PREFACE

I

among

his

T is generally agreed among his foes no less than friends that Ignatius Loyola was a maker of history. A hundred books could be cited in proof of this statement, but the aim of the present book is rather to show history and the grace of God making St. Ignatius. His own tremendous achievement in founding the Society of Jesus and writing for it those Constitutions which still regulate the lives and aspirations of 32,501 Jesuits in every land on earth is mentioned only incidentally in these pages. Even his little book of Spiritual Exercises which moulded twenty-seven canonized Jesuit Saints for Heaven, as well as one hundred and seven beatified martyrs, including twenty-two Englishmen, is not dealt with specifically because it did not receive Papal approbation and definitive printed form until the harvesttime of its author's life when his mature sanctity bore its golden sheaves. This present book may well be criticized on many counts, for it is very imperfect, but it would not be quite fair to censure it for failing to achieve a completeness to which it never pretended. It endeavours to show the long, slow stages by which God led the wounded cavalier out of his dream-world of romantic fights in the service of fair ladies into the noontide of divine reality. The Pilgrimage, as he liked to call the hard period of his spiritual apprenticeship, began when he was thirty and lasted for seventeen years of endless and often very moving vicissitude.

The book could not have been written at all but for the dusty, unsung labours of a small group of men who have produced and are still producing the substantial, finely edited volumes of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, now numbering seventy-five. The series is referred to throughout the present book by the initials MHSJ. Any virtue which it may possess is owing largely to the generosity of many friends, particularly among the Spanish Jesuits who showed so much kindness to Father John Gillick, S. J., and myself when we made our foray into their fascinating country

in search of illustrations. Father Gillick's photographs speak for themselves. Among the Basques everywhere, at home or in the exile of Aragon and Old Castile, we met with the hospitality and warm friendliness for which their race is so justly celebrated. They are modest people and would not like their names mentioned, but we must at least express our sincerest thanks to Father Valentin Arteta Luzuriaga, S.J., as representative of all of them. Father Ernest Burrus, S.J., helped me immensely from Rome. I would like also to express my deep gratitude to Mr. Tom Burns, head of the great firm which produced the book, for his unflagging interest and patience. My other generous ally in the firm was Mr. D. J. Cahill, who spared himself no pains nor trouble to make the book less unworthy of St. Ignatius. Finally, it and its author are heavily indebted to Father Desmond Boyle, S.J., Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Great Britain. The frontispiece of the book is a little-known painting of the Seicento master, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri of Bologna, known as Il Guercino, who executed it in the period 1625-1626. St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, shown with Pope St. Gregory the Great, were canonized on March 12, 1622, the feast of St. Gregory, by the short-lived Pope Gregory XV of the Ludovisi family who commissioned the work in memory of that Pontiff. After long embellishing a Madrid church, it passed as booty of the Peninsular War into the possession of a French baron, and was acquired in 1837 by the Duke of Sutherland. Its present owner is Denis Mahon, Esq., who most courteously permitted its use in this book and himself supplied the monochrome photograph.

J.B.