristling
with tradition.
But Stoneyhurst College is unique, as it's part of an astonishing legacy that
began 500 years ago, and about 700 miles from here, in the Basque region of
northern Spain.
You see, this school, and hundreds like it around the world, including scores of
universities, owes its very existence to an intriguing Spanish Basque, by the name
of Inigo López, or popularly known as Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the
Jesuits.
Yes, Ignatius was the founder of one of the most powerful, formidable,
and indeed feared religious organisations in the world.
In fact, so much so that in this country, in England, under Queen Elizabeth I,
if you're a Jesuit, you could be hanged, drawn and quartered, if you were found on
English soil.
But Ignatius was first and foremost a spiritual reformer.
But I, goes without saying, he was also a reformer beyond the spiritual.
And on a closer look, so here was a man who was one of the historical figures of
the Reformation, a major player in the shaping of what we know today as the
Western world, and indeed in the shaping, perhaps, of the world.
So, in the next hour, we'll try and find out who this Ignatius of Loyola was.
A man who, as I say, was feared, but he was loved also.
Yes, in his company of Jesus, they were even disbanded by Edict of the Pope in the
18th century.
And then they were saved by, you'll never guess who, the Empress of Russia,
Catherine the Great.
Yes, and we hope to shed just a little light, a little light on the thinking of
Ignatius and to understand the motivations of his followers, and perhaps understand
why, even today, the Jesuits are under constant watch from the Vatican.
So we'll consider the extraordinary impact that Ignatius and his Jesuits have made,
and continue to make, in the world today.
Here, in the shadow of the grey rock of Izaretz, in the foothills of the Ernio
mountains, in the Basque region of northern Spain, in Igolopeth, Ignatius
Loyola was born, the last of 13 children.
The date was 1491, just one year before Columbus set sail for the New World.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were building Spain into the superpower of the
16th century.
Yes, it was an eventful time.
And this is where the young Inigo grew up.
Terraced hills, haystacks, farmland, and like all the young men of the family,
Inigo was instructed in the ways of the Loyolas.
He was born here, in this house, the Loyola castle, or as it was sometimes
called, the tower house.
Yes, it's still there.
The Loyolas were a very ancient family.
It was at the end of the 14th century that this tower was built.
The history of this tower, I would say, is the history of the whole Basque country
and the whole of Europe, for that matter.
We are pretty sure that the house was as it is now.
The Loyolas were quite well-off, rather wealthy people.
They could afford to keep a house like this, and they needed space for the large
family.
There were reception rooms, dining rooms, guest rooms, servants' quarters,
a huge kitchen, of course, and there was even a private chapel.
The Loyolas, you might say, were quite formidable.
That family house doubled as a fortress too.
Inigo's father and mother, they'd have married in the elaborate style of
traditional custom and costume.
After all, they were a nobility, part of the local ruling class.
So, you see, Inigo was brought up in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege,
a noble lineage in family and in faith.
He was baptized in the Church of San Sebastian, and from that time forward his
religious upbringing was constant and rigorous.
His faith, like all Spaniards of his time, unquestioning.
Ignatius, as a boy, used to listen to his father, the stories of chivalry,
gallant knights and bold warriors.
Indeed, he thought he might become a great soldier himself, in the spirit of Amadeus
de Gaulle, a knight of the round table.
He could see himself risking his life for family and friends, saving his town from
the invading French, or defending the honor of some beautiful maiden.
Inigo was a restless young man, impulsive, always ready for a fight,
carousing and, yes, not unfamiliar with the ladies.
He was arrested quite a few times and even described by one of the judges as cunning,
violent and vindictive.
He was an ordinary man of his time, in the sense that he had a deep faith,
there is no doubt about that.
He had a very religious mind, but his morals weren't precisely very defined,
as most of the noblemen of the time.
You see, so he was involved in certain scandals and all that, and that was quite
normal in those days.
Even his own father had two illegitimate children, so that was part of the morals
of those days, and the way he was educated.
Inigo describes himself in this way.
Up to my 26th year, I was a man giving over to the vanities of the world,
and I took a special delight in the exercise of arms with a great and vain
desire of winning glory.
Then something happened in 1521, something that changed the whole course of
his life.
Inigo was in charge of the citadel garrison in Pamplona, then under attack
from the French, and there he was struck in the leg by cannon fire.
It was a dreadful wound, took months to recover.
