St. Ignatius walks barefoot to nurse the man who took his money

PARIS, September 1529 AD — Saint Ignatius of Loyola walked from Paris to Rouen this month, barefoot, and ate and drank nothing on the road. He went to nurse the Spaniard who had spent his money and left him begging in the streets of Paris.

St. Ignatius is thirty-eight, a Basque nobleman from Guipuzcoa who was a soldier until a French cannon ball broke his right leg at Pamplona in 1521 AD. He has been in Paris since February 2, 1528 AD, going back over a course of studies he first began at thirty-three. He has lived on alms since Lent last year.

A merchant at Paris paid him twenty-five gold crowns on an order sent from Barcelona, and he left the money for safekeeping with one of the Spaniards he lodged with. That man spent it and could not pay it back. After Lent that year St. Ignatius had to leave the house and beg his food. He took a bed in the Hospital of Saint James, near the church of the Holy Innocents. The hospital stood far from the college and would not let a lodger in after the Angelus or out before daylight, so he could not attend lectures with any profit. Since then he has paid for his studies by walking north to Flanders each summer and begging two months’ alms from the Spanish merchants there. That is enough to keep him for a year.

The man who took the money set out this year to go home to Spain and fell sick on the way, at Rouen. The account St. Ignatius dictated years later never gives his name. He had nothing at Rouen, and the only person he knew to ask for help was the man he had robbed.

When St. Ignatius heard of it he decided to go to him, and to walk the whole way barefoot and take neither food nor drink. What he wanted from the journey, by his own account, was to bring the man to leave the world and give himself wholly to God.

The account he dictated is exact about what praying over that resolve did to him: “While praying for this purpose, he felt himself seized with great fear until, entering the Church of St. Dominic, he resolved to make the journey in this manner.” What he had feared was that he might be tempting God, and in the church that fear left him. It came back the next day, worse. His own account of the morning he set out reads: “on the morning of the following day, upon arising, so great a fear seized him that it seemed to him that he could not even put on his clothes.”

He dressed, left the house and walked out of the city in that state. The fear held for the first nine miles, as far as the village of Argenteuil.

At Argenteuil the Benedictines keep the relic venerated by longstanding tradition as the Holy Coat of Our Lord. The oldest document that names it is from 1156 AD, when Archbishop Hugh of Rouen testified that it had been in the treasury of the Benedictine church there from ancient times. He had examined it with other bishops and authenticated it.

Beyond the village the fear broke. In his own account: “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 first day and spent the night in a hospital, sharing with a beggar. The second night he lodged in a cabin thatched with straw. On the third day he reached Rouen on foot, having taken nothing to eat or drink the whole way.

He found the sick man and stayed with him, consoled him and looked after him. Then he got him a passage on a ship about to sail for Spain, and food for the voyage. He also gave the man letters to carry. They are addressed to Calisto de Sa, Lope de Caceres and Juan de Artiaga, three companions of his years in Spain. All three are at Salamanca.

St. Ignatius has been in trouble at Paris all year. Last autumn three men he had taken through the Spiritual Exercises — Peralta, Juan de Castro of the Sorbonne and Amador of the College of Sainte-Barbe — gave away everything they owned, including their books. They moved into the same Hospital of Saint James to live on what they could beg. Two of them were well known, and the outcry across the university was loud. A crowd of the other Spaniards went to the hospital armed and dragged the three of them back. Diego de Gouvea, the rector of Sainte-Barbe, has resolved to have St. Ignatius publicly whipped in hall as a corrupter of the students as soon as he sets foot in the college.

On his return from Rouen he learned that he had been summoned before the Inquisitor of Paris, Matteo Ori, a Dominican. He did not wait to be fetched. He went to Ori of his own accord and said: “I heard that I had been sought for, and I now present myself.” He asked that the matter be finished quickly, because he intends to begin his arts course on the feast of Saint Remigius, October 1. Ori told him charges had indeed been laid, let him go, and has not summoned him since.