THE Company of Jesus, founded by the spanish St. Ignatius of Loyola, was one of the most important Catholic orders founded in the 16th century and continues to be internationally influential to this day. To understand the importance of this order, it is necessary that we know some characteristics of the context in which it was created.
Historical context of the creation of the Society of Jesus
One of the most important sequences of events in the Modern Age is the so-called Renovationsreligious, who understand the Protestant Reformations and the Catholic Counter-Reform, occurred during the first half of the 16th century. Among the main moments of the Religious Reforms, we have, on the Protestant side, the theses of Luther from 1517, the peasant revolt Anabaptist of 1522-25 and the Anglican and Calvinist reforms of the 1530s, which took place in England and Switzerland, respectively. On the Catholic side, the most important point was the convening of the Council of Trent, started in 1546, which reaffirmed Catholic dogmas and sought to reconcile them with the humanism characteristic of that time. Furthermore, something very particular was happening in Catholic nations, especially in Spain.
Like the Portuguese, the unified Kingdom of Spain was born from the wars against the Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. The union of the thrones of Castile and Aragon at the end of the 15th century was a milestone in the political and spiritual defense of European Catholicism. When there was the eruption of Protestantism, Spain, which had started the process of colonization of the newly discovered “New World”, together with its neighbor Portugal, sought to defend itself from the rapid spread of the ideas of Luther, Calvin and similar. In addition to the containment measures taken in the political sphere, there was, in the strictly religious sphere, the creation of the Company of Jesus, or Societas Iesu, SJ, in 1534.
Jesuits and international Catholic missions
The person responsible for the creation of the Society of Jesus, the Basque Ignatius of Loyola, was a former member of the Spanish army and managed, with other religious, as FranciscoXavier and Alfonsosalmon, to carry forward the idea of an order that had as its main objective the international Catholic missions. You Jesuits, as the members of the Society of Jesus are called, were characterized by the commitment they had to undertake missions across the globe in the era of great navigations. Thousands of Jesuits came to the Hispanic America and Portuguese America to convert and catechize the natives, as well as assist them in the acculturation process. It was by operating practices like this that the Jesuits were able to learn native languages, such as the Tupi-Guarani, and systematize them in general grammars, as well highlighted by the historian Christopher Dawson, in your book The Division of Christianity:
“No less important was the missionary activity of the Jesuits, one of the extraordinary feats of the period. From the period of San Francisco onwards, the Jesuits were the main pioneers and organizers of the expansion Christian missionary in Asia and the Americas, India and Japan, China and Siam, Mexico, Brazil and Paraguay. Not taking into account the purely religious aspects, this activity had important intellectual repercussions in European culture. Already in the 16th century, the reports of the Jesuit missionaries were more than stories of travelers and explorers, collaborating much more to transform Western knowledge and understanding of the world not European. The authors of the numerous Jesuit 'Accounts' were forerunners of modern ethnologists and orientalists, as well as of modern missionaries.” [1]
Furthermore, the importance of the Society of Jesus in the counter-reformist sphere lay in the spiritual and behavioral discipline required by the book Spiritual Exercises, written by St. Ignatius. Despite being a very short book, almost a booklet, it had a very big impact on what was refers to the modeling of the practice of prayers, meditation and ascesis that should be followed by the missionary.
GRADES
[1] DAWSON, Christopher. The Division of Christianity - From the Protestant Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment. Trans. Marcia Xavier de Brito. São Paulo: É Realizações Ed., 2014. P. 188.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/papel-companhia-jesus-na-contrarreforma.htm
