Ignatius of Loyola was born into a minor noble family in the Basque region of Spain in 1491, the youngest of thirteen children. He came of age in the culture of Castilian chivalry, seeking distinction through military service, and it was not until a French cannonball shattered his leg at the siege of Pamplona in 1521 that his ambitions were interrupted. During the long convalescence that followed, lacking the romances he preferred, he read a life of Christ and accounts of the saints — and found, by his own careful attention to his interior states, that the consolations those readings produced outlasted any other comfort. That noticing was the seed of everything that came after.
The years following his recovery were ones of severe penitential experiment, extended pilgrimage, and formal study undertaken embarrassingly late — a man in his thirties sitting with schoolboys to learn Latin. He gathered companions in Paris, and in 1540 Pope Paul III formally approved the Society of Jesus, a new religious order notable for its mobility, its direct obedience to the papacy, and its emphasis on active ministry in the world over the enclosure of a monastery.
What Ignatius gave the church most durably was not an institution but a method. The Spiritual Exercises, developed over decades of personal experience and pastoral accompaniment, offer a structured retreat of prayer, imagination, and self-examination — a way of bringing a person into direct encounter with the Gospel narratives and training them to discern the movements of their own soul. The Exercises do not tell the retreatant what to conclude; they create conditions in which, Ignatius believed, God could act directly on the will.
He died in Rome in 1556, having seen the Society grow to over a thousand members and spread from Europe to Asia and the Americas. He was canonized in 1622, and his methods of spiritual discernment remain among the most widely practiced in the Western Christian tradition.