Note: If joining “Saintly Influencers” for the first time today, please read the footnote, explaining its context, purpose, and aim.
An axiom of Christian history states that God raises up saints to influence the Church—to restore and repair—when she is in most dire need. Aside from the Apostolic Age, no period of Church history was more desperate for saintly influencers than the Renaissance and Baroque Age (roughly 1400 to 1660). During this age, Christendom was cleaved by the Protestant Reformation. Beyond that, modern western culture has been conspicuously marked by the erasure of a connection to the God of biblical revelation.
Indeed, there were numerous men and women of heroic virtue, some canonized and others unknown, who met the need. Among all these, one community of men over and above all the others seems to have influenced cultures for Jesus Christ. By the work of individual members and as a corporate community, the Society of Jesus—commonly known as the Jesuits—influenced the spread and application of Christian teaching and spirituality.
The Society formed unofficially in 1534 when a group of seven students at the University of Paris—some as young as nineteen or twenty years old—took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. By 1540, they had received permission to be ordained priests along with recognition by the See of Rome. From there, they set out to re-evangelize Europe and share the Gospel in recently discovered portions of the globe, such as the Far East and the Americas. Their influence spread rapidly, and their intellectual and spiritual formation seemed to re-ignite a fire that had languished in the Church. So extensive was this influence that two of the early Jesuits identified below are now listed among the most important teachers throughout the Church’s history.
The first influencer, the recognized leader of the seven founders, is Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). Ignatius stands as a giant of the reformation of Christianity in the mid-sixteenth century. After his own significant reformation—his conversion from worldly vanity—he founded what would become the largest religious order in the world, establishing mission sites all over the globe. Specifically, Jesuits have been leaders in the establishment of universities and other schools of advanced learning. In fact, several of the influencers listed below provide the namesakes for some well-known universities in the United States.
Still, Ignatius’ influence extends into a much more personal realm. His teachings on the spiritual life, and the practical tools he developed for the human connection with the divine, have left the deepest impact on our culture. He is best known, perhaps, for the Spiritual Exercises, which he wrote shortly after his conversion and after having taken a lengthy retreat at Manresa, Spain. All Jesuits make a thirty-day Spiritual Exercises at some point in their formation; but many other priests and laity who are unable to take a thirty-day retreat can make a Spiritual Exercises that lasts eight days. The Exercises foster conversion and ignite spiritual vigor in individuals, which overflows to broader social circles.
Two other cornerstones of Ignatius’s spiritual teachings are beneficial for anyone who seeks holiness. The first, the Rules for Discernment, is a set of principles by which a person can learn to make practical decisions while navigating the vicissitudes of the interior life. The second, the Examen Prayer, is a daily exercise meant to allow a person to recognize and understand God’s movements—and his response—in his life throughout any given day. Quite simply, these are two of the very best tools in the proverbial storehouse of Christian spirituality to keep a person moving in the right direction toward his ultimate spiritual destination.
A second Jesuit influencer was Peter Canisius (1521-1597), one of the earliest attachés of the Society. During the Reformation-era, Canisius was instrumental in sharing the doctrines of Jesus and the Church with the peoples of northern Europe, many of whom had been led away from the Catholic Faith by Protestants. In 1552, Fr. Ignatius wrote a letter to Canisius expressing a deep need for catechisms. Within three years, Fr. Canisius had begun publishing brief catechisms in the vernacular languages of northern Europe, several of which are still in print to this day. Canisius’ A Small Catechism for Catholics employed a question-answer format that provided a model for the oft-remembered Baltimore Catechism; and the structure has been closely duplicated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which recapitulated two millennia of Catholic teaching under the headings of belief, worship, morality, and prayer.
Another saintly Jesuit, Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), joined the society at just eighteen years old. After his priestly ordination, he became a gifted and illustrious teacher at the prominent Catholic University of Louvain. As the religious conflict continued across northern Europe into the late-sixteenth century, he wrote Disputationes de Controversiis to provide theological arguments in defense of the Church. His method served as the foundation for the work of apologists in this own era and down to our own age of history.
Bellarmine is probably best known in the west for his role in the Galileo “affair,” which began in the early 1600s, when he was a cardinal of the Church. For decades at least, students in history courses have been handed Bellarmine’s “Letter on Galileo’s Theories,” written in 1615 to a staunch advocate, like Galileo, of the Copernican theory of the cosmos. From the Enlightenment forward, modern philosophes and critics of the Church have used it to harangue the Bride of Christ as “anti-science” and “opposed to progress.” Still, the document presents the Church as a prudent body, always trying to be faithful to biblical revelation.
