St. Ignatius gives his old roommate, now in Japan, charge of India

ROME, October 10, 1549 AD — In Rome on October 10, 1549 AD, Saint Ignatius of Loyola made India a province of the Society of Jesus and named Saint Francis Xavier its first Provincial. The appointment put every Jesuit in India under St. Francis Xavier, who had shared a room with St. Ignatius in Paris twenty years before. The two had not met since March 1540 AD. When St. Ignatius made the appointment, St. Francis Xavier had already left India and landed in Japan.

St. Ignatius was fifty-eight and had governed the Society from Rome since April 1541 AD, when his companions elected him Superior General by every vote but his own. In the Society, a province was a territorial division, often a whole country, governed by a provincial in the General’s place. The General appointed the provincial and gave him wide powers over the local superiors beneath him, and the two kept in touch by a steady exchange of letters.

The Society was spreading fast. In February 1549 AD its first missionaries sailed from Portugal for Brazil, and in September Father Claude Jay, Father Alfonso Salmerón and St. Peter Canisius set out for Germany. All the while St. Ignatius was writing the Society’s Constitutions, the rule by which it would be governed.

St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier had met at the College of Sainte-Barbe in Paris in 1529 AD. St. Ignatius moved into the bedroom St. Francis Xavier shared with another student, St. Peter Faber, and the three ate together and shared their money. On August 15, 1534 AD, St. Francis Xavier was one of the six who made vows with St. Ignatius at Montmartre, and that September St. Ignatius took him through the month of the Spiritual Exercises.

By March 1540 AD the companions numbered ten, and that month the King of Portugal asked for some of them to go to India. His ambassador in Rome pressed for six of the ten, and St. Ignatius told him he could spare one or two. When the ambassador kept pushing, St. Ignatius answered: “Jesus! my Lord ambassador, if six out of ten go to India, what is there left for all the rest of the world?” Simon Rodrigues, one of the Montmartre companions, sailed from Civitavecchia for Portugal on March 4. The other companion chosen came back from Naples so exhausted and so ill with sciatica that he could not travel. St. Francis Xavier went in his place, with barely enough time to say goodbye to his friends and mend his worn clothes.

Before he left, St. Francis Xavier wrote out his vote for the man who should lead the Society. He wrote that he believed “in my conscience that we ought to elect as the head of our Society, to whom we are to yield our obedience, our ancient and true Father Ignatius, who in former times assembled us together with such great difficulty, and who is best able to govern, preserve, and promote the good of our Society, from having the most intimate knowledge of us all.” St. Francis Xavier signed it on March 15. The next day he set out overland for Portugal, on his way to India, carrying nothing but his breviary.

Nine years later, India became the Society’s third province. Portugal had become the first in 1546 AD and Spain the second in 1547 AD, and every other house still answered to St. Ignatius directly. By the end of the year the Society’s members were living in twenty-two places.

St. Francis Xavier had reached Goa, in Portuguese India, in May 1542 AD and taken charge of the college of St. Paul there. When St. Ignatius signed the order, the new Provincial of India was at Kagoshima, in the south of Japan. St. Francis Xavier had landed there on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, with two other Jesuits, Father Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández.

Eight days after the India appointment, on October 18, Pope Paul III gave the Society many privileges in a bull, a papal letter more formal than a brief. Among them was the General’s right to assign his men to teach theology and other subjects. Pope Paul III had given the Society his spoken approval at Tivoli in 1539 AD and issued its founding bull in 1540 AD. He died on November 10.

On December 7 Father Pietro Codacio died suddenly. Since 1539 AD he had begged the alms that kept the Society’s house in Rome fed and handled its business with the papal offices. With him gone, the house ran short of money. By late January 1550 AD everyone in the Roman house was going out to beg. On February 6 St. Ignatius went to the cardinals shut in conclave to choose Pope Paul III’s successor, and they gave him alms when he asked.