Jesuits Chartered by Pope: Order of Education Born

Ignatius of Loyola was a wounded soldier who became a saint, and the religious order he founded became the most influential educational and missionary organization in Catholic history. On September 27, 1540, Pope Paul III issued the papal bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, formally establishing the Society of Jesus with Ignatius as its first Superior General. Ignatius had conceived the order during a long convalescence from a cannonball wound suffered at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. A Basque nobleman and career soldier, he underwent a spiritual transformation while reading the lives of saints and Christ during his recovery. He spent the next fifteen years studying, traveling, and gathering a small group of like-minded companions at the University of Paris, including Francis Xavier, who would become the greatest Christian missionary since Saint Paul. The Jesuits differed from existing religious orders in critical ways. They took a special vow of obedience to the pope, making them a direct instrument of papal authority. They dispensed with many monastic traditions: no required choir prayer, no distinctive habit, no fixed monastery. Members were expected to be mobile, educated, and adaptable. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, a structured program of meditation and self-examination, gave the order a shared spiritual discipline that could function anywhere in the world. Education became the Jesuits' defining mission. Within a decade of their founding, they were operating schools across Europe, and by 1600, they ran over 300 colleges and universities. Their curriculum, the Ratio Studiorum, standardized classical education across the Catholic world. Jesuit missionaries accompanied Spanish and Portuguese explorers to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, establishing missions from Paraguay to Japan. The order's influence made it enemies. Bourbon monarchs expelled the Jesuits from Portugal, France, and Spain in the 1760s, and Pope Clement XIV suppressed the entire order in 1773 under political pressure. Restored in 1814, the Society of Jesus rebuilt and today operates over 2,000 schools and 200 universities worldwide, including Georgetown, Boston College, and dozens of other institutions. The current pope, Francis, is the first Jesuit to lead the Catholic Church.