One of the most famous of the 7000-odd letters Ignatius wrote (more than anyone else in the sixteenth century) was to a Portuguese Jesuit named Diego Mirón, who was causing distress at the royal court in Portugal. King John, a great friend of the Society, wanted Mirón to become his confessor. Mirón turned him down. Becoming the king’s confessor would plunge him into the intrigues of the court, a cesspool of mendacity. Mirón wanted no part of it. He thought it would threaten his spiritual well-being.
I sympathize with Mirón. I spent several of my formative years as a newspaper reporter working with and observing New Jersey politicians. On my first day on the job, a summer job while still in college, I shook hands with the mayor of a medium-sized Hudson County town; when I pulled my hand back, there was a five dollar bill in it. (That mayor later went to jail for corruption.)
Most of the politicians I worked with were better people, but it seemed to me that you couldn’t do politics well without doing morally ambiguous things: breaking promises, making friends with scoundrels, being ambitious while pretending not to be, paying people off, and generally presenting a false front to the world, being less than candid, assuring friends and foes (and reporters) that all would well when you knew they wouldn’t be. I was young and naïve when I formed this impression of politics. I have since learned about men and women of great integrity who were skilled politicians. (Abraham Lincoln, for example, was a political operator of the highest order.) But for me—I don’t think I could do it. I’m with Mirón. I would have said no to the king too.
But Mirón had a boss and the boss was not pleased. Ignatius reminded Mirón of a couple of things. First, that his job was to “help souls” wherever they were found, in high places as well as low, and the king was a soul like everybody else. He also reminded Mirón that the king was a good friend of the Society. It was important to please the king if at all possible, and there seemed to be no compelling reason not to do so, since there seemed to be no downside to the king’s desire to have a Jesuit at his side.
As for Mirón’s worries about his spiritual well-being, Ignatius was blunt. “l do not think the security of your soul is relevant,” he wrote. “If all we looked for in our vocation was to walk safely, and if to get away from danger we had to sacrifice the good of souls, we should not be living and associating with our neighbor.”
“l do not think the security of your soul is relevant.” In the context of the time, that was a remarkable thing for Ignatius to say. In the sixteenth century, many people joined religious communities precisely to save their souls. The monastery or convent was a refuge from the evils of the world. Ignatius kept men who thought this way out of the Jesuits. He weeded them out before they got ordained. Men joined the Jesuits to do the work of Christ in the world. They ran risks to do this work. They went into it with their eyes open, understanding that they would make mistakes, get things wrong, make many decisions in conditions of great uncertainty. The work might take them to dangerous places. If it did, Ignatius told Mirón, “Jesus himself in his infinite mercy will be our protection.”
Ignatius was also asserting a principle of discernment. When faced with a decision, we’re to make the choice that accomplishes the greater good. To see what this is, we’re to work as hard as we can to achieve a state of “indifference”—detached from personal considerations, free from fears, poised in the balance, neither wanting nor shunning the alternatives, wanting only what God wants. It’s fine for Mirón to be concerned about falling into sin, but he’s not to be worried about it, not to allow it to influence his judgment.
So it is with us. Our first thought in contemplating a new venture is usually “what’s in it for me?” and variations thereof. What risks? What rewards? How will it look? What if I fail? These are “disordered attachments” in the rubric of Ignatian discernment—not wrong, not irrelevant, but “disordered,” out of place when they dominate our thinking.
Presumably Mirón went on to do a fine job as King John’s confessor, but there’s great irony in the story of Jesuits serving in the royal courts of Europe. Over the next century or so, this became a Jesuit specialty. Many Jesuits serving princes and kings were inevitably caught up in the intrigues, coalitions, and rivalries among courtiers. Kings demanded loyalty from their confessors, so when countries went to war, prominent Jesuits were active on all sides of the struggle. In The Jesuits: A History, Markus Frieidrich writes that “the order was implicated in numerous political contradictions that sometimes veered into the grotesque.” Jesuits became polarizing figures in European politics. Eventually the kings of Europe ganged up on the Jesuits and in 1773 got the pope to suppress the Society.
An argument could be made that Mirón was right; Jesuits should have stayed away from the seat of power. But no one could have foreseen how this particular ministry would turn out. Ignatius made the best decision he could make at the time. There are no guarantees except that “Jesus himself in his infinite mercy will be our protection.”