Five centuries ago a Spanish soldier-courtier was felled by a French cannonball. During his lengthy convalescence Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola was spiritually transformed, dedicating his life to Christ. After a Holy Land pilgrimage and some street preaching, he studied at the University of Paris where in 1534 he gathered six companions into a company bound by religious oaths. In 1540 this company received papal sanction as a new religious order. Over the ensuing decades this Society of Jesus grew rapidly and spread throughout Catholic Europe and into India, the Far East, and the New World. Its members served as agents of the Counter Reformation, missionaries, educators, scientists, diplomats and explorers. Seeing God in all things, Jesuits dedicated their talents “ad majorem Dei gloriam” – for the greater glory of God. The order achieved remarkable growth and prestige, but it attracted fierce opprobrium from Protestant quarters. Within the Catholic fold it made fervent and consequential enemies. In the eighteenth century the Jesuits were suppressed, first in the leading Catholic states, and later by the Papacy. While suppression would be lifted in 1814, the Society never regained in Europe the influence it had once enjoyed. The nineteenth century saw the Society establish secondary and higher educational establishments throughout the United States which still flourish, and re-establish itself elsewhere. The Society of Jesus profoundly influenced Catholicism in the Second Vatican Council and afterwards. This course will follow these remarkable “Men for Others” in their journey across the centuries and across the globe as missionaries, educators, scientists, diplomats, explorers and men of affairs, whose deeds have been admired or reviled, but always regarded as formidable.
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