A cannonball at Pamplona ended a soldier's career and began the most disciplined religious order in Catholic history — and the meditation method still used to train it.
Íñigo López de Loyola was born in 1491 into a minor Basque noble family in northern Spain. He spent his early life as a courtier and soldier, more interested in duelling and romance than religion. In 1521, while defending the fortress of Pamplona against a French army, a cannonball shattered his right leg. The wound was so severe that surgeons rebroke and reset the bone multiple times without anaesthetic, leaving him with a permanent limp — and ending, decisively, any hope of the military glory he had been chasing.
During a long convalescence at the family castle, with nothing to read but a life of Christ and a book of saints' lives, Loyola underwent a slow psychological transformation. He noticed something specific: fantasies of chivalric glory and romance left him excited in the moment but restless and empty afterward, while thoughts of imitating the saints left him with lasting peace. That observation — that the aftertaste of a thought reveals more about its spiritual value than the thought itself — became the seed of everything he later taught about discernment.
After his recovery, Loyola abandoned his military career, spent nearly a year in solitary penance and mystical experience at a cave near the town of Manresa, and eventually resumed formal education as an adult in his thirties — first in Barcelona, then at the universities of Alcalá, Salamanca, and finally Paris, where he earned a master's degree in 1534.
In Paris he gathered six companions, including Francis Xavier and Pierre Favre, who together took vows of poverty and chastity at the chapel of Montmartre on 15 August 1534, intending to do missionary work in Jerusalem. War between Venice and the Ottomans made the journey impossible, so the small group instead offered themselves to the Pope. In 1540 Pope Paul III formally approved the new order with the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae — the Society of Jesus was born, with Loyola elected its first Superior General, a post he held until his death in 1556.
The Spiritual Exercises, composed by Loyola between 1522 and 1524 and first printed in 1548, is not meant to be read like an ordinary book — it is a director's manual for guiding another person through roughly thirty days of structured prayer, imagination, and self-examination, usually broken into four thematic 'weeks': sin and mercy, the life of Christ, the Passion, and the Resurrection.
Loyola drew directly on his own convalescent experience at Manresa: the exercises train a person to notice the difference between consolation (movements of the soul toward faith, hope, and peace) and desolation (restlessness, doubt, and turning away) — a practical psychology of decision-making he called discernment of spirits, and one of the more influential contributions of Catholic spirituality to what would later be recognised as introspective psychological method.
The most widely practised legacy of the Exercises is the Examen — a short daily review of the day's events, undertaken to notice where one felt drawn toward or away from a sense of meaning and peace. Unlike a general confession of sins, the Examen is closer to a structured mindfulness practice, and it has been adopted well beyond Catholic or even religious contexts by therapists, coaches, and secular meditation teachers.
Jesuit formation still uses a 30-day silent retreat based on the Exercises as its foundational experience, and directed retreats based on the same four-week structure are offered by retreat centres worldwide today, including to people with no religious affiliation at all — making Loyola's 16th-century convalescent insight one of the most durably exported pieces of Catholic spiritual technology.