Saint Ignatius walked 45 miles barefoot — and nearly didn't go

PARIS, September 1529 AD — The morning he set out, Saint Ignatius of Loyola was so frightened that he could hardly get his clothes on. He got them on anyway. He walked out of the house, out of Paris, and kept going for three days. He was going to look after the man who had taken all his money.

In September 1529 AD St. Ignatius was thirty-eight, and he was a student in Paris. He had been a soldier until a cannon ball broke his right leg at Pamplona, eight years before. Now he sat in a Latin class with children, because he had never learned the basics. He lived on what people gave him. The Church declared him a saint in 1622 AD.

The money that disappeared

Twenty-five gold crowns. A merchant in Paris paid the money to St. Ignatius on an order sent from Barcelona. St. Ignatius handed the coins straight to one of the Spaniards he lodged with, to keep them safe. The man spent them. He couldn’t pay them back. The old accounts never give his name.

A gold crown was a lot of money. After three years of study, students in Paris had to pay a fee to get their degree. The fee was one gold crown. The poorest of them couldn’t find it.

In April 1528 AD St. Ignatius had to leave the house and beg for his food. He got a bed at the Hospital of Saint James, near the church of the Holy Innocents.

It stood a long way from the college. Its door was shut for the night at the Angelus, and nobody was let out before daylight. So he couldn’t get to lectures properly. Every summer after that he walked north to Flanders. He spent two months there begging from the Spanish merchants. Two months of it kept him for a year.

He picked the hardest way to go

About a year and a half later the same man set out for home in Spain. He got as far as Rouen and fell ill.

As soon as St. Ignatius heard, he decided to go and look after him. He also decided how he would travel: barefoot, and with nothing to eat or drink until he arrived. Nobody made him do that. It was his own plan. St. Ignatius said later why he did it. He wanted the man to leave the world behind and give himself to God.

Nine miles of fear

Everything known about this walk comes from St. Ignatius. Years later he told the story out loud. A friend, Luis Goncalves da Camara, wrote it down as he talked. The old accounts give the month, September 1529 AD, and not the day.

Praying about the plan frightened him badly. He was afraid that going that way was tempting God. That means putting God’s goodness and power to the test, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it. That fear left him in the church of Saint Dominic in Paris. There he made his mind up for good. The next morning it came back worse. That was the morning he could hardly dress.

He went. The fear stayed with him for the first nine miles, as far as a village called Argenteuil. A church there kept a relic that longstanding Catholic tradition holds is a garment of Our Lord. Past the village the fear broke. St. Ignatius described that moment in the account he dictated: “a feeling of great consolation and strength filled his soul with such joy that he began to shout aloud and to talk with God as he walked through the fields.”

He covered forty-five miles that day. That night he slept in a hospital, sharing with a beggar. The second night he stopped in a cabin roofed with straw. He came into Rouen on foot on the third day. He had eaten and drunk nothing the whole way.

What he did when he got there

The man had still not paid back a single crown.

St. Ignatius found him, stayed with him and looked after him. Then St. Ignatius found him a place on a ship that was about to sail for Spain. He gave him food for the voyage.

He sent letters with him as well, for three friends of his at Salamanca. Their names were Calisto de Sa, Lope de Caceres and Juan de Artiaga. Then he went back to Paris. On October 1, the feast of Saint Remigius, he began his course at the College of Sainte-Barbe.