What does ‘studying with the Jesuits’ mean?

Cyclically in the newspapers in the biographies of important personalities, youthful studies in the Catholic Jesuit Order are emphasised, as an implicit indication of a particularly prestigious and admirable education, different from all others. Even Mario Draghi, appointed two days ago to try to form a new government, ‘studied at the Jesuits’. Like so many other economists, journalists, show business personalities and politicians: including former President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and former Prime Minister Mario Monti, who are cited these days as precedents of distinguished economists called upon to solve the troubles of politics, respectively in 1993 and in 2011.

In order to understand what is so special about Jesuit education, one has to start with the Society of Jesus, the religious order founded in 1540 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola – a Basque knight who became very religious after risking death – with a history that is centuries long, and rather fragmented. It can be roughly divided into two periods: the first runs from the year of its foundation to that of its provisional dissolution in 1773, and the second from when the Society was re-established in 1814 to the present day. Among the essential traits of St Ignatius’ thought was the prescription of zealous obedience to superiors and the Holy See (Perinde ac cadaver, i.e. obeying ‘like a dead body’), but also a focus on the inner life and intellect. His most famous text is the Spiritual Exercises, a manual of prayer and inner meditation still much studied today…