The Establishment of the English Province of the Society of Jesus
And touching our Society be it known to you that we have made a league–all the Jesuits of the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England–cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us and never to despair of your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted, so it must be restored.The Jesuit mission to England so proudly announced by Edmund Campion in 1580 was a venture hesitantly undertaken by the Society of Jesus. There was careful, prayerful discernment not only before Father General Everard Mercurian decided in its favour but also throughout its subsequent growth and development. According to the Formula of the Institute, in a sense the Jesuit rule, the purpose and goal of the Society was twofold: the salvation and sanctification of both the individual Jesuits and of their fellow men and women. The entire thrust of Ignatian spirituality was the consideration of the first in so far as it advanced the second. Ignatius urged that all the ordinary practices and customs of religious life be considered in the context of the apostolate and either executed or modified in so far as they advanced the order’s goals. Because of the stress that Ignatius had placed on the Society’s works, he was reluctant to prescribe any universally binding spiritual practices. Indeed, among the wide powers granted to the General in the order’s Constitutions was that to grant dispensations ‘in particular cases which require such dispensation, while he takes account of the persons, places, times, and other circumstances.’