Before he was founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola was a war-wounded courtier. The year 1521 found him recovering at his home in the Basque region of northern Spain from grave injuries suffered during the battle of Pamplona. Those many months of convalescence proved to be a journey of healing not just for his body but also for his soul.
Ignatius documented his conversion experience in letters and an autobiography. He became passionate about the action of God in his own life and talked with many men and women about their own search for God. From his own experience and these conversations he developed a manual called the Spiritual Exercises. The letters, autobiography and Spiritual Exercises would become the foundations of Ignatian spirituality and give a distinctive character to all the apostolic activity of Jesuits—teaching, missions, science and art as well as giving retreats or running parishes.
The tradition of St. Ignatius continues in the six parishes that we run, as well as in the two retreat houses and the spirituality centers. Of course, our colleges, universities and high schools also include a spirituality dimension for students and faculties through well-developed programs of liturgy and retreats. Jesuits and their lay colleagues even continue Ignatius' custom of informal conversation about the active presence of God who continues to recreate the world, moment by moment, and invites us to labor with the Son who renews all things.
Online Resources
Discovering a Sacred World
Fr. John J. Callahan SJ writes, "One of the most appropriate and fruitful ways to come to an understanding of what is behind the whole endeavor of the Jesuit mission is to go back to the source, the vision and insight of St. Ignatius Loyola." (14 pages, PDF format, 414 KB).
Download the essay
The Sunday Web Site
The Center for Liturgy at Saint Louis University offers reflection and background research on the readings and their spirituality aspects to help people prepare for upcoming Sunday liturgies.
http://liturgy.slu.edu/index.html
sjweb Prayer Page
The Jesuit Curia in Rome provides links to prayer and spirituality resources in multiple languages.
www.sjweb.info/pray/index.cfm
Ignatian spirituality
Ignatian spirituality is a way to pray, an approach to making decisions, a point of view about God, and a practical guide to everyday life. Ignatian spirituality sees God as actively involved in the world and intimately involved with us in every moment and place. Loyola Press created this rich site which offers a great deal of resources.
www.ignatianspirituality.com
Sacred Space
The Irish Province offers a simple daily meditation that you can read online
www.sacredspace.ie
Pray-as-you-go
The Jesuits of the English Province offer 12 minute daily audio meditations for MP3 players
www.pray-as-you-go.org
On-line Ministry (Creighton University)
Reflections on the daily Mass readings as well as several versions of an online retreat are available.
www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/online.html
Spiritual Exercises- The Complete Text
The book of the Spiritual Exercises is not a text to be read as a work of non-fiction, but rather as exercises to be prayed, usually under the guidance of a spiritual companion. The original Spanish text of the Exercises was translated into Latin and subsequently approved by Pope Paul III in 1548. Note: Unfortunately, this legally available document does not use the standard section numbers developed in 1928 by Arturo Codina SJ. This may make it difficult to reference the text. On the other hand, the 1914 translation presented here by Elder Mullan SJ is considered by many to be the most literal and accurate of the English versions. As expected, this English translation of Ignatius' Spanish can be clumsy. There are a good number of contemporary English translations available.
Download the text