members to be involved in active and varied tasks––shock troops available
for any mission the Holy Father and Holy Mother Church would ask of
them.
The constitutions required total obedience towards the General of the
Company, who was elected for life. In his turn, the General promised entire
submission to the Pope. In the words of Ignatius, “Those who live under
obedience are to allow themselves to be moved and directed by Divine
Providence through their superiors just as though they were a dead body.”
Though the Company possessed a strict hierarchy, any member could
communicate directly with the General.
If the constitutions were the governing laws of the Company, the Spiritual
Exercises were its soul. Composed by Ignatius in the wild solitude of
Manresa, it is a manual of precepts and maxims to be used on retreats to aid
the soul in its choice of vocation and along the road of sanctification. The
Exercises are to be practised, not simply read through. In sanctioning their
use, Pope Paul III described the Exercises as “full of piety and holiness,
very useful and salutary, tending to the edification and spiritual progress of
the faithful.”
Ignatius had no wish for his spiritual sons in the Company to be raised to
episcopal honors. Rather, he desired for them another glory: that
persecution and suffering might be their lot. On one occasion Ignatius was
radiant after a long meditation. Asked why this was so he replied, “Our
Lord has deigned to assure me that, in consequence of my earnest prayer to
this intention, the Society will never cease to enjoy the heritage of His
Passion in the midst of contradictions and persecutions.”
Being founded during the first decades of the Reformation, it was
inevitable that the Company of Jesus should have a major role in combating
Protestantism. The Jesuits were intent upon reunifying a Christendom now
shattered by the various heresies of the innovators. Heresy had spread
rapidly, due to the weakening of knowledge and practice of the Catholic
Faith among western Europeans, a weakening caused by the humanism of
the Renaissance. Education was seen a principal means towards redressing
this crisis.
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