THE EDUCATIONAL PLAN OF ST. IGNATIUS

St. Ignatius had gathered about him a body of picked men. The Roman College, the type of colleges of Jesuit education, would have for its professors only those who had been doctors of the University of Paris.

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The outline of the course of education was given by St. Ignatius. It was completed and developed by Aquaviva. The work was still more perfected by Father Laynez, of whom it is said,—

"St. Ignatius praised him not only on account of other great merits, but particularly for devising and arranging the system of colleges."

As to the number of students found under a unified method of thorough teaching, it will be interesting to take them in review.

In Rome in 1584, the twenty colleges attending classes in the Roman College numbered 2108 students, in Poland there were 10,000 young men chiefly of the nobility, at Rome 2000, at La Flèche 1700. In the seventeenth century at the College of Louis le Grand, in Paris, the number varied between 2000 and 3000. In 1627 the Province of Paris had in fourteen colleges 13,195 students.

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The papal seminaries under Gregory XIII, at Vienna, Dillengen, Fulda, Prague, Grätz, Olmütz, Wilna, as well as in Japan, were directed by the Fathers, as also that of Pius V and of St. Charles Borromeo at Milan.

Taking an average, there were more than two hundred thousand students being educated in these educational institutions.

A comparison could be made on this basis of the work done by the Order and that which is accomplished by Oxford.

If Oxford spends annually a revenue of $2,500,000 to supply facilities for higher education to two thousand of the nobility and gentry, how much would be required to educate a quarter of a million students,—not two thousand, but two hundred and fifty thousand?

The fundamental principles in the educational institute of St. Ignatius were these:—

First, solidity and thoroughness.

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The first condition of all higher studies as well as of lower studies was such that, as St. Ignatius said, "It was useless to begin at the top, as the edifice without a good foundation would never stand."

Let literature and philosophy be gone through with satisfactorily, and then theology may be approached.

Literature must come first of all. St. Ignatius provides for law and medicine, but by professors of law and medicine outside of the Order; but no professors of the Order were sent for work outside of Jesuit institutions. If the younger men were sent abroad, the younger generation would be deprived of that type; and if eminent men were sent forth without a permanent Jesuit College, the work would not be that of the Order, but of scattered individuals, and would soon perish.

In the cause of education St. Ignatius had placed in his charter the watchwords "Defence and Advance." As a leader of [Pg 160]a military type he had gathered about him the flower of youth and of mature age, from college and university, from doctor's chair and prince's throne, and in fifteen years from the foundation of the Order left one hundred colleges and houses in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Germany, France, Brazil, and the East Indies. Xavier traveled from India and Ceylon, in the west, to Malucca, Japan, and the coast of China on the east. Wherever the energy and activity of Apostolic zeal penetrated it was with the purpose, and usually the result, of permanent Apostolic work in the foundation of educational institutions. Father de Backer says,—

"Wherever a Jesuit set his foot, wherever there was founded a house, a college, a mission, there too came apostles of another class, who labored, who taught, who wrote."

This is true even to our day where in the Rocky Mountains, beside the mission [Pg 161]house of Spokane Falls, rises the Jesuit College of Spokane.

Sixty years later than the time of St. Ignatius there were 272 colleges, and in 150 years the collegiate and university houses of education numbered 769.

"Looking at these seven hundred institutions of secondary and superior education," says Father Thomas Hughes in his work on Loyola, "in their scope of legislative executive power we find they were not so much a plurality of institutions as a single one.

"If we look at the 92 colleges in France, although the University of Paris was in one quarter of the city, and in that sense materially one,—although including 50 colleges,—yet in the formal and essential bond these 92 Jesuit colleges were vastly more of a unit as an identical educational power than any faculty existing. No faculty at Paris, Rome, Salamanca, or Oxford ever preserved the control over [Pg 162]its 50, 20, or 8 colleges that each Provincial exercised over his 10, 20, or 30 colleges, or the general of the Order over the 700 colleges, with 22,126 members in the Order."

At the present day we find the Jesuit colleges in almost every part of the known world. In Rome and in China, in South Africa and North America, in the Philippine Islands as well as in Ceylon and Egypt, in Australia and Cuba, as well as in Syria and the city of New York.

We may glance briefly at the colleges scattered over the world, containing to-day 52,692 Jesuit pupils.

This is a larger number than those taught at Oxford and Cambridge and Glasgow and Harvard or Yale or Princeton or in Paris and Edinburgh.

In the Jesuit College at Rome there are 2082 students.

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Thus the total number of students—studying with professors of the Society of Jesus under one university system in all parts of the known world—is 52,692.

There has been no going back. Fifty years ago, when the groundwork of rebuilding the 700 institutions that had been destroyed by the suppression had to be commenced all over again, there were but 15,000, to-day there are 52,692.

St. Ignatius was born in 1491. The first College of Coimbra was founded in 1542. From 1542 to 1773 is a period of 231 years. The suppression lasted from 1773 to 1814 (41 years). The new work continued from 1814 to 1899, a period of 85 years.

Among the colleges founded in the chief cities of the world are Loyola College, at Loyola in Spain; St. Omer's College, in Belgium, the link between Europe and America; Stonyhurst College, in England; Clongoes Wood, Ireland; Mangalore, in[Pg 165] India, the only first-grade college in the district; Melbourne, Australia; St. Ignatius College, California, the pioneer of Pacific coast missions and of the Rocky Mountains; at Kansas City the only boarding college in the far West; St. Ignatius, at Cleveland, Ohio, one of the latest Western colleges; Spring Hill College, at Mobile, Alabama; Georgetown College, at Washington, D.C.; Holy Cross College, at Worcester, Massachusetts; St. John's College, at Fordham, New York; St. Francis Xavier's College, in New York City.

In the proportion mentioned above, in the same period (that is, a period of 231 years), there will be in the Jesuit colleges 263,690 pupils.

St. Ignatius died July 31, 1556. He was sixty-five years of age. At the age of thirty he hung up his sword at Montserrat, and, with ready mind and heart and pen, in thirty-five years he achieved the gigantic work of the founding and [Pg 166]developing the Order. The educational work was projected and advanced in a brief period of fifteen years, from 1542 to 1556.

He was a man of prudence and deliberation, and of unswerving decision.

Vigilant and patient, whenever he appeared account had to be taken of the man; and so with his Order, whenever it appears it is to be recognized either by foes to oppose it or friends to love it and forward its work. It has its churches—its missions—its colleges. In its churches it is faithful to the teaching of Christ and His Church, loyal ever to the Vicar of Christ; in its missions, unbounded in zeal and personal self-sacrifice; in its colleges, it aims ever at the solid and thorough training of complete Christian education. Ignatius of Loyola made his Order to go on without him, and it goes on just as he made it.

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