Primitive surgery, of course, no anesthetic, and the leg never really
healed, and Inigo walked with the limp for the rest of his life.
Inigo was carried back on a stretcher to Loyola, almost 100 miles, a very painful
journey, as you can well imagine.
I was not able to stand upon that leg and so remain in bed.
I asked for some books to help while away the time.
I was given to read worldly books of fiction and knight errantry.
They could find none of these.
So I was given a life of Christ and the life of the saints.
It was during this reading that these desires of imitating the saints came to
me.
And so Inigo set off from home, the beginning of a pilgrimage that was
going to take him all over Europe and beyond, beyond into political and
religious scrimmages that were going to affect his world, and indeed our own.
A pilgrimage that was to go on for the rest of his life.
The reformation was just about getting underway.
Yeah, things were happening.
Corruption in the papal court and other abuses in the church, new ideas,
ideas of national consciousness brought about under the influence of humanism and
the new learning, and of course the discovery of another world west of the
Atlantic Ocean.
All this was pointing to a new Europe, the new Europe emerging.
The reformers, reformers, John Calvin, Martin Luther and the rest, they found
their listeners, local lords seeking power and influence, and with the church in
turmoil, of course, they found their opportunity.
The so-called religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries were hardly anything
more than civil wars.
Spain, on the other hand, remained staunchly, strongly Catholic.
Yes, the reformation couldn't find a foothold there.
Inigo was still some years away from his own revolutionizing activity, the founding
of a new religious order, but he was more a mystic than an activist.
Inigo, like Francis of Assisi, threw aside his upper-class cloak,
he gave his clothes to a beggar and put on the pilgrim's outfit.
He began living like a hermit in the woods, sleeping in caves and letting his
hair and his fingernails grow long and dirty.
Yes, and all this time he kept a journal, a journal of his reflections.
He indulged in eccentric penances, prayed seven hours a day, and he began to
have mystical experiences.
Once, along the path that scours the river Cardonaire, I sat down, gazing at the
waters that flowed below me.
My eyes began to open.
It was not a vision, but I was granted to understand many things.
It is impossible to enumerate the details of what I heard then.
It is enough to say that I received a great illumination from God.
This event, more than anything else, was the source of an unremitting faith in
God and of trust in himself.
All his life Inigo kept a journal, Meditations on God, which became the
famous Spiritual Exercises.
What the Spiritual Exercises are, is a way of helping people discover just
how God is speaking within them, and helping them learn to cooperate with
that leading of God.
Well, the idea is that a person is normally left on their own for a
considerable amount of time, either for an hour or so every day, or for a complete
period, perhaps of up to 30 days.
They're left on their own in silence, and then they meet with a retreat giver,
or a director, or a guide, for a period each day in which they talk about what
they're experiencing in their periods of prayer, and the kinds of ways in which
they are feeling attracted or repelled by the Gospel stories they're thinking about.
But I think it's quite important to see that the Spiritual Exercises aren't just
there to make people into Jesuits.
They're for the whole Church, and for the whole people of God, and they're a way of
helping every human person discover who they're meant to be under God.
Following pilgrimages to Rome, Venice, Jerusalem, Inigo went to
Barcelona.
He was 33, and he decided now that what he needed was education.
And he started from scratch, taking Latin, for instance, with a group of schoolboys.
Later then, he went on to the Universities of Alcalá and Salamanca.
Inigo was hauled up before the Inquisition more than once for preaching without
credentials.
So, after he was forbidden to teach without theological training, he went off
to Paris to study.
He managed to keep going, begging and so on, and he carried on with his preaching
and also with good works while at the University of Paris.
If you look at the educational history of the 16th century, there were four men who
attended the College of Montaigu at the University of Paris.
It was one of the most famous of the colleges of the old medieval University of
Paris.
It was known for the very harsh conditions in which the students lived and worked.
In fact, it was, if you'll pardon my language, it was actually described as the
cleft between the buttocks of Mother Church.
That was what it was known to these irreverent students.
And among its four most famous alumni were Erasmus, Calvin, Ignatius Loyola,
and Rabelais.
And it's very interesting that Erasmus and Rabelais hated the place and never forgot
how much they'd hated it the rest of their lives.
These were the two liberals.
The two toughies, Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, loved it.
June 1534, in the chapel of underneath the martyr, Ignatius, he was called Ignatius
now, and his companions vowed to give themselves to a life of poverty and,
if possible, to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
If not, then they'd go to Rome and put themselves at the service of the Pope.
