by Wyatt North
– St. Hilary of Poitiers
Hilary was born and raised a pagan, but his search for meaning in life led him to the Scriptures where he found the answers he was seeking. He converted and was chosen by the people and clergy of Poitiers (in present-day France) to serve as bishop. Hilary lived during the time of the Arian controversy and was exiled to the East in 356 for failing to support their condemnation of St. Athanasius. While in exile, Hilary spent his time studying and writing. Released from exile after three years, he traveled through Greece and Italy on his way home, preaching against the Arians along the way. Back in Poitiers, he started writing hymns, as he’d seen how effectively the hymns of the East were used as pro-Arian propaganda. His were the first Western hymns that can be attributed to a known writer. Hilary died in 367 or 368 and was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1851.
I
“I have no taste for corruptible food nor for the pleasures of this life. I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, who was of the seed of David; and for drink I desire his blood, which is love incorruptible.”
– St. Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius was consecrated as the second Bishop of Antioch around 69 A.D. by the Apostle Peter. What is known about his life and works comes primarily from the seven letters he wrote to the Christians in the communities he passed through while being taken to Rome to face martyrdom during the reign of Emperor Trajan. Ignatius was a disciple of the Apostle John and was a staunch defender of the early Church. In the year 107 he was sentenced to be devoured by wild beasts in the Coliseum because of his refusal to renounce Christianity. The long journey under guard to Rome gave him ample opportunity to write his letters to encourage, instruct, and inspire Christians in the communities where they stopped throughout Asia Minor and Greece. Arriving in Rome on the last day of the games, Ignatius went without fear to his death and was killed immediately by two ravenous lions. St. Ignatius of Antioch was the first to refer to the community of Christians as the “Catholic Church,” for the fact that it was open to anyone wanting to follow Jesus.
“God gives each one of us sufficient grace ever to know His holy will, and to do it fully.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
St. Ignatius of Loyola didn’t consider a religious life until he was about 30. He was born into a Spanish Basque family of minor nobility and grew up dreaming of glory on the battlefield, but that was not meant to be. Spain was at war with France, and in 1521, Ignatius was seriously wounded in a battle the Spanish troops were losing. He was carried home and underwent months of painful treatments and bed rest. He asked for something to read to take his mind of the pain and boredom. He expected tales of knighthood and courtly love, like The Song of Roland or El Cid, but he was given a book about the life of Jesus and a book of stories about saints. Until then, Ignatius hadn’t been very devout. He believed in God and went to Mass, but as he read about the saints, he was fascinated by their deeds and their devotion to God. During the remainder of his recovery, he thought a lot about the good he could do in the world if he made use of the gifts God had given him. He prayed, and he thought about his life up to that point, and he felt that he was being called to God’s service.
“Few souls understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves unreservedly to Him and if they were to allow His grace to mold them accordingly.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
The book Ignatius had read about the life of Jesus had a profound effect on him because it describes a spiritual exercise that he found very helpful to him in discerning his calling and deciding to enter religious life. The exercise involved imagining oneself present during the major events in Christ’s life. Ignatius found it so effective that he began devising his own spiritual exercises. He kept a diary of his own spiritual journey over the years, and he drew upon it in writing his book, The Spiritual Exercises, which earned him a reputation as an expert in spiritual direction.
“The vigor with which you resist the enemy will be the measure of the reward which will follow the combat.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
When Ignatius was well enough to leave his sick room, he kept vigil for three days in Santa Maria de Montserrat, a Benedictine monastery, and then laid his sword in front of a ceramic tile depiction of the Black Madonna. He gave away everything else, shedding his old life and embarking on a new one dressed in a beggar’s garb. He made a deal to work in a hospital in exchange for a place to sleep and relied on begging for food. He spent as much time as he could in an isolated cave where he could do his spiritual exercises without disturbance or distraction. During the ten months that he lived this way, Ignatius worked his way through his feelings and fears and gained an understanding of God’s plan for him.
“More determination is required to subdue the interior man than to mortify the body; and to break one's will than to break one's bones.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
Ignatius knew that to carry out what he believed to be his mission, converting non-believers to Catholicism, he would need a different kind of education than he’d received as a child. For one thing, Latin was the language of the Church, and he didn’t know a word of it. So, he returned to Barcelona and, at 30, ended up learning Latin in a grammar school class of young children. Once he’d mastered Latin and some other basic classes, Ignatius moved on to study at universities and loved to talk about spiritual matters with others. It was inevitable that he would come to the attention of the Inquisition. He was accused of preaching without having the necessary training in theology, which could result in spreading misinformation or causing misunderstanding. That would be considered heresy. But after three different bouts of questioning by Inquisitors, Ignatius was always found innocent.
