Ignatius of Loyola and women

Writing the biography of a saint, especially one of the stature of Ignatius of Loyola, is not easy. The risk of surrendering to rhetoric, apologia, or worse, hagiography is always lurking. The only option when undertaking such endeavors is to deepen one's studies, even when one thinks one knows everything—indeed, especially when one is convinced one knows everything—and to always be honest with oneself and with the person one wishes to portray. It requires discernment—the most Ignatian term possible—between truth and falsehood, between what comes from our prejudices and what is the fruit of our serene knowledge. In short, if the biography is reduced to a glorious holy card or a caricature, in our opinion, it is no biography at all. It is useless narcissism.

In her Ignatius of Loyola (Laterza, 2026, pp. 320, also available as an ebook), theologian Flaminia Morandi eschews all narcissistic and hagiographic temptations to offer us a sometimes surprising and intimate portrait of the founder of the Jesuits. She does so by retracing, naturally, the key moments in Ignatius's life, from the adventures of a reckless and libertine adolescence to his war exploits, to the discovery of a religious dimension the future saint never suspected he possessed, leading to the path that would lead to the birth of Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuit order. Morandi, however, retraces these events from a perspective different from the traditional one, which focuses entirely on the evolution of Ignatius as a figure. Instead, she focuses her research on the fundamental, yet little-explored, connection between Ignatius and women. The book, as the author herself writes, “is a reading of their relationship throughout history, from Ignatius’s conversion to the closing of the Society’s doors to women.”

Well, we all know that at the height of the Counter-Reformation, Ignatius of Loyola revolutionized the Catholic Church by founding the Society of Jesus and introducing his "spiritual exercises" into a Catholic world that seemed to have lost all the vigor of original Christianity. This method, through silence, meditation, prayer, and self-denial, frees people from the paralysis of automatic processes and enables them to bring order to their internal chaos. Surprisingly for the time, Ignatius involved women in this practice, which gave them a self-awareness and autonomy unthinkable in the sixteenth century. As Morandi writes: "It was with women that Ignatius had had the most enlightening spiritual conversations after his conversion. They were illiterate women, but in them he recognized the sincerity of the quest that Ignatius had 'given' the Exercises, still in their infancy."

It was a revolutionary act because it demonstrated that spiritual and religious experience did not require theological preparation or even any kind of culture. Spiritual and religious experience occurs, instead, "when someone helps another open a breach in the wall between the depths of consciousness, where the question of the Mystery resides, and the cultural and intellectual construct that traps the person in automatic behaviors," Morandi writes.
Furthermore, it was thanks to some rich and powerful women who gathered around him and who supported him with great strength at the beginning of his spiritual journey, that Ignatius managed to gain access to the papal and imperial courts which then embraced his proposal at the height of the Counter-Reformation.

Yet, Ignatius himself ended up excluding women from the institution he had founded. This choice is difficult to understand, given that Pope Paul III Farnese himself had initially approved women's entry into the Society, only to then, under insistent pressure from Ignatius, officially expel them within a few months. Why did Ignatius take this stance? One might suggest that, thanks to the Ignatian Exercises, women had learned to know themselves, to come face to face with their own limitations, and thanks to this knowledge, to find a way to communicate with the Mystery. Those women had acquired an awareness unprecedented for sixteenth-century women who were not from aristocratic families: the awareness of freedom and determination. The consequence was that women of this type became dangerous because they were decisive and independent. This is one possible interpretation of Ignatius's choice, but it is not "the" interpretation according to Morandi. Explaining Ignatius's choice in this way means settling for a partial answer, remaining superficial, and failing to resort to the discernment we mentioned at the beginning. Flaminia Morandi goes even further. She poses the question "why Ignatius decided to exclude women from the Society of Jesus" at the center of a genuine and fascinating investigation into the saint's biography. This exploration opens up new perspectives and invites us to reconsider not only the past, but also the future of a question—the presence and role of women—that continues to challenge the contemporary Church, without obtaining satisfactory answers...at least for now.