The Letter on Perfect Obedience (26 March 1553),

Its Troubled Origins, and Its Uncomfortable Relevance Today

 By Fr. Sebastian James, SJ –

As we celebrate the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, anyone familiar with the Jesuits — or with St. Ignatius himself — will sooner or later speak of Jesuit obedience, the virtue for which the Society is famous above all others. Indeed, no talk on St. Ignatius or the Jesuits ever reaches completion without reference to his celebrated Letter on Obedience. Whether in a retreat conference, a recollection, or a sermon, whether in a provincial’s letter or a superior’s gentle refrain, the letter of 26 March 1553 is invariably invoked. Perhaps, then, this feast is a fitting occasion to look behind the familiar quotations: to examine the historical background of the letter, the troubled circumstances that gave rise to it, and the reasons it remains strikingly relevant today — not only for religious, but for any person who lives and works under one form of authority or another, that perennial source of so much of our tension, resistance, and, at times, grace.

I. The Primacy of Obedience in the Letter of 26 March 1553

When St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote to the Society in Portugal on 26 March 1553, he produced what is arguably the single most influential text on religious obedience in the modern history of the Church. Other orders, he conceded, might surpass the Society of Jesus in fasting, in vigils, in austerity of life. But in obedience — in the “true resignation of our wills and abnegation of our judgments”[1] — the Society must be distinguished above all else, because obedience was not one virtue among many for the Jesuit: it was the structural principle of the entire Institute.

The letter’s genius lies in its refusal to let obedience remain a merely external performance. St. Ignatius distinguishes three ascending degrees. The first, obedience of execution, is simply doing what one is told; St. Ignatius dismisses this as insufficient, indeed as barely worthy of the name.[2] The second is obedience of the will, in which the subject genuinely wants what the superior commands. The third and highest is obedience of the understanding — the submission of one’s own judgment, so that the subject not only does and wills what is commanded, but comes to see it as right, “never looking to the person whom they obey, but in him to Christ our Lord.”[3]

This is the theological heart of the letter: the superior is obeyed not because he is prudent, holy, or even competent, but because he stands in the place of Christ. Strip away that supernatural motive, and obedience collapses into either calculation (I obey because it benefits me) or coercion (I obey because I fear). St. Ignatius names the latter with devastating clarity: “he who obeys only out of fear or external force is not a true son of obedience, but a slave.”[4] Obedience, in other words, is meant to be an act of freedom and love, a filial offering of the most precious thing a human being possesses — his own judgment — and precisely for that reason it is the highest of sacrifices, a holocaust of the interior man.[5]

For Ignatius, this was no abstract mysticism. A body of “Friends in the Lord” working in the vineyard from Lisbon to Goa, from Vienna to Brazil, could only remain one body if every member was joined to the head. Obedience was the nervous system of the Society; without it, the body would be a collection of twitching, disconnected limbs.

II. The Background: A Letter Forged in Crisis

It is essential to grasp that the Letter on Perfect Obedience was not written in serene abstraction. It was written in the heart of a disaster—or rather, woven into two successive disasters in the same province.

The first was the crisis of Fr. Simão Rodrigues in Portugal. Fr. Rodrigues was no marginal figure: he was one of the first companions of Montmartre, a founder, sent to Portugal with Fr. Francis Xavier, where he built the College of Coimbra into the largest and wealthiest establishment of the young Society. But isolation from Rome and the uncritical adulation of the royal court tarnished his governance. Coimbra descended into an emotional, charismatic regime of unsupervised extremes — public nocturnal flagellations, scholastics parading half-clothed through the streets, ruinous mortifications that broke the health of the young scholastics. More gravely still, Fr. Rodrigues cultivated a nationalist faction that regarded the Portuguese province as his personal domain and resisted integration with Rome. After a decade of increasingly firm correction was ignored, St. Ignatius did the unthinkable to a founding companion: he stripped Fr. Rodrigues of his provincialate, imposed an Apostolic Visitation, and warned that “the full severity of the laws of our Society will be deployed,” for it was “not reasonable that healthy members should be infected in order to preserve a diseased member.”[6] The province split into loyalists of Fr. Rodrigues and loyalists of Rome; dozens of men left or were dismissed.

