I forgot to tell you that Father Ignatius was ordained a priest

David Gibson has a post at Pontifications - Pope to clergy: "After God, the priest is everything!" - about B16's letter on the Year of the Priest. This made me think of Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote the Spiritual Exercises long before he ever became a priest. I've been reading John O'Malley's book, The First Jesuits, and I thought I'd post what he wrote under the heading of "Holy Orders" .......

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Because the Society strictly forbade its members from accepting bishoprics, Jesuits obviously could not administer the sacrament of Orders. That prohibition helps account for the little mention of the sacrament in the sources. Most Jesuits were, however, either already ordained priests or destined for ordination. What is surprising about this fundamental reality is how seldom it is singled out for comment. Ordination to the priesthood, for instance, is in effect not mentioned in the Constitutions. Certainly, the early Jesuits spoke so little about priesthood because they took it for granted. They inherited the medieval idea that the sacrament of Orders conferred the power to confect the Eucharist and provided the basis for the jurisdiction that allowed priests to hear confessions. Given the centrality of these two sacraments in the ministry of the early Jesuits, they obviously needed to be ordained to carry out that ministry as they understood it.

As should be clear by now, however, much of the ministry in the Society was in fact done by persons who were not ordained. More fundamentally, was the warrant for all the ministries derived in their opinion not from ordination but from acceptance of the call to be a member of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits discussed that call frequently and at length, but rarely, if at all, did they speak of a "call to priesthood".

They could find some substantiation for these attitudes in the Summa of Aquinas and the writings of other members of the mendicant orders. Moreover they found them at least indirectly confirmed by the various papal documents that allowed all members of the order to preach and engage in all the constueta ministeria, except hearing confessions and distributing Communion.

When Nadal in his exhortations reviewed with his fellow Jesuits the outline of Ignatius's life, he therefore had practically nothing to say about his ordination, reflecting Ignatius's Autobiography in this relative silence. On one occasion Nadal began an exhortation with a telling apology for his narrative about what happened in Venice in 1537: "I must mention, by the way, that yesterday I forgot to tell you that Father Ignatius was ordained a priest." ...... Some young Jesuits thought ordination brought with it the danger of honor and special privilege and, hence, said they did not want to be ordained unless their superiors expressly ordered them ....

It cannot be said that the Jesuits, like the Somaschi, another religious order formed at about the same time, were a lay institution that became "clericalized". All of the original ten companions were already priests in 1540, and, when Polanco some years later inquired of Ignatius whether all the professed should be priests, he was told emphatically that they should. The Jesuits never tried to pass themselves off as anything else, not did they entertain the possibility that most Jesuits would not eventually be ordained. They were by definition an order of "clerks regular". Nonetheless, the psychological reality that primarily grounded their lives and their ministry was membership in the Society, not being in orders.

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