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Biography of Ignatius of Loyola, St.Name: Ignatius of Loyola, St.Birth Date: December 24, 1491 Death Date: July 31, 1556 Place of Birth: Loyola, Guipúzcoa, Spain Nationality: Spanish Gender: Male Occupations: priest, soldier Ignatius of Loyola, St. The Spanish soldier and ecclesiastic St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) was the founder of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit order.Ignatius was born in the castle of Loyola in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa. His real name was Iñigo de Oñaz y Loyola, but from 1537 on he also used the more widely known Ignatius, especially in official documents. From the age of about 15 to 26 he lived at the fortress town of Arévalo as a page of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, a treasurer general for Ferdinand the Catholic. After 1516 he participated in military expeditions for the Duke of Nájera. On May 20, 1521, he was wounded in the defense of Pamplona.During convalescence at Loyola, Ignatius read from the Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony and from the short lives of saints by Jacobus de Voragine entitled Legenda …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…order to make the conducting of schools for lay students a major work prescribed by the Constitutions.At his death on July 31, 1556, the Society of Jesus had some 1,000 members distributed in 12 provinces. He was declared a saint by Pope Gregory XV on March 12, 1622. Further Reading St. Ignatius's dictated autobiography is in González de Cámara, ed., St. Ignatius' Own Story as Told to Luis González de Cámara, translated by William J. Young (1956). Paul Dudon, St. Ignatius of Loyola, translated by William J. Young (1949), is the most complete and scholarly life of the saint in English. Briefer and reliable is Mary Purcell, The First Jesuit (1957). Ignatius's religious experiences are described and analyzed in Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice (1964), and in Ignatius's The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, translated with an introduction and a commentary by G. E. Ganss (1970). |