[B.] St. IGNATIUS of LOYOLA Presentation: The ... - St. Gaspar Bertoni

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over from desolation, loneliness, to consolation. The person who unites with Mary experiences
this presence of the Risen Lord in life. The saint has us enter into such experiential
understanding in freedom and fidelity. Only an understanding of lived and hopeful faith can lead
one to serve the Church for a lifetime.
[e] In the light of the resurrection of her Son, Mary
inaugurates the new type of understanding the faith which will be the patrimony of the nascent
Church. In the moment of the glory of the resurrection, Mary is one with the Church [cf. Ac 1:12-
14] - which Jesus Christ has entrusted to His Apostles. In her one can become united in a unique
manner to the Paschal Mystery, and in this way the faith in the Church is generated and
communicated.
[f] The understanding of the Scriptures, the Gift of
the Spirit, and Mary: these are three realities that are intimately interwoven throughout the
unfolding of that Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius begins to contemplate from this
very composition of the initial place which consists in the passing over from the disposition of the
sepulcher to the House of Our Lady [cf. SE # 220]. Concerning this coming to the “House of
Mary”, a figure of the Church, the spiritual understanding of the Scripture is the Gift of the Spirit
which the Church receives in the moment in which the Risen One, her Son, meets with Mary.
[2] Ignatius’ Conversion through the Risen Lord to Total
Commitment to the Apostolic Mission of the Church:
[a] For this reason, there can be little surprise in accepting
the person of Mary as symbolically the culmination of the entire spiritual process. In similar
manner, as for the Grand Journey of Jesus, ever towards Jerusalem, St. Ignatius follows this step
by step, noting the historical Jesus all the way up to the moment of His death on the Cross.
Jesus is followed right through to Jerusalem.
[b] However, at a given moment of Ignatius’ life, Rome
comes to occupy for him the end of his own pilgrimage. Rome for him is definitively the New
Jerusalem, whence he looks upon the faith of Mary received in the Spirit in her Risen Son, and
she then becomes the exemplary Model of the Faith of the Church obedient to God.
[c] From the reception of the Word and by the fulfillment of
the salvific will of God, the Church is born, the Spouse of Christ, constituted in conformity with
the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by the ecclesial communion, for the apostolic mission. With the
appearance of the Risen Lord to Mary we find ourselves consequently before the theological
foundation of the specific discernment of the Fourth Week: to consider the Church as the
Spouse of Christ, led by the Spirit of God beginning with the moment of the Ascension.
[cf. Ac 1:4].
[3] The Ascension and Ignatius’ Conversion to the Apostolic
Mission:
[a] For Ignatius, the Lord’s Ascension was connected
closely to his own desire for the Holy Places. His idea was to imitate even materially Jesus Christ
even in the minimal details, and to consider these simply as elements on his way of his following
of Christ - the horizon of which was still in the Plan of God. He was making the leap from the
‘particular’ place, the Holy City of Jerusalem - to the Spiritual Jerusalem, the Universal Church
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
[b] The Ascension meant for him that final point of the
Fourth Week. This opened up, through the Contemplation toward Love, to the daily monotony
and routine of the living of the Constitutions, using as his horizon his life in and for the Church.
This meant the disappearance of the visible Jesus of Nazareth Who gave the beginnings of the
Apostolic Mission, beginning with the humble, but vital apostolate of teaching catechism to the
rudes, in an around the Gesu’ in Rome. This all began and was inspired by the experience of