St. Ignatius and three priests shout in four squares of Vicenza

VICENZA, Republic of Venice, September 1537 AD — In a busy square of Vicenza this month a man of forty-six climbed onto a bench, gave a great shout, and waved his hat above his head until people came over. At that same hour, in three other squares of the city, three men who had walked from Paris to join him were doing the same thing. Then all four preached. The sermons set the city talking and brought a number of townspeople to a more devout life, and afterwards more food came in to the four.

The man on the bench was Saint Ignatius of Loyola, ten weeks a priest. He and his companions had bound themselves by vow at Paris to go to Jerusalem, but the war between the Republic of Venice and the Turkish Sultan Suleiman had shut the sea, and no ship left Venice for the East this year. The papal nuncio at Venice, Girolamo Verallo, had given them faculties to preach, teach and explain Scripture publicly and privately anywhere in the Venetian dominion. It was permission to preach, not a church to preach in: they had no parish, no pulpit and no hearers.

Nine of them had reached Venice on January 8 of this year, on foot from Paris through a winter of war. They were four Spaniards, two Frenchmen, two Savoyards and a Portuguese, and every one of them was a Master of Arts. They went straight into two hospitals and took the lowliest work among the sick poor. Then they walked to Rome for Holy Week, where Pope Paul III had them dispute before cardinals, bishops and doctors. The Pope gave them his permission for Jerusalem and sixty ducats, and from the cardinals and others present they collected more than a hundred and fifty more. On June 24, the feast of Saint John the Baptist, seven of the companions were ordained priest at Venice, St. Ignatius among them, under the title of voluntary poverty. Vincenzo Nigusanti of Fano, Bishop of Arbe, who ordained them, said afterwards that in laying his hands on these men he had felt a devotion he had never known on any other occasion.

A month later the voyage was given up, and the companions sent the two hundred and sixty ducats back to the people who had given them. St. Ignatius wrote from Venice that July that they had no wish to use the money for anything but the voyage, “and are unwilling that anyone should come to think that we hunger and thirst after the things for which the world dies.” Then they split into twos and threes across the Venetian territory to wait out the year the Paris vow allowed them. Vicenza fell to St. Ignatius, to Saint Peter Faber and to James Laines.

Outside the Santa Croce gate the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie let them have an empty monastic house that had neither door nor windows. They slept on a little straw they had carried in with them. Two of the three walked into the city morning and evening to beg, and the third stayed behind to bake. What came back barely fed them, and they ate bread, mostly boiled. The baking fell mostly to St. Ignatius, because his eyes had grown weak from the abundance of his tears and he could not go out. Forty days passed like that, with nothing in them but prayer. Through those weeks he had many spiritual visions, and consolations in great number. In August he wrote to Pietro Contarini, a Venetian nobleman who had made the Spiritual Exercises under him at Venice: “Consequently we have no capital to begin with except our efforts after sanctity and perfection.”

At the end of the forty days Jean Codure arrived from Treviso. That made four of them, and the four decided to preach. They spoke Italian with a foreign accent and sometimes used foreign words outright; a good many of the people who stopped for the entertainment were struck to the heart and hurried back to hear them again. The other companions, scattered through the towns round about, began to do the same in their own market places.

Several of them fell ill from the work of preaching and the hardness of the life, Simon Rodrigues worst of all. He was lodging at a hermitage called St. Vito near Bassano, where he shared the fasts of the old hermit Antonio and got up at night to sing psalms with him. When he fell sick this month the physician who was called gave him up. St. Ignatius set out for Bassano at once with St. Peter Faber, leaving James Laines sick in the hospital. St. Ignatius had a fever, and walked so fast that St. Peter Faber fell behind and had to be waited for on the road. On the road St. Ignatius was given an assurance from God that Rodrigues would not die of that illness. They found Rodrigues much consoled by their coming, and before long he was better.

At the end of this month the companions who had not yet said a first Mass said it at Vicenza. St. Ignatius did not. At his ordination in June he had decided to wait a year before saying his first Mass, so as to prepare better and to ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to place him near her Son. At Vicenza he confirmed that he would keep to the year.