Thinking with Jesuit Saints: The Canonization of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier in Context

Abstract

The significance of the two founder saints to the contribution made by Jesuit missionaries, many of whom became martyrs, to the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion, was made explicit not at the canonization ceremony itself, nor in the celebratory processions made through the streets of Rome, but in events and decorations put up within spaces controlled by the Jesuits themselves at the Gesù, the Collegio Romano, and the novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale. This points to the wider phenomenon, pursued in complementary fashion in the six essays that follow: that how one “became” a saint and came to enjoy a cult (then as now) has more to do with particular, local appropriation and interpretation (including Rome itself) than with official papal, universal approbation.