Santità, agentività e segni nell’autobiografia spirituale

The modern Saints of the Catholic Church were proclaimed, represented, and turned into role–models through several texts and different media. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Founder of the Society of Jesus, was among the most prominent ones. First in his autobiographical notes, which the Church decided not to disclose, and then especially in Pedro de Ribadeneira’s official biography/hagiography, as well as in the visual biography (with engravings by Rubens) prepared for the beatification of 1609 and then expanded for the canonization of 1622, the theme of religious con- version was paramount. Through these verbal and visual narratives, stemming from a concealed autobiographical Urtext, the Society of Jesus propagated its vision of the dialectics between human and divine agency in the building of sanctity, often in con- trast with the theologies and narratives of competing religious orders.