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Emerio de Bonis was a twenty-five-year-old scholastic strongly troubled by temptations against chastity. He had been in the Society for five years and felt overly uncertain about himself. He revealed his state of soul to Ignatius. De Bonis received the following reply from Ignatius, written on his behalf by Juan Alfonso de Polanco. Ignatius calls […]

In this letter to Lorenzo Bresciani, Ignatius explains how the Society of Jesus “regards the mingling of human attachments with charity as imperfect.” Bresciani had reportedly given rosaries and an error-filled dialogue to certain ladies, signs of preferential treatment to which Ignatius had found objectionable. For more sources from Ignatius, please visit the Letters of Ignatius

Ignatius cared deeply for the apostolic work of reforming the houses of members of religious orders. During Ignatius’s lifetime, Jesuits carried out this work in places as far apart as Sicily, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Cardinal Marcello Cervini (later Pope Marcellus II) charged Ponce Cogordan with the reform of a monastery of Benedictine nuns

A scholastic at the Jesuit college in Ferrara, Bartolomeo Romano was dissatisfied with conditions there and wanted to be moved. The house at Ferrara certainly experienced its troubles. The four Jesuits there were overworked, and the town’s citizens were becoming disillusioned with the Jesuits. Ignatius had written to the superior, suggesting ways to improve the

The local inquisition in Venice forbade any priests under the age of thirty-six from hearing women’s confessions. The Society of Jesus, however, enjoyed the right, by papal authority, to hear anyone’s confession. Ignatius did not want to press the dispute publicly. So he arranged that for the only Jesuit in Venice above the minimum age

Teutonio de Braganza was a member of the high Portuguese nobility, the stepbrother of the Duke of Braganza. Once he had decided to enter the Society, he had to overcome the opposition of his family. In the Society at last, he became a partisan of Simão Rodrigues in the troubles among the Jesuits in Portugal.

Jerónimo Doménech, the provincial of Sicily, had complained both in writing to Ignatius and by word of mouth to others about the lack of manpower he had to carry on the works for which he was responsible. Ignatius’s reply to Doménech serves as a strikingly realistic account of the penury in quantity and qualifications of

A Neapolitan woman had started a home for six or seven abandoned girls, whom she brought to the Jesuit church for the sacraments. She rented a house next door to the Jesuits, where the girls’ windows looked onto the men’s rooms. When she refused to move, the Jesuit superior, Alfonso Salmerón, threatened to deny the

Along with Francis Xavier, Gaspar Berze (or Barzaeus) was one of the great Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth century. Before entering the Society, the Dutch Berze had served in the army of Emperor Charles V, lived as a hermit at Montserrat, and worked in the royal treasury of Portugal. With the following letter, Ignatius has

In the letter here, Ignatius offers a program to offset Protestant propaganda in German-speaking lands and in France. Ignatius’s program against heresy has three parts: the creation of a “summary theology” to be taught at all educational levels, the spread of Jesuit schools, and the writing of popular tracts to counter the Protestant literature. Although