Last year was the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Pamplona, the occasion when a cannonball shattered the leg of a Basque gentleman soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, who had a kind of spiritual conversion during his convalescence while reading the lives of Christ and of the saints. It led him to form the Society of Jesus in 1539.
How does the Society of Jesus look now, 501 years on, at least in Britain?
The man who knows is Fr Damian Howard, for the past four-and-a-half years Provincial of the British province, whom I met at the Jesuit office next to Farm Street church in Mayfair. He is courteous, quietly spoken and articulate; he was also a little wary. I had suggested in the email I sent asking to meet him that the Society of Jesus was now better known for its work with refugees than for making converts and for the intellectual formation of Catholics; he bristled a bit at that. Fr Damian is proud of the work Jesuits do with refugees – it’s one of the Society’s four priorities for mission – but he was keen to emphasise what the order is actually about.
