Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius told his own story to a fellow Jesuit between 1553 and 1555 (Ignatius, Autobiography preface of the writer, pp. 9–14). Until his twenty-sixth year, he said, he was given to the vanities of the world and to soldiering; wounded in the defence of Pamplona, he read a life of Christ and lives of the saints during his recovery and began to love spiritual things (Ignatius, Autobiography pp. 19–24). At Paris he won Peter Faber and Francis Xavier by giving them the Exercises, and with his companions resolved to go to Jerusalem or, failing that, to put themselves at the pope’s disposal (Ignatius, Autobiography pp. 122, 126).

His Spiritual Exercises open with the principle that man is created to praise, reverence and serve God and by this means to save his soul (Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises Principle and Foundation). The bull of Paul III that approved the Society of Jesus Is Founded names him first of the ten companions and describes them as priests and masters of arts of the University of Paris (Paul III, Regimini militantis Ecclesiae § 1).