Homily for Memorial of St. Ignatius Loyola

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Ignatius Loyola

July 31, 2025
Matt 13: 47-53
Collect
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

“The kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old” (Matt 13: 52).

St. Ignatius wounded in battle

Ignatius of Loyola lived in a revolutionary age.  He was born in the same year as Henry VIII, 8 years after Martin Luther.  He died 8 years before John Calvin did.  They were among the archetypes of the religious revolution that turned Europe upside down.

Ignatius brought forth the old in religious reformation:  the need for personal conversion and a radical commitment to Christ.  It was old, too, to find an impetus for that in the lives of the saints, which sparked Ignatius’s own conversion and reminds us of the power of good models and good mentors—for ourselves and our being such for others.

Ignatius’s spirituality was also new, his emphasis on the discernment of spirits, conveyed especially in his Spiritual Exercises.  His apostolic labors were new, appropriate to the age:  education, training the young in both the dramatically new forms of learning and in solid Christian formation; and missionary activity to reach the new worlds opened up by European exploration and commerce.

The collect suggests that we imitate Ignatius “in fighting the good fight on earth.”  That, of course, is an allusion to Ignatius’s military career, to his severe wounding in battle that began the course of his conversion, and to his founding of a “company”—a military term—to carry out Christ’s battle for souls against the archenemy of humanity, Satan, and against the reformers who were deforming Christian teaching and destroying the unity of the Church.  This Company of Jesus was a new approach from this householder, a new form of religious life, radically immersed in the world while constantly serving “the greater glory” of God’s name, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as the collect states.

We all learned in our earliest catechism that the glory of God is our purpose in life:  “God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this life and to be happy with him forever in the next.”  Ignatius adapted that old idea to the revolutionary age of 16th-century Europe and to the mission lands of Asia and America, whither he dispatched his troops.  We remain engaged in the same fight on God’s behalf—the battle for our own souls against the enemy of mankind and the battle for the souls of the young thru the education and mission work of our confreres.  Even in this house, we’re still engaged in the battle thru our prayer and our fraternal support of the troops on the front lines.