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1 The Acta as Privilegedand New Source
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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The chapter opens by presenting the Dominican Melchor Cano as an antagonist who criticized Ignatius Loyola for his vanity. Ignatius's awareness of that fault created a quandary for him late in life when he acceded to requests to narrate God's activity as he had discerned it over the course of his lifetime. He resolved that quandary by seeing the narrative as a mirror of vainglory valuable for all Jesuits. The chapter explores the reasons for the halting progress of the narration and its eventual completion to the satisfaction of Ignatius just before his death in 1556. Some years later, the Jesuit Superior-General Francisco de Borja (1510-72) made the decision to suppress the text of Ignatius's Acts and substitute for it a biography of Ignatius written by Pedro de Ribadeneira (1526-1611). Ribadeneira's biography presented a sanitized Ignatius more palatable to Church authorities intent on countering the Reformation.