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A.M.D.G.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
The Society of Jesus was founded “for the greater glory of God,”
an idea repeated more than a hundred times by Ignatius in the
Constitutions of the Jesuits. The phrase became the unofficial
motto of the Society. Jesuits schools and churches often had
“A.M.D.G.” inscribed on their portals. In James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus
writes the initials on his school papers in nineteenth century
Dublin, a practice some students in Jesuit schools still follow.
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loses
his soul?”). He led them through a program of prayer and reflection
that he had learned through trial and error in the long years
of his own spiritual education.
The goal of this spiritual program
was to achieve the interior freedom necessary to make good life
decisions. The decision the group eventually made, in Paris
in the summer of 1534, was to commit themselves to a spiritual
journey that was to lead in directions they could not have imagined
when they began it.
Ignatius
of Loyola
Ignatius is one of the more remarkable
figures to emerge at the turbulent border between the medieval
and modern worlds. The youngest of thirteen children, he was
born in 1491, into a family of minor nobility at Loyola, in
the Basque region of Spain. His father had enough connections
to get him a position in the household of the king’s treasurer
where he might make a career as an administrator in the royal
service. He fought duels, was arrested for brawling, and may
have had his share of romantic indiscretions. He hoped to win
the hand of a princess. He was trained in weapons and after
the king’s treasurer died he entered military service under
the Viceroy of Navarre. Wounded in battle against the French
in 1521, where he fought bravely and even foolishly against
overwhelming odds, he was carried home to recover. His leg healed
badly and, knowing that
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