Jesuit Terms I

Terms I

Ignatian
Ignatian Colleagues Program
Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm
Ignatian Solidarity Network
Ignatian Vision
Ignatius of Loyola
Ignatius of Loyola, Marian influence
IHS
Inculturation
Inter-Religious Dialogue

Ignatian

Adjective, from the noun Ignatius (of Loyola). Sometimes used in distinction to Jesuit, indicating aspects of spirituality that derive from Ignatius the lay person rather than from the later Ignatius and his religious order, the Society of Jesus.

Ignatian Colleagues Program

This leadership opportunity, an initiative of the Heartland/Delta universities and five sponsoring Provinces, supports higher education administrators throughout the ACJU in understanding and advancing the Ignatian mission on their campus.

Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm

Ignatian pedagogy (from the International Center for Jesuit Education [Rome, 1993]), is a model that seeks to develop men and women of competence, conscience and compassion. Similar to the process of guiding others in the Spiritual Exercises, faculty accompany students in their intellectual, spiritual and emotional development. They do this by following the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm. Through consideration of the context of students' lives, faculty create an environment where students recollect their past experience and assimilate information from newly-provided experiences. Faculty help students learn the skills and techniques of reflection, which shapes their consciousness, and they then challenge students to action in service to others. The evaluation process includes academic mastery as well as ongoing assessments of students' well-rounded growth as persons for others.

For more information see:

Ignatian Solidarity Network

The Ignatian Solidarity Network's purpose is to facilitate and enhance the effectiveness of existing social justice and advocacy efforts that are currently present in Jesuit affiliated high schools, universities and colleges, parishes, retreat centers, independent organizations, and individuals across the nation. The network serves as a means to connect, strengthen and broaden communication among these already existing groups in order to better understand what it means to live and act upon "a faith that does justice."

Ignatian Vision

Characteristics of the Vision

Drawing on a variety of contemporary sources which tend to confirm one another, one can construct a list of rather commonly accepted characteristics of the Ignatian/Jesuit vision. It...

sees life and the whole universe as a gift calling forth wonder and gratefulness;
gives ample scope to imagination and emotion as well as intellect;
seeks to find the divine in all things — in all peoples and cultures, in all areas of study and learning, in every human experience, and (for the Christian) especially in the person of Jesus;
cultivates critical awareness of personal and social evil, but points to God's love as more powerful than any evil;
stresses freedom, need for discernment, and responsible action;
empowers people to become leaders in service, "men and women for others", "whole persons of solidarity," building a more just and humane world.

The relative consensus about these should not be taken to indicate that the six characteristics exhaust the meaning of the living Ignatian tradition. Like the living tradition of Christian faith, of which it is a part, no number of thematic statements can adequately articulate it. At the heart of both traditions stands the living person of Jesus, who cannot be reduced to a series of ideas.

No one claims that any of these characteristics are uniquely Ignatian/Jesuit. It is rather the combination of them all and the way they fit together that make the vision distinctive and so appropriate for an age in transition—whether from the medieval to the modern in Ignatius' time, or from the modern to the postmodern in ours.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)

Youngest child of a noble Basque family fiercely loyal to the Spanish crown (Ferdinand and Isabella), he was named Inigo after a local saint. Raised to be a courtier, he was trying valiantly to defend the fortress town of Pamplona in 1521 when a French cannonball shattered his leg. During a long convalescence, he found himself drawn away from the romances of chivalry that had filled his imagination from an early age to more spiritual reading — an illustrated life of Jesus and a collection of saints' lives.

After his recovery, he set out for the Holy Land to realize a dream of "converting the infidel." On the way he stopped first at the Benedictine Abbey of Monsterrat where he made a confession of his whole life and held an all-night vigil before the Black Madonna. There he hung up his sword and dagger; effectively, his old life was over and his new life had begun. Next he went to the nearby town of Manresa and wound up spending nearly a year there during which he experienced both the depths of despair and great times of enlightenment.

Ordered to leave Palestine after being there little more than a month, Ignatius decided that he needed an education in order to be able to "help souls." In Barcelona, he went to school with boys a quarter his age to learn the rudiments of Latin grammar, then moved on to several Spanish university cities. In each he was imprisoned and interrogated by the Inquisition, because he kept speaking to people about "spiritual things," having neither a theology degree nor priestly ordination.

Finally, turning his back on his homeland, he went to the foremost university of the time, the University of Paris, where he began his education all over again and with diligence, after five years, was finally awarded the degree "Master of Arts." It was here at Paris that he changed his Basque name to the Latin Ignatius and its Spanish equivalent Ignacio.

While at the university, he had roomed with and become good friends with a fellow Basque named Francis Xavier and a Savoyard named Peter Faber. After graduation, these three, together with several other Paris graduates, undertook a process of communal discernment and decided to bind themselves together in an apostolic community that became the Society of Jesus. Unanimously elected superior by his companions, Ignatius spent the last 16 years of his life in Rome directing the fledgling order, while the others went all over Europe, to the Far East, and eventually to the New World. And wherever they went they founded schools as a means of helping people to "find God in all things."

A Biography of St. Ignatius Loyola: The Founder of the Jesuits
George Traub, S.J. and Debra Mooney, Ph.D.

Ignatius of Loyola, Marian influence

See "Montserrat, Our Lady of".

IHS

The first three letters, in Greek, of the name Jesus. These letters appear as a symbol on the official seal of the Society of Jesus or Jesuits.

IMAGE RIGHT: The seal of the Society of Jesus being lifted onto Bellarmine Chapel on the campus of Xavier University.

Inculturation

A modern theological concept that expresses a principle of Christian mission implicit in Ignatian spirituality — namely, that the gospel needs to be presented to any given culture in terms intelligible to that culture and allowed to grow up in the "soil" of that culture; God is already present and active there ("God's action is antecedent to ours"-Jesuit General Congregation 34 [1995], "Our Mission and Culture").

Thus in the first century Saint Paul fought against the imposition of Jewish practices on non-Jewish Christians. And in the 16th and 17th centuries, Jesuits like Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) fought to retain elements of Chinese and Indian culture in presenting a de-Europeanized Christianity to those peoples, only to have their approach condemned by the Church in the 18th century.

Ideally, the gospel and a culture mutually interact, and in the process the gospel embraces some elements of the culture while offering a critique of others.

Continuing the Legacy of St. Ignatius Loyola: A Pioneer in International Education
Laura Hellebusch, International Student Advisor, Xavier University

Inter-Religious Dialogue

See Religions, Non-Christian.

Documents on inter-religious dialogue at Creighton University

The Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College

The Brueggeman Center for Dialogue at Xavier University

Reflections of a Muslim Faculty Member at a Jesuit University, Anas Malik, Ph.D.

^{JESUIT A TO Z: An expanded version of the publication "Do You Speak Ignatian?"}