Brendan Byrne, SJ
Published: 27/07/2026
Ignatian spirituality has its origins in the conversion of a Spanish soldier and courtier of the minor Basque nobility, Inigo (Ignatius) Loyola, in the early 16th century. Seriously wounded in a battle fighting against the French and forced into a long convalescence, Ignatius took up the only reading available which was a medieval Life of Christ, along with some lives of the saints. This led to a discovery on his part that the touch of God in human lives could be discerned by careful attention to the interplay of feelings and moods within oneself, and their subsequent movement towards or away from God. He further discovered through itinerant encounters on the streets that he had a gift for helping people recognize and name their spiritual experience.
Drawing on his own radical experience Ignatius developed a program of sustained prayer and reflection on one’s life over a number of weeks in a situation of silence and withdrawal (“retreat”) from daily life. This program of renewal, highly flexible and adaptable to personal circumstances and undertaken in conversational dialogue with a director, came to be known as the Spiritual Exercises. From the time of Ignatius down to the present it has helped countless people lead the Christian life in a more radical, free, and committed way.
Pursuing this spiritual ministry as a lay person, Ignatius found himself in trouble with officials of the Spanish Inquisition, ever suspicious of anything smacking of the sense that God spoke directly to the individual Christian aside from religious practice and worship conducted by clergy. Realizing that if he was to carry on his ministry he would have to seek ordination as a priest, Ignatius undertook studies to this end, first in Spain and ultimately in the most renowned centre of Catholic learning at the time, the University of Paris. There he initiated a group of younger fellow students into the program he had developed. Forming around him a close-knit band of several nationalities, these students became the nucleus of what was to become a new religious order in the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
In time the order found itself dedicated to a whole range of activities in the service of the Catholic Church, especially in foreign missions (spearheaded by one of Ignatius’s earliest companions, Francis Xavier) and education. Founding colleges and universities in many of the great cities of Europe Jesuits gave considerable heft to the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation. Nonetheless the driving force of all the order’s ministries remained the spirituality emanating from the Spiritual Exercises.
The characteristics of this spirituality—the promotion of which in recent times has been taken up by laypeople as well as Jesuits—can be summed up as based on a profound conversion experience stemming from the Exercises and the freedom flowing therefrom to give one’s life in companionship with Jesus to the service of God and God’s designs for the world as outlined in the Gospel. It is a spirituality that engages with the world and with culture in an attitude that is positive but at the same time ever-accompanied by discernment and awareness of the subtle interplay between the spiritual forces of good and evil. Ignatian spirituality, in this discerned way, has been summed up as “seeking God in all things”.