“Teach us to give and not count the cost.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
At the age of 38, Ignatius enrolled in the College of St. Barbe of the University of Paris. He earned his master’s degree when he was 44 and would have continued on for a doctorate, but he was rejected because he was considered too old. He shared quarters in Paris with Peter Faber and Frances Xavier. As their friendship grew, Ignatius shared his religious exercises with them. Word of their activities spread, and other men joined them. The group called themselves “Friends in the Lord.” They had a common goal of going to the Holy Land to convert non-believers. Given the political and military situation at the time, the Friends in the Lord shifted their destination to Rome. When they presented themselves to the pope in 1540, Pope Paul III approved Ignatius and his friends as a religious order. The others convinced Ignatius to be their first leader, though he thought himself unworthy of the position. Thus, the Friends in the Lord became the Society of Jesus, known to many as Jesuits.
“Here is the difference between the joys of the world and the cross of Jesus Christ: after having tasted the first, one is disgusted with them; and on the contrary, the more one partakes of the cross, the greater the thirst for it.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
Given that their first members came together as university students and their common interest in converting non-believers, it was only natural that the Society of Jesus would focus on education. They believed that education and reason were essential to fighting heresy and bringing people into the Church. The schools the order established employed a pedagogic model similar to the formal, highly structured model they were familiar with from their time at the College of St. Barbe of the University of Paris. Under Ignatius’s leadership, the Society of Jesus established 35 schools.
“To use profitably for our neighbor's salvation the gifts nature has given us, they must be actuated from within and draw their strength there from.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
During his long recuperation from his battle wounds, Ignatius had a vision of the Blessed Virgin holding baby Jesus. The intensity of his feelings at the sight of such purity filled him with disgust for the sins he committed
during his youth and his military life. He knew that the strength of his aversion to the mere idea of his past sins of the flesh was proof that the vision had been sent by God to help him realize there was a purer love, the love between God and His children.
“Who could count all those who have had wealth, power, honor? But their glory, their riches were only lent to them, and they wore themselves out in preserving and increasing that which they were forced to abandon one day.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
The Jesuit Constitutions that Ignatius wrote stressed absolute self-denial and obedience, which are consistent with his own sense of order and military discipline. Translated from the Latin, the motto established for the Order was “as if a dead body,” meaning “as well-disciplined as a corpse.” The Constitutions were adopted in 1553, three years before Ignatius would die in Rome. It was an order with no monasteries, as its members were meant to take action in the world, not cloister themselves away from the world.
“We should speak to God as a friend speaks to his friend, or a servant to his master, sometimes asking a favor, sometimes accusing ourselves of our faults, sometimes laying before Him all that concerns us, our thoughts, our doubts, our projects, and our dispositions, and asking counsel from Him in all these things.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
When Ignatius and his group of Friends in the Lord were on the way to Rome to seek a mission from the Pope, they stopped at a small chapel. In the chapel, Ignatius had a vision of The Eternal Father and his Son, and heard the Father telling him He would be favorable to Ignatius and his followers in Rome. And then he heard the Father tell the Son to take Ignatius as his servant. Finally, he heard the Son speak to his heart, telling him that he wanted Ignatius himself to serve “us” – Father and Son.
“Go and set the whole world on fire with the fire of Divine love.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
When Ignatius told his group in 1539 that they would carry out whatever mission the Pope gave them when they presented themselves to him in Rome, he warned that they could end up being scattered to distant lands. This is, in fact, what happened. At first Pope Paul II asked Ignatius to send six men to the East to convert non-believers, but when Ignatius pointed out that sending six would limit his ability to send anyone to the other areas where Calvinism was spreading, Francis Xavier, Ignatius’s old roommate, was sent to India with another man, and it was the last the two friends would ever see of each other.
“Take it for a principle to concede readily in the beginning of a conversation with those whose aspirations are only earthly; but reserve yourself for the end and try to cover with a layer of gold the metal of their conversation, whatsoever it may be.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
From 1547 until his death, Ignatius had a trusted private secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, who helped him with his writing. Ignatius generated an enormous amount of correspondence, and as his health deteriorated, some of the burden of writing hundreds of letters to some of the most prominent personages of the time shifted to Juan. The secretary also helped Ignatius finish getting the Spiritual Exercises ready for publication. Its lasting popularity is the reason for St. Ignatius being made the patron saint of spiritual retreats.
