Brian Grogan SJ points out how in Barcelona in the years 1524-25 St Ignatius’s person radiated something that brought veneration and affection in others. Many made mention of a light that lit up his face.
In Barcelona, Ines Pascual welcomed Ignatius once again into her home where he had spent three weeks prior to his departure for Jerusalem. She was described as ‘a woman who loved the truth and would not tell a lie for all the gold in the world.’
A child whom she had found wandering and whom she sheltered during the ravages of the plague remembered the upstairs room that the pilgrim occupied in the little house; he recalled the wooden bed that had no mattress; and how Ignatius would spend hours on his knees in prayer. He recalled that he was a silent man, unwilling to converse. He spoke only when he was asked a question, but what he said would speak to the heart.
He attested that Ignatius came back from Jerusalem dressed in the same clothes he was wearing when he departed, and that he carried with him a rosary that he said continuously. He begged for his food during the whole time that he remained under Ines Pascual’s roof. For him the benefits that resulted from begging were an encounter with the unknown, the unpredictable; the experience of depending on pure charity that gives without question to a nameless poor person; the frequent scorn and the accompanying condescending lecture; and finally, the feeling of total hopelessness before people, along with a complete reliance and hope in God alone.
Each week one of the Barcelona ladies brought him a supply of flour that Ines Pascual would knead and bake for him. Whatever he had not eaten he would then distribute to the poor. It seems too that Ignatius used to bring home scraps of bread, eat the most unsavoury pieces and give away the best.
On one occasion, the boys of the household looked through his knapsack and said, ‘You’ve got a lot of bread down there’. The pilgrim answered gently, ‘Help yourselves to it’. In spite of the disapproval of Ines the boys accepted the invitation. ‘You rascals, you should let him eat it!’ she said. The pilgrim intervened in this dispute and in a most gentle way said, ‘Mother Pascual, let them alone; it gives me joy just watching them eat it all’. We may note here that perhaps the only woman in this world whom Ignatius called mother was Ines Pascual.
Ines’s son, John, shared an upstairs room with the pilgrim. When the time came for them to retire, Ignatius would say to the young man, ‘John, you go to bed now, I have something else I want to do’. The boy would get into bed and pretend that he was asleep, but in fact he would stay awake, fascinated, watching his roommate praying on his knees for hours on end, and sighing aloud, ‘My God, if only people knew you!’
The local Dominican nuns had the reputation of socialising with lay people. He visited them on a number of occasions and succeeded in convincing them to amend their ways. But he paid the price for this when a thug, hired by a nobleman who had been deprived of this company, assaulted him and left him for dead in the middle of the street. Some millers picked him up and brought him to Ines’s house where he remained laid up for almost two whole months. He was in such a sorry state that whenever they made his bed they had to use towels to move him. They cured him by wrapping him in sheets soaked in wine.
He never indicated who might have been the perpetrator or the instigator of this act of revenge. John Pascual recalled that during these days, ‘My mother treated and coddled him as if he were her own son or an angel come to earth; she stayed by him during the night without ever sleeping a wink…. The flower of Barcelona’s nobility came to visit him, both ladies and gentlemen, and they all pampered him to death’.
Ignatius’s person radiated something that brought out veneration and affection in others. Many made mention of a light that lit up his face, a physical transparency of his intense interior light. The most remarkable testimony of this was given by Isabel Roser. She saw the pilgrim for the first time in Barcelona prior to his departure for Jerusalem in 1523, seated on the church steps surrounded by children. She was struck by a light that shone forth from the pilgrim’s pallid and somewhat luminous face. She heard a voice from within say, ‘Call him!’ With her husband’s permission she sent for the pilgrim and invited him to dine with her family, who asked him to speak to them about God. He told them that he was on the point of embarking on a ship but they took his books off the boat which then departed, only to sink while still in sight of Barcelona.
Isabel would always remain fond of the pilgrim, and years later, during the time he was in Paris, she would help him to defray the cost of his schooling. In 1532, he would write the following words of gratitude to her from Paris, ‘I owe more to you than to any other person I know in this life’.
While studying in Barcelona, Ignatius began to have the desire to gather certain persons to himself in order to put into operation the plan he had, beginning at that time, of helping to repair the defects he saw in people’s service of God, namely, persons who might be like trumpets of Jesus Christ. This is the first indication of his reforming ideal. Three companions joined him, but their enthusiasm would dim with time, so that he lost them to other interests. Meanwhile Ignatius’s teacher, Ardevol, was pressing him to begin his studies of arts at Alcala.
He left Barcelona late in 1525, leaving behind him a profound spiritual heritage — people touched by his unique personality, and places and objects where his lingering presence hovered. A letter of his to Ines Pascual, dated December 6, 1525, warned her of some serious problems facing her, and advised her on how she might avoid them and live joyfully. This man, so exacting when it came to himself, shows himself lenient when it came to his adopted mother: she should not resort to excessive penance as he had done. He signs his letter, ‘The poor pilgrim, Ignatius’.
For Pondering:
Do you recognise how much you owe to those who care for you?
