Five centuries ago at Pamplona a French cannonball felled a Spanish soldier-courtier. During a lengthy convalescence Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola would be transformed, dedicating his life to Christ. After a Holy Land pilgrimage and some street preaching, he pursued academics. At the University of Paris in 1534 he gathered six companions into a company bound by religious oaths which in 1540 received papal sanction as a new religious order. In a few short decades this Society of Jesus would spread throughout Catholic Europe and to India, the Far East and the New World as agents of the Counter Reformation, missionaries, educators, scientists and explorers. In its first two centuries the order achieved remarkable growth and prestige, while attracting fierce opprobrium from Protestant quarters. Within the Catholic fold it also created fervent and consequential enemies. The Jesuits would be suppressed in the leading Catholic states in the mid-eighteenth century and by the Papacy in 1773, but the suppression would be lifted in 1814. While the Society of Jesus would never regain in Europe the power and influence it had once enjoyed, the nineteenth century would see it establish educational establishments throughout the United States which continue to flourish, and re-establish itself elsewhere. The Society of Jesus has had a profound influence on Catholicism leading up to the Second Vatican Council and afterwards. This course will follow these remarkable “Men for Others” in their journeys across the centuries and the globe as missionaries, educators, scientists, diplomats, explorers and men of affairs whose deeds have been admired or reviled, but always regarded as formidable.