“Place before your eyes as models for imitation, not the weak and cowardly, but the fervent and courageous.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
In his later years, Ignatius suffered great pain from a variety of ailments, including gallstones and problems with his liver, and he was often confined to bed. On more than one occasion during the last five or six years of his life, he was thought to be dying, and he grew progressively weaker and frailer. In July of 1556, he was taken to a farm in the countryside to see if he would benefit from the fresh air, but within a couple of weeks he was moved back to La Strada, and he died there four days later. The immediate cause of death was malaria, which broke out in Rome periodically and was referred to as the Roman Fever. Ignatius died as dawn was breaking, before he could be given the last rites. At the time of his death, the Society of Jesus had more than a thousand members.
“Before choosing, let us examine well whether the attachment we feel for an object springs solely from the love of God.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
Ignatius believed that the way to convert non-believers was to connect with them through something that is familiar and comfortable to them. One of his conversions came about through a game of billiards. A French Doctor of Theology challenged him to a game. Ignatius accepted the challenge on the condition that if the doctor won, Ignatius would be his servant for a month and do whatever the doctor asked of him. But if Ignatius won, the doctor would have to do only one thing for him. It was a daring bet for Ignatius, who knew nothing about billiards. Still, Ignatius did win, and he asked only one thing of the doctor—that he complete the Spiritual Exercises. It took the doctor a month to do so, and through the process, he became a convert.
“Truth always ends by victory; it is not unassailable, but invincible.”
– St. Ignatius of Loyola
Ignatius was placed in a small wooden shrine which was buried in the Maria della Strada Church that had been his base in Rome. Two years later that church was demolished and replaced with the larger Church of the Gesu, where Ignatius was reinterred. Beatified in 1609 and canonized in 1622, St. Ignatius of Loyola is the patron of Catholic soldiers, the Basque Country, the Society of Jesus, soldiers, educators and education, the Military Ordinate of the Philippines, and several dioceses and municipalities.
“My confidence is placed in God who does not need our help for accomplishing his designs. Our single endeavor should be to give ourselves to the work and to be faithful to him, and not to spoil his work by our shortcomings.”
– St. Isaac Jogues
French-born Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues arrived in Quebec, Canada in 1636 and spent the next six years working with other missionaries to convert the Huron Indians around the Great Lakes. In 1642 he led an expedition to Quebec to obtain supplies. On the way back to the mission, the party was ambushed and captured by a band of Iroquois, enemies of the Hurons. The captives were tortured, and Isaac’s assistant, Rene Goupil, and their Christian converts were killed. Isaac spent thirteen months as a slave of the Iroquois until, aided by Dutch Calvinists, he escaped and returned to France. Received with great honors at court, he was named a martyr by Pope Urban VII because of the torture he had suffered, which included the mutilation of his hands. (Several of his fingers had been bitten off.) Within a few months, Isaac returned to negotiate peace with his former captors, resulting in a treaty. He went back to Quebec but after a brief stay once more sought out the Iroquois with the goal of converting them. While he was in Quebec, however, illness and crop failure had turned the Iroquois against the missionaries. Once again, he was captured, but this time he was martyred by decapitation. St. Isaac Jogues was canonized in 1930 with seven other North American martyrs, including St. Rene Goupil.
“Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us... If a man wants to be always in God's company, he must pray regularly and read regularly. When we pray, we talk to God; when we read, God talks to us.”
– St. Isidore of Seville
St. Isidore of Seville lived in a time when the legacies of the Roman Empire were in danger of disappearing in a Spain that had been controlled by Goths for nearly 200 years. The modern world is indebted to him for preserving much knowledge that might otherwise have been lost to us over the intervening centuries. Isidore, regarded as the most learned man of his age, devoted the last years of his life to creating an encyclopedia of all existing knowledge, which he called Etymologiae and is sometimes referred to as Origins. He acted more as compiler and curator than as author, pulling together material, both ancient and modern, from 154 different authors, both Christian and pagan. St. Isidore’s encyclopedia served as a textbook for nine centuries! It solidified his standing as the last of the great Latin Fathe
rs of the Church. The encyclopedia was the capstone to a life devoted largely to bringing together the disparate cultural influences of the time into a blended Spanish civilization.
“Do not permit yourself to be a spectacle for the gossip of others; do not allow your honor to be degraded. Do not associate with vain people. Avoid the bad; rebuff the indolent. Flee overmuch association with men, especially those who are more inclined to vice.”