The second disaster was the cure that proved almost as harmful as the disease. Fr. Diego Miró, Fr. Rodrigues’s successor, was loyal and organized but a cold administrative legalist. Commissioned to govern “with all gentleness, healing past wounds with a spirit of mildness,”[7] he instead overcorrected, enforcing the rule with mechanical rigidity, subjecting fragile and already wounded scholastics to excessive public penances, and provoking in the province a second wave of anxiety, bitterness, and passive resistance.

The Letter on Perfect Obedience of 26 March 1553,[8] though addressed to the whole Portuguese province, was therefore doing two things at once. To the subjects, favourites of the Fr. Rodrigues faction, it taught that obedience is not optional, not conditional on one’s affection for the superior,[9] and not satisfied by grudging external compliance.[10] To the superior — and this is the frequently forgotten edge of the letter — it was a rebuke of Fr. Miró’s authoritarianism, a reminder that a governance which extracts only the obedience of execution, through fear and external force, produces slaves rather than sons, and therefore fails precisely as Ignatian governance.[11]

III. A Doctrine Written Because of Disobedience: The Wider Pattern

Portugal was only the most spectacular case. The whole Ignatian doctrine of obedience was hammered out, letter by letter, against the disobedience of provincials, superiors, and rectors — the very men charged with teaching obedience to others. The correspondence between St. Ignatius and other Fathers reveals a remarkably consistent pattern: he begins with trust, affection, and encouragement, and escalates only when defiance hardens.

Three species of disobedience recur. The first is the disobedience of judgment, the substitution of a private program for the common design. Fr. Rodrigues did this with his emotional charismatic regime; Fr. Andrés de Oviedo did it at Gandía, where, influenced by the apocalyptic visionary Texeda, he tried to convert an active apostolic college into a quasi-monastic house of prolonged contemplation and threatened to become a hermit if Rome refused. St. Ignatius’s reply cut to the bone: to follow a “private spirit” against the design of superiors, even under the pretext of greater prayer, “is an illusion of the devil and pride disguised as holiness.”[12]

The second is the failure of accountability. Fr. Jean Pelletier at Ferrara, once trusted enough to be the first rector of the Roman College, simply stopped reporting — hiding ledgers, refusing the mandatory letters to Rome, pleading pastoral busyness. St. Ignatius, through Fr. Polanco, declared that “prolonged silence is a grave fault against obedience,” because failing to give an account “is to break union with the head.”[13] Fr. Antonio Araoz in Spain, St. Ignatius’s own nephew, went further: courting the crown, withholding funds owed to the Roman College, refusing to release Spanish men for universal missions on the grounds that they were “indispensable” to national interests. The uncle who had once playfully commanded him “in virtue of holy obedience” to eat and sleep properly now wrote without a trace of family warmth: do not “allow particular affection for a province to break the union with the head.”[14]

The third is unordered zeal — zelo desordenado — the launching of genuinely good works outside obedience. The rectors of Florence, immersed in Medici society, took on convents and public commitments on their own initiative and defended themselves by the evident goodness of the works. St. Ignatius’s answer became a permanent principle: zeal “that breaches the limits of obedience, even if it appears to be for the very greatest good of souls, is not acceptable to God,” because it destroys the order of subordination which is the base of the Institute.[15] Fr. Nicolás Bobadilla, founding companion and free agent of Europe, accepting missions from princes and bishops without ever consulting Rome, received the same medicine: one is a missionary “not by your own authority nor solely by the will of princes,” but by the vow that binds all to the mandate of the General.[16] Even the opposite failure — the excessive gentleness of Fr. Paschase Broët, fondly called by St. Ignatius himself the “Angel of the Society,” whose refusal to discipline anyone allowed insubordination to fester — was named as a form of disobedience in the superior himself: “excessive gentleness is not true charity when it allows the discipline of the community to relax.”[17]

The conclusion is inescapable and humbling: the Ignatian theology of obedience is not a doctrine imposed downward upon novices by serene superiors. It was written upward, so to speak — provoked by the pride, nationalism, factionalism, secrecy, and self-will of provincials, rectors, and even founding fathers. The men closest to St. Ignatius were the ones who taught him, by their failures, how fragile the union of the body is and how absolute the remedy must be.

