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Appearing below are the concluding paragraphs of the letter Pedro Arrupe sent to all the members of the Society of Jesus following his debilitating stroke in 1981. The letter emerged from an address he had given earlier that February at the end of a program hosted by the Ignatian Center of Spirituality at the Jesuit […]

Paschase Broët was born into a wealthy family in Northern France in roughly 1500. He traveled to Paris in 1532 to begin his university studies, where he met Ignatius of Loyola, Jean Codure, Pierre Favre, Claude Jay, Simão Rodrigues, and Francis Xavier. These seven men made the same vows together in a Montmartre church in

The following is an excerpt of a manuscript by Jerónimo Nadal on the spirit and practice of prayer. It is unclear if Nadal merely wrote this text (with assistance from Diego Jiménez) or delivered it, but Nadal edited it in 1561 or 1562. The selections below articulate Nadal’s contention that a Jesuit must reconcile a

In December 1551, Ignatius had his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco write to Antonio Araoz, the provincial of Spain, about the Society’s rapidly developing educational apostolate. What resulted was a concentrated epitome of the early Society’s thinking about this enterprise. Polanco swiftly covers issues of “method” (founding, administration, faculty, structure, content), and “advantages,” both for

The official Directory of the Spiritual Exercises was published in 1599. The directory was the culmination of study and experimentation through commissions over the course of four generalates. A committee appointed by the Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (1593-94) appointed the committee that ultimately produced the official directory. To mark the occasion,

The delegates at the Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus gathered in the summer of 1565, in part, to elect a success to Diego Laínez as the Jesuits’ superior general. They chose Francis Borgia, a former duke of Gandía. Borgia became the third superior general, “smitten by the sword of responsibility.” Borgia delivered

Five months after Ignatius’s death on July 31, 1556, Jerómino Nadal gave two talks to Jesuit scholastics in the Collegio Romano. The talks came at the request of Diego Laínez, who served as the vicar general of the Society of Jesus following the death of Ignatius. Nadal explains, in the following excerpts, to the men