Íñigo López de Loyola was a Basque nobleman and soldier. In May 1521, the month Luther was hidden at the Wartburg, a cannonball shattered his leg at the siege of Pamplona. During his recovery he read the lives of Christ and the saints and resolved to become a soldier of the church. At Manresa he began the Spiritual Exercises, a month-long discipline of meditation that became the training of his order.

He studied at Paris, where he lodged for a time at the Collège de Montaigu that Calvin had attended, and in 1534 at Montmartre he and six companions vowed to serve the pope. Paul III approved the Society of Jesus on September 27, 1540, and Ignatius became its first general. The Jesuits bound themselves to obedience in the most absolute terms:¹

If we wish to be sure that we are right in all things, we should always be ready to accept this principle: I will believe that the white that I see is black, if the hierarchical church so defines.¹ Ignatius of LoyolaSpiritual Exercises, Rules for Thinking with the Church, 13

The Jesuits founded colleges across Catholic Europe, served as confessors to princes, and trained preachers and controversialists for the struggle with Protestantism. When Ignatius died in Rome on July 31, 1556, his order numbered about a thousand. Within seventy years it had more than fifteen thousand members, and with the help of Catholic rulers it had won back much of southern Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Poland.

The Reformation’s answer was that the Christian’s conscience is bound to the Word of God, not to what a hierarchy defines. “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20).

Catholic Opponents