The company of Jesus, as they called themselves, were ordained, and finally
they decided they'd go to Rome.
You must remember, religious orders were not all that popular at the time.
They were under severe criticism, even in Rome, for corruption.
And there was talk among the hierarchy of suppressing most of the orders.
So, as you can well believe, when Ignatius and his little flock arrived in Rome,
they found themselves up against stiff opposition.
However, they did make an impression on the papal court, a strong impression,
organizing help for the poor and starving in that heavy winter of 1538-39.
They went out into the streets of Rome, actually seeking out the homeless,
and gathering up the most desperate cases.
They fed and nursed and sheltered countless people.
Finally, in 1540, Pope Paul III approved the plan and, with the document Regimini
militantis ecclesiae, the Society of Jesus, as it was now officially called,
was launched.
Ignatius, now just about 50, lived here in these modest rooms, where he worked and
prayed for the rest of his life.
This is Ignatius's office, restored.
He used this file cabinet, chair and desk, and this is where, from here, he directed
his Jesuits in their unwavering service to the papacy.
The following rules should be observed to foster the true attitude of mind we ought
to have in the militant.
If we wish to proceed securely in all things, we must hold fast to the following
principle.
What seems to me white, I will believe black, if the hierarchical church so
defines.
By the time Inigo died, in 1556, a thousand men had become Jesuits.
The population was increasing, there were more and more young men around,
and the clever ones and the energetic ones, they wanted something exciting and
important to do.
And Saint Ignatius offered them this.
First of all, they tended to be recruited from the upper classes and the upper
middle classes.
They were people who came from assured, confident, and on the whole wealthy
backgrounds.
So they could talk to the great men on terms of equality.
And this has always been a very important thing about the Jesuits.
They are very urbane, they're men of the world.
They're not cloistered in any way, they move out into the world and they
know, they speak the language of the powerful and the great.
Secondly, they were, and this was a very important aspect of Saint Ignatius'
teaching, they were very, very carefully trained.
Their training took a long time, it was very strict, it was very thorough,
and it was very successful.
Perhaps of all their works, the Jesuits are best known as educators.
Everywhere they went, they set up colleges and universities.
This school, the Gregorian University in Rome, stands as the preeminent example of
the Jesuit educational system.
Right from the beginning, Jesuits felt that one should think as well as love and
that study and personal commitment were complementary rather than contradictory.
And why that was so, I think the secret is in that group around Ignatius who founded
the Jesuits.
They were at the best university of their time, Paris, and that gave us an
orientation that's never left us.
It was founded by Ignatius in 1551.
Today, there are over 400 high schools, colleges, universities all over the world,
and about a third of all Jesuits are educators.
Ignatius saw the development of the human mind as essential and natural to the
fostering of the spiritual life, theology, and secular learning as being
complementary, not contradictory.
Since the days of Ignatius, the Gregorian University has grown into a consortium of
schools with students, men and women, from all over the world.
The Biblical Institute is a highly respected school for the study of
scripture.
The Orientalia Institute, set up during the first world war, has preserved the
religious spirit and traditions of eastern Catholics, even during the communist
persecution.
Today, since the demise of Marxism, this school is redefining itself in the
service of the church in eastern Europe.
And Ignatius wanted this university to be literally a university for the world,
and it certainly carried through that dream of his.
It's a university that has students from something like a hundred nations.
Of course, now there are students that come from Latin America, from Asia,
from Africa.
In his day, the students were recruited almost exclusively from Europe itself.
The earliest Jesuits were great intellectual and educational innovators.
They brought to the skills of educating a tremendous sense of discipline and a
uniform pattern.
Ignatius didn't really know what he wanted to do.
He knew he wanted to fight the Protestant attack on the church.
He was a soldier, and he wanted to fight it with a disciplined force, and therefore
he wanted to create such a force.
But he didn't quite know, to begin with, what they ought to do.
His first idea was that they should act as stretcher bearers at the holy places and
other shrines, look after the sick, and so on.
And almost by accident, he got into the business of high-powered education.
And that essentially is what the Society of Jesus was and is about.
In the 16th century, in the 17th century, for any Catholic prince in Europe who was
prepared to fight the Reformation and to fight the Protestants, he would provide,
and the Jesuits who followed him, would provide a religious service.