IV. The “Godfather” and “Big Brother” Plague in the Religious life Today

This history speaks with uncomfortable directness to a pathology widely lamented in religious life today: the culture of the “godfather/godmother” and the “big brother/big sister.”

The godfather/godmother phenomenon is the modern face of Fr. Rodrigues and Fr. Araoz. A powerful figure — a former provincial, a well-connected superior, a man/woman with access to benefactors, bishops, or provincial curias — gathers around himself/herself a circle of protégés. He/she secures their studies abroad, their appointments, their promotions; they, in return, give him/her their loyalty, their information, and their votes of influence. What forms is not a body united to its head, but a patronage network: a province within the province, exactly as Fr. Rodrigues built his personal faction at Coimbra and Fr. Araoz built his court party in Spain. Appointments begin to follow loyalty rather than mission; discernment is replaced by lobbying; a man/woman who does not join any of these pressure groups, without a patron, watches the favored sons/daughters rise and quietly concludes that obedience is for the naive. The Ignatian principle that the missioning of men belongs to the superior acting in the place of Christ is hollowed out, because everyone knows the real decisions are brokered elsewhere.

The big brother/sister phenomenon is its intimate counterpart: the informal senior who shields “his/her” men/women from correction, covers their failures, filters what reaches the provincial’s ears, and teaches the young — not in words but in practice — that survival in the Society depends on attaching oneself to a protector rather than on transparency with legitimate superiors. This is Fr. Broët’s excessive gentleness weaponized: leniency not as weakness of character but as currency of allegiance. It is also Fr. Pelletier’s sin institutionalized — the culture of not giving an account, of managed information, of silence toward the head.

The damage is precisely what St. Ignatius diagnosed four centuries ago. Patronage produces obedience of execution without obedience of judgment: men/women comply outwardly with superiors while their hearts and careers are mortgaged to a godfather/godmother — and Ignatius’ word for that condition is not “son” but “slave.” Factions along lines of ethnicity, region, language, or caste reproduce Fr. Araoz’s nationalism in miniature, dividing “what in the body of the Society ought to be one.”[18] Talented men/women doing impressive works under a patron’s protection, bypassing community and provincial discernment, are the modern bearers of zelo desordenado — good works that “destroy the order of subordination.” And the contagion spreads exactly as St. Ignatius feared in the case of Fr. Soldevila: a single culture of self-will and secret allegiance “is like a pestilence that infects a college,” because the young learn the system faster than they learn the Spiritual Exercises.

The remedy, now as then, is not merely disciplinary but theological. Godfatherism thrives wherever the supernatural motive of obedience dies — wherever the superior is seen merely as a man with power to distribute, rather than as one who holds the place of Christ. If the superior is only a man, then of course one seeks the strongest man; patronage is the rational strategy of a de-supernaturalized community. Ignatius’ letter of 26 March 1553 attacks the disease at this root: see Christ in the superior, and the godfather becomes redundant; submit the judgment in love, and the big brother has nothing to sell. Conversely, the letter also warns superiors themselves — as it warned Fr. Miró — that governance by fear, favoritism, or rigidity manufactures the very slaves and schemers it claims to correct.[19]

V. Conclusion

The Letter on Perfect Obedience was born of scandal: of a founder’s faction in Portugal, a rigorist’s tyranny, a nephew’s nationalism, a mystic’s private revelations, a rector’s hidden ledgers, a free agent’s ego. St. Ignatius did not write about obedience because his men were obedient; he wrote about it because they were not — and because he saw, with cold clarity, that every other virtue and every apostolic triumph would be devoured if the union of members with the head dissolved. Today’s godfather and big brother cultures are not new diseases but old ones wearing modern clothes: the same private spirit (WhatsApp groups and cliques), the same particular affections, the same silence toward the head, the same good works done in self-will. The letter of 26 March 1553 remains the diagnosis and the cure — a subpoena to be, in every generation, not slaves who obey out of fear, and not clients who obey a patron, but sons who, seeing Christ in the one who commands, offer the holocaust of their own judgment for the unity of the body and the greater glory of God.