Ignatius used to refer to his recently founded Jesuit order as ‘this least Society’. This was partly to do with numbers. When it was established, in 1540, the order had only ten members. Even sixteen years later, when Ignatius died, its manpower could be numbered in hundreds, rather than the thousands and tens of thousands of some of the older religious families. But it was also a matter of longevity. There had been Benedictines for a millennium already when the first Jesuits appeared, and many other orders could point back to centuries of history. Ignatius, the order he founded and the spirituality that sustained it were very much newcomers into an ancient field. In the nearly 500 years since then, however, the situation has changed markedly. Today, Ignatian spirituality seems to be one of those pathways to God that is most accessible to contemporary men and women. Since the 1970s, when there was a large-scale rediscovery of many aspects of this particular spirituality, it has continued to grow, develop and expand its scope. This issue of The Way bears witness to some of those developments.
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