They'd set up a university, they'd set up a primary school, they'd set up secondary
schools, any kind of school from the earliest age right up to early manhood.
They would set up an educational service.
All the prince or the court or the government had to do was to provide the
money.
The Jesuits would provide the expertise and the teachers.
And then after people had left university, they would provide a lifetime service of
the confessional.
The Jesuits supplied very skilled, able, highly trained people who were the
confessors of the great.
Whether they were kings, emperors, princes, archbishops, cardinals,
anyone who held great power in society could get a Jesuit confessor and the
Jesuit would guide him behind the scenes.
After some diplomatic maneuvering, Emperor Charles V and Pope Paul III
finally agreed to convene a council to deal with problems within the church.
Now this council at Trent in the Italian Alps was trying to reform the church on
the inside, at the same time tried to counter the advances of the Protestant
reformers and set the tone for meeting up with Protestantism over the next 400
years.
The Jesuits were at Trent, the Pope sent them there as advisors, setting up
agendas, influencing decisions, the Jesuits made their presence felt.
Two men who were sent as theological advisors to the bishops by Saint Ignatius
with the Pope's sponsorship, these two men, James Lainez and Alphonse Salmeron,
had considerable influence.
They had influence because they were well educated, graduates of the University of
Paris, they had studied patristic theology, they knew the writings of the
early fathers of the church, and they were strong opponents of the Lutheran version
of Christianity.
The Jesuits were seen as enemies of the Protestants and the Council of Trent,
being so strongly opposed to criticism from the reformers, was thought to be
overprotective of the Catholic Church.
So the Jesuits were seen even as creatures of Satan, demonic spew in the guise of
priests.
Yes, they were very much feared by the reformers.
They feared them because they were so successful.
You see, you have to remember that in the mid-16th century, it was a matter of some
doubt, and certainly in the minds of most Protestants, as to whether the Catholic
Church could survive at all.
The Reformation had been very successful in many parts of the world.
They felt they were the wave of the future.
What the Jesuits did was to not only, as it were, draw a line and say,
below that line, I'm talking geographically in Europe, no Protestants
shall pass, but they actually went on to the counter-offensive.
And as a result of their activities, both during the second half of the 16th
century in the first place, when they were consolidating Catholic power in Italy and
Spain, and to some extent in France, that was the first phase.
But then in the second phase during the Thirty Years' War, when they
re-consolidated Catholic power in Austria and southern Germany, and thirdly in
France itself under Louis XIV, where they effectively swung the and the
monarchy against the Huguenots, against the Protestant element there,
and drove them out through the Edict of Nantes in the 1680s.
So during those three phases, in all of which the Catholics recovered lost ground
and even drove into the Protestant bastions, the Jesuits had been probably
the most active instrument in the hands of the papacy.
So the Protestants feared them because they were highly successful.
They were the elite, the praetorian guard, the spiritual army of a resurgent
Catholicism.
So that's why the Protestants feared and hated them.
As the effect of the inside reform, stemming from the Council of Trent,
spread and spread throughout the world, Ignatius of Loyola was labeled by the
Protestants, Mark you, as the architect of the Counter-Reformation.
To some extent it is true that he was the architect of the Counter-Reformation.
Certainly what he did was to turn the Reformation on its head.
That is to say, he created poles of attraction to fight the undoubted
attraction of the Puritan spirit.
The Puritan spirit attracted through simplicity.
He created an attraction of complexity.
Ignatius and his Jesuits inspired the Baroque.
Their celebration of faith in music, art, architecture was lavish, truly
theatrical and sensual.
So in very large parts of Europe, particularly Italy, Spain, France,
southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, this Jesuit aesthetic,
as opposed to the Puritan aesthetic, had a tremendous success.
Stoneyhurst is quite international with students from all parts of the world.
At the same time it's very British and this does make sense.
You see, the Jesuits have always adapted to the local culture.
So Stoneyhurst is just as British as any other English public school, just as a
Jesuit school in Spain would be thoroughly Spanish.
However, one characteristic is the same in any Jesuit school.
They're very serious about education.
Ignatius believed that all children, whether of noble lineage or common stock,
should have first-rate academic training.
His idea, his educational plan, was a blending of the arts and sciences
with strong theological backing.
The ideal student would be keen of intellect and morally sound.
Training at Stoneyhurst is traditional and also individual.
Have a look at Father Channing Pearce and his students' treehouse project.
