Saint Ignatius and the Company of Jesus by August Derleth

On his way, he stopped at a Benedictine monastery. He was in turmoil over his many sins, and he decided to atone for them by taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Surely, that was a life more wonderful than any lived in wealth, or on the glorious battlefield!Īccordingly, the moment Ignatius was well enough to travel, he resigned from the army. Soon, he found himself thinking less and less of his return to his old life, and more and more about the life of a saint. When he finished that, he read ‘The Lives of The Saints.’ But that wasn’t the end of it. Grudgingly, he picked up ‘The Life of Our Savior’ just to have something different to do. So the books sat, unread for a time, while Ignatius amused himself by staring out of the window and at the wall, dreaming of the time he would finally be well enough to return to court and soldier life. She brought him the only two books in the house: ‘The Life of Our Savior,’ and ‘The Lives of The Saints.’ Ignatius rather indignantly rejected them at first, saying that they were not the right material for a soldier to read. In one of his many fits of boredom, Ignatius asked his sister-in-law for a book to read. There, his brother and sister-in-law made him as comfortable as possible as several different surgeries were performed on his badly injured legs.

He was then sent to his childhood home to recover. He was hastily tended to by a field surgeon. He was only a soldier for a few years when he was wounded in the defense of a citadel by a cannon ball, which broke both of his legs. Soon, however, he grew restless at being idle all the time, so he joined the Spanish army at the first opportunity.

There, Ignatius found himself quite swallowed by the pomp and glitter of court living. When he grew old enough, his parents sent him to be raised in the court of the Spanish king, Ferdinand the 5th. Ignatius of Loyola was born to a noble family in 1491.

Saint Ignatius and the Company of Jesus by August Derleth