St. Ignatius enters Jerusalem at midday after a year begging across Europe

JERUSALEM, Ottoman Palestine, September 4, 1523 AD — About two miles short of Jerusalem, on the road up from the coast, a Spanish gentleman named Diego Manez asked the pilgrims riding with him to keep silence and collect their thoughts for the rest of the way. They were on donkeys, as pilgrims on that road are. Every man did as he asked. Then a monk came down toward them with a crucifix in his hands, and the whole file dismounted and stood in the road.

One of the men who got down was Saint Ignatius of Loyola, thirty-two, of the old Basque nobility of Guipúzcoa, and until two years ago a soldier. At the citadel of Pamplona in May 1521 AD a French cannon ball tore open his left calf and broke his right shin, and the garrison surrendered as he fell. He was carried home to Loyola. The bones had knit badly, so the surgeons broke the leg a second time and reset it. One end of bone still stood out below the knee, and he asked them to saw it off. Then they stretched the limb under weights for many days, all of it without anaesthetic. There were two books in the house, a life of Christ and a book of saints’ lives, and he read them both. When he could walk he went to Montserrat, and then to Manresa, where he stayed the better part of a year and began the notes that became the Spiritual Exercises. He left Manresa for Barcelona in the middle of February to take ship for this city, and he does not mean to go home.

The road he came up was emptier than it should have been. Rhodes fell to the Turks last Christmas Day, and most of the pilgrims who had gathered at Venice for the crossing this season turned back rather than risk the sea. Thirteen sailed in the pilgrim ship and eight or nine in the government ship the Doge, Andrea Gritti, opened to them.

St. Ignatius made the journey with nothing and turned down every offer of help he could refuse. Men in Barcelona wanted to travel with him, and warned him that he had neither Latin nor Italian. The account he dictated years later says he wanted only three things for the road: “Faith, Hope, and Charity. If he took a companion, when hungry he would look to his companion for food; if exhausted, he would call on his companion for help.” The captain required every passenger to bring ship’s biscuit aboard, and St. Ignatius begged his. Before he boarded he left the five or six coins he had been given as alms on a bench on the wharf. He reached Rome on Palm Sunday, after a night in a damp church outside the shut gates. In Easter week he took the blessing of Pope Adrian VI. Friends pressed six or seven gold pieces on him for his passage, and he gave every one of them away within three days. He came into Venice with four coins and needed all four for a bed. He begged his food there and slept in St. Mark’s Square. On the morning his ship sailed he was several days into a fever and asked the doctor whether he could go; the doctor said he could, if he wanted the ship for his tomb. He went aboard, recovered at sea, transferred to the pilgrim ship at Salinae in Cyprus on August 19 with no provision of any kind, and landed at Jaffa on the last day of August.

The Franciscans, who have charge of the holy places, came out in procession to meet the party on the road and brought them into the city at noon. The account he dictated years later says only this of the sight of Jerusalem: “On beholding the city, Ignatius was deeply affected, and the rest affirmed that they experienced a sort of heavenly joy. He always felt this same devotion whenever he visited the holy places.”

The record sets down the fortnight that follows, day by day. He went round the holy places on the 5th. At first light on the 6th he received Communion at the Holy Sepulchre, and that evening he made the Way of the Cross. On the 7th he went to Bethany and the Mount of Olives, and on the 8th and 9th out to Bethlehem. He was at the Kidron from the 10th to the 13th, and at the Jordan and the mount of the temptations on the 14th and 15th. He does not see a place once and leave it. He goes back, alone and with others, looks closely, takes down exact particulars, and writes a description of the places to send to Ines Pascual at Barcelona.

The city he wants to stay in is under Ottoman rule. Christians here wear a girdle that marks them out from Muslims, and it is dangerous to move about outside without a Turkish guard. The Franciscans keep the holy places, and their Provincial holds authority from the Holy See to detain pilgrims and to excommunicate any who will not obey when he stops them. That power was given because of the trouble of finding ransoms for Christians taken captive. Others who stayed on have died, and others have been taken.

St. Ignatius came with letters of recommendation to the Franciscan Guardian for exactly this purpose. He presented them and asked to be allowed to stay in Jerusalem, so that he could visit the holy places often. He said nothing about his other intention. He means to help souls here. The Guardian told him he did not see how it could be done. The house cannot provide for the friars it already has, and he means to send some of them away from the Holy Land.

St. Ignatius then asked him for one thing instead: to hear his confession. That is what he had come to make. The Guardian said that could be done, but that he would have to wait for the Provincial, who is at Bethlehem.