Well, I first came to Stoneyhurst actually as a boy of eight, which was a long time
ago.
I see anything to do with nature as being civilising.
That is, it tends to bring out what is real in people.
And I think that a very important part of education is getting your hands dirty,
getting to real things instead of just words, and to be able to make something
and to make a difference in your life.
I think that that is all very Jesuit, you know, finding God in all things,
and you've got to be where things are in order to find God.
No one knows if this is true, but it has been said, give a Jesuit a boy that is
seven and you'll have a Jesuit for life.
We often get told about St. Ignatius by the Jesuits here, and they tell us a lot
about him.
Yeah, he was born in 1491 and things like that, and you pick it up as you go along
until your knowledge of him increases when you leave.
When he argued with people he was cunning and sly, it's described as.
So I think it's very different for a holy man to be cunning and sly, so that way it
gives me a different impression of Jesuits altogether.
Well, I don't know much about St. Ignatius yet because we haven't done it,
but all I've heard is the same as them, and also I know about his motto,
Ad Memoriam Dei Gloriam.
We have to write that on the top of our pages.
When I first came to Stoneyhurst, I was struck by the enormity of the
building.
It seemed then to be such a huge place.
Interestingly enough, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was an old boy of the college,
described Stoneyhurst in Hound of the Baskervilles as Baskerville Hall.
So it's some sort of impression of the place that you enter.
It's quite a frightening but exciting feeling.
The results of the Ignatian plan of education are the same the world over.
Pride.
You do feel a great sense of, yeah, I'm a Stoney boy.
And you're known practically, your school is known around the country, probably
around the world.
And I know a lot of old boys from my country, Zambia, and they feel very proud
about the fact that they went to Stoneyhurst, and what they did at
Stoneyhurst, and what Stoneyhurst stands for.
I think you have to really think very hard about it to notice it.
But I think the sense of individualism that has actually evolved because of the
Jesuits, it's a, their way of thinking tends to be, I think it's a totally
different one than your average lay teachers.
I think it's the it's the actual lay teachers themselves that have become
influenced through the sort of Jesuit teaching that changes our lives perhaps
slightly, makes us sort of strive for what we want, which is sort of the great Jesuit
theme, I suppose.
They have a sort of interesting, if you can call it method, it seems to
work out that way, that a great emphasis is put on uniformity.
You're all the same, you're all here together, more so when the school first
began.
And in that way people then tend to charge off more into individuality, try and break
school uniform down for instance, which is like sillier dishes in a pocket
handkerchief.
But there is more of a stress here, I think, on being confident within
yourself because you're almost suppressed into conformity and uniformity.
When Queen Elizabeth II made an official visit to Stonyhurst College, Her Majesty
greeted the Jesuits very warmly indeed, in marked contrast to her predecessor,
Elizabeth I.
The people who created the Elizabethan regime, including Queen Elizabeth herself,
had lived through the very hazardous days of her half-sister Queen Mary,
during which large numbers of Protestant extremists and militants had been tried
and convicted and burnt at the stake, and others had been tortured and others
had been exiled or had gone into exile, had fled.
And those memories were still green, even towards the end of the reign,
in the minds of many old people, including Queen Elizabeth herself.
She was not an extremist, never had been, and she hated the idea of persecuting the
church.
But persecute she did, and priests had a price on their heads.
At a stage like Harvington Hall here, people went to dangerous lengths to
protect their priests.
At that time, it was high treason for any Catholic priest to live and work in
England, and punishment was hanging, drawing and quartering.
So, in houses that were owned by Catholics, secret hiding places were
built, in which the priests could hide in the event of raids by searchers.
Harvington has the finest surviving series of such places anywhere in England.
The most famous builder, Saint Nicholas Owen, was eventually caught only 10 miles
from here.
You need to remember that a house of this period didn't consist only of the state
rooms, like the withdrawing room, or of the hiding places and the chapels.
There was a large community of servants, as well as family, and this could cause
serious difficulties in security.
There are cases of priests who were betrayed by servants.
Saint Edmund Campion, a Jesuit martyr, was betrayed by a cook in the house where
he was staying.
A spy came to the house, who was an old friend of the cook, and the cook said to
him, will you go up, meaning to mass in the chapel, and so he did, and found that
the priest there was the famous and much-wanted Jesuit, Edmund Campion,
and so that was how he was arrested.
