The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [30]
When Iñigo, a natural leader who was consumed with his new religion, formed the small Latin Quarter group, Francisco laughed at him, found his sayings trite and his vows of poverty ridiculous. The once vain Iñigo, now lame and aging, showed a new tolerance for this tall young athlete whose family had been his enemies in war. Two decades later, Iñigo’s secretary would write that Iñigo referred to Francisco as “the roughest clay he ever had to knead.” According to legend, after two years of intellectual jousting, with Francisco mocking the less educated Iñigo’s attempts to preach, and Iñigo flattering the younger man’s vanity, Iñigo finally won him over.
On August 15, 1534, Iñigo and his group of seven founded their new order, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits. The founding ceremony, typically Jesuit and, perhaps, typically Basque, took place by a crypt in Montmartre, a subterranean site beneath the hill north of Paris, said to be of pagan significance. The Jesuits, whose vows were simply chastity, poverty, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, would become known for a tendency toward the occult but also for their strict discipline. They shunned the wearing of habits and renounced loyalty to local Church hierarchy. But they were fiercely loyal to the pope, leading the orthodox Counter-Reformation that tried to reclaim Protestant populations. True to the traditions of the Loyola family, the head of the order bears the title of general.
Ignatius was one of the Catholic Church’s great mystics, given to visions and trances. His eyes would run with tears for hours as he tried to recite prayers. The Jesuits became the first worldwide order, accomplishing more than Queen Isabella’s knights ever had to carry out her dream of spreading Catholicism to the new global Spanish Empire. In his battle against the Reformation, Ignatius made Jesuits in the tradition of medieval romance, knights who went forth in the world to conquer lands for the Church. Francisco, known as Francis Xavier, was his leading knight. Once the handsome and gregarious Francis, still only thirty-four, sailed from Lisbon for Asia in 1541, Ignatius would never see him again. Francis was a missionary in Japan, the Molucca Islands, and Malaysia, and died in 1552 en route to China. He is remembered as the patron saint of missionaries. After his death, other Jesuits went to Africa, to the Caribbean, and to the Americas.
In 1556 Ignatius fell ill, this time deteriorating so quickly that he died without receiving last rites. At the time there were 1,000 Jesuits.
The infanta Catalina, who had become the queen of Portugal, continued to support the Jesuits after Ignatius’s death. In 1622, Loyola was canonized Saint Ignatius and his fellow Basque, Francis Xavier, was canonized alongside him.
Controversy has always accompanied the order. Known in Latin America as the preachers of revolution, they traveled up the unknown rivers of South America and tried to establish a model Christian society based on collectivism among the indigenous people they found there. In Europe they became, like Iñigo de Loyola, conservative-leaning and friendly to monarchs, although the Spanish Bourbon monarchs distrusted them. The French Bourbon monarchs, however, enlisted them as confessors to the royal house. Many progressive movements were vehemently anti-Jesuit, and their reputation in France was so reactionary that when Emile Zola wrote his famous 1898 defense of Alfred Dreyfus, “J’accuse,” he called the military establishment that had persecuted