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Poverty, sickness, exposure, fatigue, starvation, dangers of shipwreck
and capture, prisons, blows, contradictions, these were his daily lot; and
on his arrival the Franciscans, who had charge of the holy places,
commanded him to return [home] under pain of sin (Catholic
Encyclopedia 1913).
However, by 1524, Ignatius had found a safe haven at the University of Paris
and began a Master’s in Theology. With a group of likeminded classmates, he directed
a series of meditations derived from his spiritual growth to date, which basically form
the same “spiritual exercises” that modern Jesuits draw on (Society of Jesus 2009).
After being ordained, Ignatius and his followers dedicated themselves to the service of
Pope Paul III, who then approved the Society’s creation in 1540. Ignatius was elected
General Superior and served in that post until his death in 1556 at the age of 65
(Society of Jesus 2009).
Jesuits thus differed from the other kinds of monastic orders at the time, with
their heavy emphasis on education and individual spiritual quickening — a tradition
which continues to this very day (Society of Jesus 2009). Unlike the Spanish
conquistadors who bombarded foreign shores for “God, gold and glory,” the “black
robes” for better or worse, lived among the indigenous groups they befriended and
spoke their languages, as though they might have been “proto-anthropologists”
(Steckley 1992:478).
When Jesuit mission efforts began, the great world powers were Spain and
Portugal, and as a result mission sites were at first largely determined by the locations
of Portuguese settlements in the East, and by the trade routes followed by the
Portuguese merchants (Catholic Encyclopedia 1913). The first French Jesuit missions
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