Ignatius And The Mohammedans

After recognizing the impossibility of becoming an active warrior in the cause of the Catholic Church against the Mohammedans, Ignatius devoted all his energies to the furtherance of his spiritual mission in the Holy Land and the cause of the early hostility to the Society which he afterwards founded, was the settlement of its members in countries other than Palestine. Father Christopher Genelli, S.J. in his Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, says that:

"Everything tends to show that Ignatius, in making the journey to Jerusalem, had no other object than to take up his abode near the sepulchre of our Lord, and there labour to extend the Kingdom of Christ and to make war upon His enemies. It was not then a simple pilgrimage that he was making, for the East had been his first thought after his conversion. 

He had the idea of at once establishing, on the spot sanctified by the presence of our Lord in the flesh, a Society of Jesus, composed of apostolic evangelical labourers, whose spiritual welfare in the midst of the children of Mohammed should pave the way to new triumphs of the Catholic Church. 

This was, without doubt, a noble conception, which the swords of the Christian chivalry of Europe had not been able to realize by the efforts of Catholicism of centuries. That this was the real design of St. Ignatius is proved by the pains he took to gain a footing in Palestine. ... To the last years of his life he thought seriously of securing at last an entrance for the Society in Jerusalem."

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