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Ignatius uses this letter as a reproof to a discontented temporal coadjutor brother. Giovanni Battista Guidini was the buyer at the college of Padua, and he was agitating to study for the priesthood. Several letters between the rector at Padua and Ignatius were exchanged on the matter. On the same day he wrote to Guidini […]

As the rector at Leuven, Adrian Adriaenssens frequently consulted Ignatius on a variety of questions. In this letter, Ignatius addresses Adriaenssens’s problem of how to provide the proper food for his scholastics who are of different nationalities and physical constitutions. While Ignatius recommends having all get used to the ordinary local diet, he is clear

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

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

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

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

After the Spiritual Exercises, perhaps until the publication and translation of his “autobiography,” the writings of Ignatius were perhaps best known for this letter, commonly known as the “Letter on Obedience” to the Province of Portugal. Generations of Jesuits heard it read at table once a month in their refectories. Ignatius writes here during a

In 1552, the Portuguese province experienced a breakdown of obedience in its members, arising, in part, because the previous provincial (Simão Rodrigues) was unable or unwilling to take the necessary corrective measures. To solve the problem of disobedience, Ignatius wrote the following letter asking that Diego Miró, the new provincial, dismiss from the Society those

King Ferdinand I requested that the Jesuits come to Vienna in 1551. The success of the Jesuits in teaching there led to a discussion of the ways to restore the decayed faculty of theology at the University of Vienna, so as to provide Germany with educated Catholic priests. In this letter, sent by commission to

In this letter, Ignatius replies to a number of questions from Antonio Brandão, a Portuguese scholastic who had accompanied Simão Rodrigues to Rome. The original questions dealt with practical questions, some of which Ignatius addresses at the end of the letter by simply noting that they “are more dependent on circumstances.” Of note is Ignatius’s