Beyond the Galileo affair, Bellarmine’s lasting influence in the west happened because of his spiritual writings from his last years. In 1618, he wrote The Seven Last Words from the Cross, a meditation on seven statements spoken by Jesus during His Crucifixion on Calvary. The meditations are powerful and valuable in and of themselves, and the idea became deeply influential for Catholics in America as it was carried forward by Ven. Fulton Sheen (who studied at Louvain) in his early radio broadcasting and book publishing.
The very next year, just two years before his own death, Bellarmine wrote The Art of Dying Well. This was the venerable cardinal’s effort to draw forward the axiom so prevalent throughout Church history: Memento Mori. In the introduction to the text, Bellarmine identified that persons begin to consider how well they have lived as they are faced with death and, all too often, very infrequently before that. More specifically, his aim was to present the seven sacraments of the Church as the means of sanctifying grace that helps us to live well so that we may die well. Our own present-day Christian culture would do well to heed Bellarmine’s advice: the art of dying well is the noblest of all the arts in our culture; and we need habitual grace to live well and be ready to die well.
Other saintly influencers from the Society took the teaching and merciful love of Jesus into uncharted territory. Emulating the witness of another founding brother, Francis Xavier (1506-1552), missionaries brought the love and teaching of Jesus to both American continents in the early- and mid-1600s. St. Peter Claver, for example, ministered in Cartegena, Colombia, to the exploited slaves who had been trafficked across the Atlantic.
In North America, Jesuits exerted an influence that remains noteworthy to this day. Names such as Marquette and Joliet come immediately to mind. Yet, two other French missionaries exhibited heroic virtue in evangelizing the Huron and Iroquois tribes of the continental interior (near the eastern portion of the Great Lakes). Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649) and Isaac Jogues (1607-1646) exerted an influential witness that led to the conversions of many in these tribes. Both exhibited a holy joy and a willingness to give their lives for the Faith and for the conversion of souls. In a letter to his mother, Jogues wrote:
Nothing can equal the satisfaction we enjoy in our hearts while we impart the knowledge of the true God . . . I have always felt a great love for this kind of life, for such an excellent profession, for one so closely akin to that of the apostles. Had I to work for this happiness alone, I would exert myself to the utmost to obtain this favor, and I would be more than willing to give a thousand lives for it. (Roustang, 2006, pp. 229-230)
After much terrible suffering, including beatings with clubs and fingers being bitten off, both men would give their lives for their Lord and His mission. Perhaps their greatest influence is as witnesses is for us today, as we take up the mission to spread the Gospel amidst a culture that is frequently openly hostile to Christianity—and to the Catholic Faith in particular.
From the era of the Society’s founding through the last five centuries, these, along with scores of other Jesuits, have influenced the spiritual, intellectual, and missionary life of the Church and individual Christians around the world. Most recently, a Jesuit from South America—Pope Francis—brought that missionary spirituality to the Church for over a decade, which many people appreciated, respected, and even lauded. The Jesuits’ teaching and witness have made us more capable of answering objections, doing robust and rigorous study, and sharing the true Faith with foreign cultures. By learning from the examples of the saints who were spiritual sons of Ignatius, we, too, can influence the culture Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.
[1] Learning about the lives of holy men and women is a common and helpful spiritual practice. But while we might take some time to consider saints in their historical contexts, it’s easy to look past the ways their lives and actions influence our own present culture. Saints are made within specific cultural, historical circumstances and, just as importantly, they have borne deep impact on this current age of history.
Thus, this series seeks to identify the saints from the history of our Church who have borne the greatest influence on our present culture, that is, the way we think about and experience the Christian life in our current era, and in our segment of geography (i.e., the West and, in particular, the United States). This series delineates Christian history into eight ages: the Apostolic Age (A.D. 35-100); the Early Patristic Age (A.D. 100-480); the Later Patristic Age (A.D. 480-800); the Age of Early Christendom (A.D. 800-1200); the Age of Later Christendom (A.D. 1200-1400); the Renaissance and Baroque Age (A.D. 1400-1660); the Modern Age (A.D. 1660-1900); and the Post-Modern Age (the twentieth century). Each essay within this series will examine a handful of saints who sought and found holiness within their historical epochs and who, in turn, have borne an outsized influence on the ways Catholic-Christians in the third millennium understand and live the Catholic Faith. These few in each essay are chosen from among many, many other saints whose influence could be included in this series as well.
The great hope is that learning these influences gives us inspiration and stamina as we seek to answer the call to holiness in the world and the culture of the twenty-first century.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
