The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [109]
Francis Xavier was far more resistant to change than Peter Favre had been. Only after Peter left their lodgings to visit his family, when Ignatius was alone with the proud Spaniard, was he able to slowly break down Xavier’s stubborn resistance. Legend has it that Ignatius quoted a line from the New Testament, “What does it profit them if they gain the world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” As John O’Malley writes in The First Jesuits, Francis’s conversion was “as firm as Favre’s but more dramatic because his life to that point had shown signs of more worldly ambitions.”
It is impossible to read the journals and letters of these three men—Ignatius the founder, Xavier the missionary, and Favre the spiritual counselor—without noticing the differences in temperaments and talents.
In later years Ignatius would become primarily an administrator, guiding the Society of Jesus through its early days, spending much of his time laboring over the Jesuit Constitutions. Xavier became the globe-trotting missionary sending back letters crammed with hair-raising adventures to thrill his brother Jesuits. (And the rest of Europe, too; Xavier’s letters were the equivalent of action-adventure movies for Catholics of the time.) Favre, on the other hand, spent the rest of his life as a spiritual counselor sent to spread the Catholic faith during the Reformation. His work was more diplomatic, requiring artful negotiation through the variety of religious wars at the time.
Alike in Spirit and in Love
Francis Xavier writes from India, in 1545, to his Jesuit friends in Rome, expressing love for his faraway friends:
God our Lord knows how much more consolation my soul would have from seeing you than from my writing such uncertain letters as these to you because of the great distance between these lands and Rome; but since God has removed us, though we are so much alike in spirit and in love, to such distant lands, there is no reason . . . for a lessening of love and care in those who love each other in the Lord.
Their letters reveal how different were these three personalities. They also make it easy to see how much they loved one another. “I shall never forget you,” wrote Ignatius in one letter to Francis. And when, during his travels, Xavier received letters from his friends, he would carefully cut out their signatures and carried them “as a treasure,” in the words of his biographer Georg Schurhammer, S.J.
The varied accomplishments of Ignatius, Francis, and Peter began with the commitment they made to God and to one another in 1534. In a chapel in the neighborhood of Montmartre in Paris, the three men, along with four other new friends from the university—Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Simon Rodrigues, and Nicolás Bobadilla—pronounced vows of poverty and chastity together. Together they offered themselves to God. (The other three men who would round out the list of the “First Jesuits,” Claude Jay, Jean Codure, and Paschase Broët, would join after 1535.)
Even then, friendship was foremost in their minds. Laínez noted that though they did not live in the same rooms, they would eat together whenever possible and have frequent friendly conversations, cementing what one Jesuit writer called “the human bond of union.” In a superb article in the series Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, titled “Friendship in Jesuit Life,” Charles Shelton, the professor of psychology, writes, “We might even speculate whether the early Society would have been viable if the early companions had not enjoyed such a rich friendship.”
The mode of friendship among the early Jesuits flowed from Ignatius’s “way of proceeding.” For want of a better word, they did not try to possess one another. In a sense, it was a form of poverty. Their friendship was