Ignatius praying by the Cardoner River, attributed to Cornelius Galle the Elder, 1622.

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     The Society of Jesus was born in a university. Its first members were all university students in Paris, a diverse group from mutually hostile parts of France and Spain, ambitious for careers in church institutions, mostly serious about their work but students nonetheless, in the best university of Europe. At the center of the group was Ignatius, a charismatic ex-soldier from Loyola, in the mountainous Basque region of northwest Spain. He challenged his fellow students to think about what they were going to do with the unique gifts and personalities God had given them (to Francis Xavier, a spirited athlete from Navarre, he kept putting the question that Jesus asks in Matthew’s gospel, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, Francis, but

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