One of the tricks of the searchers was to make a great clattering of feet and
banging of doors, and then one of them would come round quietly and say,
it was safe to come out now because the searchers had gone, thanks be to God.
So to avoid that, the priest would not come out unless he recognised the voice of
someone whom he knew.
The house was surrounded by a large mob of men.
The servant rushed up to my room and warned me.
She made me come downstairs at once and showed me a hiding place underground.
I got down into it.
It was dark, dank, and cold, and so narrow I was forced to stand the entire time.
They drew closer and I could hear practically every word they said.
Here, look, they called out, a chalice and a missile.
They demanded tools to break through the wall and panelling, and then one of them
said, why waste time?
There's not enough space here for a man.
They were feared because they had been so successful elsewhere in Europe.
They were highly trained, highly motivated, extremely skilful, and as the
Potterson would say, very unscrupulous too.
So all these were mixed together, hatred, fear, respect in a way,
because they had to respect them as very efficient enemies, so that in a sense,
to use a modern parallel, it was like the CIA or the British Secret Service fighting
the KGB.
These were very skilled opponents, and they fought them with terrific
ruthlessness.
When they were found on English soil, the sentence on these priests illustrates
the savagery of government.
You must go to the place from which you came, there to remain, until you shall be
drawn through the open city of London, upon hurdles to the place of execution,
and there be hanged, and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your
entrails taken out, and burnt in your sight.
Then your heads to be cut off, and your bodies divided into four parts,
to be disposed of at Her Majesty's pleasure.
And God have mercy on your souls.
But the Jesuits received more than just the wrath of the English.
Later, in the 18th century, the rulers of Catholic Europe successfully pressured
Pope Clement to suppress them.
The stories told that the Pope's suppression of the Jesuits was due to
Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV of France.
Apparently, Louis' Jesuit confessor wouldn't grant the King absolution,
and as she gave up, well, gave up the affair.
But the King chose to give up the Jesuits rather than the mistress.
So much for folklore.
The fact is that the Jesuits became involved in all the political intrigue of
the courts of Catholic Europe.
They became the professional diplomats of Christendom.
This influence and power began to alarm other politically motivated people,
and Pope Clement, Clement XIV, finally yielded to pressure from the
Catholic crowns of Europe.
And the Jesuits were dissolved in 1773.
This struck at 23,000 Jesuits, almost as many as there are today.
They closed 800 schools and ruined missionary work and scholarly endeavors
just everywhere.
In Russia, Empress Catherine the Great, more out of spite for the Pope than
respect for the Jesuits, well, she wouldn't allow them to leave her
country.
Later, Pope Pius VII restored them in 1807, but by that time, the Jesuits had
lost most of their political influence.
Through all of this, the Jesuits were sustained by the spiritual exercises.
Every Jesuit discovers his vocation through the exercises, and certainly the
majority of Jesuits find that making a retreat every year based on these
exercises is vital to their ongoing well-being.
I was going through, I suppose, a lot of problems about who I am here at
Stonyhurst, what I'm doing, am I anybody, am I a nobody?
But there was an opportunity for a highline retreat, which is a day where you
go off and you do a lot of reflection and meditation.
Saint Ignatius would have done a lot of that.
And we went down to a Jesuit house in the north of Wales, and just the opportunity
to reflect and to think, to stop, and being able to think about who you are
and where you're going helped me a lot.
Perhaps it didn't solve my problems, but it taught me what the options were,
where I could go.
Ignatius basically gives you a set of ideas based on the Gospel, which you're
meant to think about in roughly the same sort of order.
You start off by reflecting on the mysteries of sin and our forgiveness,
and then after about 10 days or so on those, you spend a long time thinking
about the public life of our Lord, and move from that into the story of the
Passion and from there to the Resurrection.
Ignatius was more than a man of prayer.
He embraced and promoted the philosophies and ideas born of humanism and the
Renaissance.
I think his timing was just right.
I mean, he undergoes his conversion in the 1520s, and the new learning had been on
the way since the middle or the latter part of the 15th century.
So there were about 50 or 60 years of experiment behind him, and so he's coming
on the scene when the new learning that had come from the East and from Florence
had really gone through a kind of experimental period.
We still have here outside Rome the Jesuit astronomers, and they, some of them teach
every now and then at this university, and they remind me of people like Clavius
who helped to reform the calendar.
We call it the Gregorian calendar.
