St. Ignatius of Loyola
Patron of Jesuits, retreats, soldiers, spiritual exercises
Saint Ignatius (1491–1556), a Basque soldier whose conversion began while convalescing from a cannonball wound at the siege of Pamplona, founded the Society of Jesus in 1540 — a new kind of religious order, mobile, learned and bound by special vow to the missions of the pope. His Spiritual Exercises, refined in a cave at Manresa, became the formative spiritual practice of the Catholic Reformation and remain to this day the most influential single book of Christian meditation outside the Bible. From his rooms above the Gesù in Rome he directed, by letter, a society that within thirty years was teaching, preaching and exploring on five continents.