Nuptial Election and the Ignatian Exercises

During his youth, Ignatius of Loyola fantasized about romance and chivalry. According to Father Juan Alfonso de Polanco, a close friend and coworker, the young Ignatius indulged in "gambling, dueling, and romances with women."¹ Marriage was not on his radar. When his promising military career was cut short by a crippling injury, the battle-hardened soldier resolved to re-dedicate his vocation to Christ rather than the globalizing Spanish empire. From the religious and vocational conversion that began during his convalescence, and deepened during his experiences at Montserrat and Manresa, Ignatius discerned the core features of a transformative spiritual process that came to be known as the The Spiritual Exercises. The irrepresible dynamism of this spirituality soon gave birth to a major religious movement that evolved into the Society of Jesus. Within a few years intrepid Jesuit missionaries were trekking across India, China, Japan, South and North America. Ignatius' thirty-day closed retreat, Spiritual Exercises, became spiritual boot camp for these celibate special-operation forces spearheading Catholicism's world missionary work during the 16th and 17th centuries.

What relevance could a spirituality forged within this religious crucible have for contemporary reflection on the vocation of marriage? Not much, apparently. In his extensive correspondence with women we do find Ignatius dealing with marital issues. However, his reflections can seem dated and, at times, diverging sharply from current perspectives. For example, addressing a marital separation that was causing political and ecclesiastical turmoil, Ignatius exhorts his confidant, Donna Joanna of Aragon, to submit herself to a husband who seems to be abusive:

. . . with a generous mind and trusting in the Lord, . . . go to Señor Ascanio's house, putting yourself entirely in his power, without seeking for other security or making any other conditions, but freely, as a wife is normally, and ought to be, in the power of her husband.²

Ignatius insists that the laws of holy matrimony require that "a wife is normally, and ought to be, in the power of her husband" given the biblical mandate that "the head of the woman is the husband and that wives should be subject to their husbands."³ These views may resonate with certain strains of Christian fundamentalism; however, they do not reflect the course of Catholic teaching on marriage since Vatican II.

In the centuries following Ignatius' life and mission, there is little evidence of any meaningful attempt to engage the Sacrament of Marriage through the Spiritual Exercises. The 20th century did witness concerted efforts to revive lay participation in Ignatian spirituality in Europe and North America. An insistence on the critical relevance of Ignatian spirituality for the laity lay at the heart of the work of Canadian Jesuits such as John English, Gilles Cusson, and John Wickham who helped spearhead this revival.⁴ However, the marital vocation remained a somewhat elusive calling in these modern movements. English's popular study of the Exercises does cite the key passages where Ignatius speaks of marriage as one of two "unchangeable choices." However, his study offers a fairly thin exegesis of these texts, apart from noting that marriage is "a wonderful vocation and a way of sanctity."⁵ When John Wickham addresses the question of marriage his discussion gravitates to the challenges that marital ties might pose for individuals doing the Exercises.⁶ In recent years there have been attempts to explore how the Spiritual Exercises might speak to our modern fascination with the sexual and the erotic. Andrew Walker suggests that the Exercises can revitalize our experience of the erotic, or, in his words, "to resacralize the erotic and to eroticize the sacred."⁷ The focus of these studies is on the sexual and the erotic, not the marital vocation.⁸

The record of history and contemporary experience might suggest that the marital vocation just may be a poor fit for the Spiritual Exercises. There are obvious difficulties with this conclusion. Early Jesuit commentators firmly believed that the Exercises should offer "great fruit and light" to anyone "in whatever state one is in."⁹ More significantly, this dearth of attention to marriage seems at odds...