Ignatius and eleven popes

I'm reading an interesting journal article by John Padberg SJ ..... "Ignatius, the Popes, and Realistic Reverence", Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits , 25 (May 1993). The article is really long and detailed, but here's just a little bit from the beginning .....

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The relationship of Ignatius of Loyola to the popes of his time might at first seem very simple. After all, the phrase "to serve the Lord alone and the Church, His spouse, under the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth" stands near the beginning of the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus, and the set of rules for thinking with the Church stands near the end of the Spiritual Exercises. They are hallowed phrases in Jesuit history. Add to them the near-legendary "fourth vow" of obedience to the pope, all of these the work of Ignatius, and there is no wonder that one might so judge. But such is not the case .....

The undoubted reverence of Ignatius for the Holy See and for the person of the pope can be seen as all the more remarkable if one recalls the activities and reputations of the [eleven] popes and their curia in the lifetime of Ignatius, from 1491 to 1556 .....

[following in the article was a hair-raising account of the serious badness of popes Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X, of the indifferent reigns of Pius III, Adrian VI, and Clement VII, and of the mixed reigns of Paul III and Julius III]

From 1555 to 1559, that is, for the last year of Ignatius's life and for three years beyond, Gian Pietro Carafa reigned as Paul IV. He was the cofounder of the Theatines, a man with whom in earlier years Ignatius had had disagreements in Venice and whose proposal to amalgamate the Jesuits with his Theatine order Ignatius had declined. Paul was seventy-nine years old when elected, learned and incorruptible, undoubtedly and genuinely reform-minded. But he was also a self-willed, stubborn, intolerant, short-sighted, harsh autocrat with a fierce hatred of almost everything Spanish, in part because of the Spanish hegemony over his native Naples. Ignatius, of course, and many of the early Jesuits were Spanish. So fanatically severe was he that he even put into prison as suspect of heresy Cardinal Morone, one of the most ardent of reformers and one of the presidents of the Council of Trent. So blind was he in his nepotism that he raised to the cardinalatial dignity two of his utterly worthless nephews, men whom everyone knew to be worthless and who so lived up t their reputation that the next pope had them executed for crimes ranging from fraud to murder. Paul IV also reinforced the Roman Inquisition in all its severity and forced the Jews of Rome into the [Rome} ghetto, from which they definitively emerged only at the time of the French Revolution. No wonder that Ignatius became briefly perturbed when he heard of Carafa's election as pope. At one point Paul IV went so far as to send a search party to the Jesuit headquarters to look for arms, and Ignatius insisted that they look everywhere. They found nothing, of course. When he died, the Roman populace tore down his statues and set his prisoners free. There is no question, however, that Paul IV moved what might have been described as Catholic reform into what came to be known as the Counter-Reformation ........

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It's really interesting to see what was going on with Ignatius and the popes, and it gives some perspective on stuff like the rules for thinking with the church. Maybe I'll post again on this once I finish the article.


- Ignatius and Pope Paul III