LOYO'LA, IGNATIUS DE atIGO LOPEZ DE RECALDE), the youngest son of Bertram de Loyola and Marina Salez de Baldi, was b. in the year 1491 at his ancestral castle of Loyola, in the Basque provinces. After the scant training of that age in letters he was received as a page in the court of Ferdinand; but the restraint and inactivity of court life were distasteful to his enthusiastic mind, and, under the auspices of his relative, Don Antonio Manriquez, duke of Najura, he embraced the profession of arms. The details of his career as a soldier are of little importance in his history, although they display in a very marked way both the excellency and the irregularities of his ardent temperament, thrown undirected among the temptations as well as the duties of a mili tary life. Of his bravery and chivalrous spirit many remarkable instances arc recorded, ana 0110 of these proved the turning-point of his career. In the defense of Pampeluna he was severely wounded in both -legs, one being fractured by a cannon-ball, and the other injured by a splinter, and having been taken prisoner by the French, was by them conveyed to his paternal castle of Loyola, where he was doomed to a long and painful confinement. After a very painful operation, the results of which had well-nigh proved fatal, he eventually recovered; and with his returning. strength he appears to have resumed his old thoughts and his habitual levity, for, in order to remove a deformity which had resulted from the first setting of his wounded limb, he consented to the pain ful remedy of having it re-broken in order to be reset. After this operation his conva lescence was even more slow; and the stock of romances, by which he was wont to relieve the tedium of confinement, having been exhausted, he was thrown upon the only other available reading, that of the Lives of the Saints. The result was what might be expected in so ardent a temperainent—the creation of a spiritual enthusiasm equally intense in degree, although in kind very different from that by which he had hitherto been drawn to feats of chivalry. The spiritual glories of St. Francis or SL Dominic now took, in his aspirations, the place which had been before held by the knights of medimval romance. With souls like his there is no nUddle course: he threw himself, with all the fire of his temperament, upon the new aspirations which these thoughts engendered. Renouncing the pursuit of .arins, and with it all other worldly plans, he tore himself from home and friends, and resolved to prepare himself for the new course which he contemplated by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With a view to his immediate preparation for this holy task he retired in the garb of a beggar to the celebrated monas tery of Montserrat, where, ou the vigil of the feast of the annunciation, in 1522, he hung up his arms, as at once a votive offering significative of his renunciation of the works of the flesh, and an emblem of his entire devotion to the spiritual warfare to which he was from that moment vowed. From Montserrat he set out barefooted on his pilgrimage, the first step of which was a voluntary engagement which he undertook to serve the poor and sick in the hospital of the neighboring town of 3Ianresa. There his
zeal and devotion attracted such notice that he withdrew to a solitary cavern in the vicinity, where lie pursued alone his course of self-prescribed austerity, until he was car ried back, utterly exhausted, to the hospital in which lie had before served. To this physical exhaustion succeeded a state of mental depression, amounting almost to despair, from which, however:he arose with spiritual powers renewed and invigorated by the very struggle. From Manresa he repaired by Barcelona to Rome, whence, after receiv ing the papal benediction from Adrian VI., he proceeded on foot, and as a mendicant, to Venice, and there embarked for Cyprus and the Holy Land. He would gladly have remained at Jerusalem, and devoted himself to the propagation of the gospel, among the infidels; but not being encouraged in this design by the local authorities, he returned to Venice and Barcelona in 1524. Taught by his first failure lie now resolved to prepare himself by study for the work of religious teaching, and with this view was not ashamed to return, at the age of 33, to the study of the very rudiments of grammar. Fie followed up these elementary studies by a further course, first at the new university of Alcala, and afterwards at Salamanca, in both which places, however, he incurred the censure of the authorities by some unauthorized attempts at religious teaching in public, and eventually he was induced to repair to Paris for the completion of the studies thus repeatedly interrupted. Here again he continued persistently to struggle on without any resources but those which he drew from the charity of the faithful; and here again he returned to the same humble elementary studies. It was while engaged in these studies, and among the companions of them, that lie first formed the pious fraternity which resulted in that great organization which has exercised such influence upon the religious, moral, and social condition of the modern world. From the dos.° of his resi dence in Paris, Loyola's history has been told in the history of his order. See JESUITS. From the date of his election as the first general of his society, lie continued to reside in Rome. To him are due not alone in the general spirit, but even in most of their details, all its rules and constitutions; from him also originated several works of general charity and benevolence, the germs of great institutions still maintained in Ronne; but the great source of his influence upon the spiritual interests of the world is his well•known Exer cilia Spiritualia, of which an account has been already given. He died at Rome, it may well be believed, prematurely, being worn out by his long-continued austerities, July 31, 1556. His name was admitted to what is known in the church of Rome as the prelim inary step of beatification, in the year 1609, and he was solemnly canonized as a saint by Gregory XV. in 1622. His life has been written in almost every European language. The biographies of Ribadaneira, of Maffei, of Bartoli, and Bouhours are the best known and the most popular among Roman Catholics.