And there were others in the 16th century, the great missionaries who tried to adapt
the faith to ancient cultures, Matteo Ricci to China, Francis Xavier to
Japan, de Nobile to India.
Later Jesuits broadened the scope of their mission, the poet Cheryl Manley Hopkins,
Thayer de Chardin, the archaeologist and visionary, former United States
congressman Robert Drinan, the Louisiana union activist Louis Toomey.
Still other Jesuits discovered the medicinal value of quinine, developed the
magic lantern for a run of motion pictures, and they were the first to map
out the moon, and to realize the earth circles the sun.
Today the Jesuits continue to challenge the times, and not without controversy.
I would say that the major thing that has happened is that we have become aware of
the social sciences in this century.
And we have seen that, for example, the call of the gospel isn't just an
individual conversion, but also to a conversion of the structures within our
society, both nationally and internationally, which caused some people
to suffer acutely.
For a long period we thought that, well, we had no insight into sciences such
as economics or psychology or sociology, we just thought the world was built in a
certain way and we couldn't do anything about it.
With the discovery of the human sciences, we're beginning to see that actually we
can affect the way our society is structured, sociologically, economically,
ideologically, and that therefore the fulfillment of Christ's command of love
involves a commitment to work at the structural level as well.
Well, I think the Jesuits have caught the disease that the church is suffering from
at present in a particularly virulent form, and I think they have lost their
way.
I think they have abandoned, or in practice if not in theory, the real
purpose of their existence, which was to defend, to protect, and to advance the
views of the papacy.
That was their raison d'etre, and that is what they had always done with terrific
loyalty and enormous success.
And I think they have, in practice, tended to abandon that mission,
particularly under the present pope.
And instead they have done something which they have always been opposed to in the
past.
They've fallen for popular fads and fancies.
They've gone for the spirit of the age and other transient phantoms.
And in particular, they've adopted what I regard as a very foolish dictum,
the option for the poor.
There's nothing terribly new about the preferential option for the poor.
I mean, Christian disciples have always been interested in the destitute and the
marginalized.
The new element, I think, that came in the 1970s was the sense that we could actually
do something at the structural level as well as at the individual level.
We could talk about works of justice as well as works of charity.
I don't know what the option for the poor is.
In theological terms, it's poppycock, in my view.
I think it is just an excuse for adopting a number of left-wing secular policies.
And that, I think, the Jesuits or some Jesuits have tended to do.
So they've lost their way.
They've ceased to be the great standby and bulwark of the papacy.
And they have adopted a number of foolish left-wing fads and fancies.
There's certainly a difference between the promotion of justice and subscribing to
any vulgar left-wingery that just sort of happens to be around.
But it certainly should be the case that we should be very, very critical of any
kind of ideology, right-wing or left-wing, about how society is organized.
But it remains the case that you cannot be serious about the following of Christ in
our contemporary world unless you're also serious about trying to do serious work to
change the structures which oppress people.
I suppose if they were still alive, I might still be one of their critics in
some ways.
But there you could see people who had given their lives in the service of the
gospel, in the service of what they saw was right.
And I just felt immensely proud to be a member of that organization.
I think his timing was just right.
And also, I know about his motto, Ad Memoriam Dei Gloriam.
We have to write that on the top of our pages.
So they've lost their way, but they will find it again.
And when he argued with people, he was cunning and sly.
And I just felt immensely proud to be a member of that organization.
Ignatius was born into a world not unlike our own.
A world full of doubts and change.
Global change, I think they call it.
A world in which people needed leadership and continuity and strength.
It was a world of political and religious extremists claiming to have all the
answers to all the questions.
A world of upheaval.
A place where many lived in fear of violence.
It was a time rather like our own of strange new diseases, spiritual as well as
physical, and relentless old prejudices.
And still places like Stonyhurst College here have a tradition of turning back,
of looking back.
Yes, back to the man where we look for him for answers even today.
Perhaps the legacy of Ignatius is not in some simple maxim we can easily quote and
say, that's why we still listen to him.
No, perhaps his legacy is that he trusted to the individual.
And he led others to believe that our hope lay in, or shall we say, developing the
mind and our hearts, our spirits.
Yes, our spirits.
And he was confident that if we did so, this world, sometimes so dark and
confusing, might one of these days be full of full of hope and life.
And I think it can be said that there is always a Jesuit for every circumstance and
every occasion.
And looking back is sometimes a way of looking forward.