(Anglican Jesuits)
About Us
Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam
To the Greater Glory of God
To be a Companion of the Anglican Society of Jesus is to enter a company of persons — lay and ordained, male, female, and non-binary — who have heard the call to campaign for God under the standard of the Cross. Such a person desires to give service to the Lord alone and to his people and all creatures on earth. Professing First Vows of Simplicity, Fidelity, and Obedience, the Companion belongs to a Society instituted especially to aim at the progress of souls in Christian life and learning, at the propagation of faith through the ministry of the Word, the Spiritual Exercises, and works of charity, and expressly at the formation of the young and of those not yet formed in the Christian way of life.
The Anglican Society of Jesus does not prescribe a habit for its Companions. Its distinguishing mark is not outward dress but the interior disposition of one who seeks to find God in all things, in all places, and in all persons.
Anglican and Ignatian: The Theological Case for the Synthesis
The Anglican Society of Jesus rests on a theological claim that deserves to be stated clearly and defended honestly: that the Ignatian and Anglican traditions are not merely compatible but mutually illuminating, and that their synthesis produces something that neither tradition produces alone. This claim could be questioned from both sides, and it is worth addressing those questions directly.
The Apparent Tensions
From the Ignatian side, there may appear to be a tension between the emphasis on personal, interior, direct encounter with God and the Anglican tradition’s characteristic mediation of that encounter through liturgy, sacrament, and communal prayer.
From the Anglican side, there may appear to be a tension between the tradition’s characteristic theological openness — its willingness to hold questions in suspension, its resistance to premature systematization, its distrust of spiritual methods that appear to prescribe the form of God’s communication — and the apparently systematic character of Ignatian Spirituality.
These tensions are real, but they are productive rather than destructive. The Anglican’s liturgical formation, far from inhibiting the personal depth sought in Ignatian Spirituality, provides its most natural context: the Companion who has been shaped by the Psalter’s full emotional range, by the Office’s daily movement through praise and lament and intercession, by the Eucharist’s enacted drama of offering and reception, is a Companion whose interior life has already been schooled in exactly the movements Ignatian Spirituality will intensify. The Spiritual Exercises do not replace the Anglican liturgical formation; they personalize and deepen what that formation has been building for years.
And the apparent systematism of Ignatian Spirituality is, on careful examination, less prescriptive than it first appears. Ignatius was always insistent that the director must adapt the Spiritual Exercises to the specific person receiving them. The Anglican instinct for theological provisionality is, at its best, a form of the Ignatian indifference: neither tradition prescribes what God must do, and both trust the Spirit to do what is needed.
The Deeper Consonance
Beneath the apparent tensions lies a deeper consonance between the two traditions. Both Ignatius and the Anglican tradition are fundamentally Incarnational: both insist that God is met not in escape from the material world but in and through it, in the ordinary textures of human life and human community. Ignatius’s principle of finding God in all things and the Anglican sacramental imagination’s insistence that matter is the vehicle of grace are two formulations of the same theological conviction.
Both traditions are fundamentally apostolic: both resist the temptation to make the interior life an end in itself, and both insist that the contemplative life is ordered toward action and service in the world. The Ignatian ‘contemplatives in action’ and the Anglican tradition’s theology of vocation as the ordering of every form of life toward the service of God and neighbor are two expressions of the same refusal to separate the spiritual from the practical.
Both traditions have a sophisticated understanding of the movements of the soul and the discernment of the Spirit. The Ignatian Rules for the Discernment of Spirits and the Anglican tradition of spiritual direction — as practiced by the Caroline Divines, recovered by the Oxford Movement, and developed by the twentieth century’s directors — share a common conviction: that the interior life has a recognizable grammar, that consolation and desolation are indicators of the Spirit’s movement that can be read and responded to, and that a trained and faithful human companion is an irreplaceable resource for the soul that is genuinely seeking God.
And both traditions are, at their best, fundamentally ecumenical: Ignatius sought always the greater good of the universal Church, never the advantage of one party within it; the Anglican via media is, in its deepest intention, a form of the same universality — the refusal to purchase clarity at the price of exclusion. The Anglican Society of Jesus’s second motto — Ut Omnes Unum Sint — is the most explicit expression of this shared ecumenical conviction: the goal is not the victory of one tradition but the unity of all in the truth that each tradition, in its own way, is reaching toward.
“The whole world is a kind of mirror for the knowledge of God, and all things speak of him.”
— St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Diary
“All things are a kind of praise, a kind of prayer, a kind of offering to God, if they are received and used in the right spirit.”
— Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation (adapted)
Some More Resources
for the Convergence of
Anglicanism and Ignatian Spirituality
Ignatian Spirituality and the Anglican Tradition
An Annotated Bibliography
(Click on the name of the text to open a .pdf of the file)
A short, pointed essay by an Anglican ethicist arguing against a sentimentalized reception of Ignatius that strips him of his Counter-Reformation edges. Kincaid traces the genuine historical antagonism between the early Society of Jesus and the English church — the fourth vow of obedience to the papacy, Ignatius's 1553 letter framing England as afflicted by "the grievous disease of heresy," and the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries such as Edmund Campion — before turning to the "presupposition" that opens the Spiritual Exercises as a positive resource. She reads that presupposition (assume the best construction on another's statement, then engage rather than immediately condemn) as a discipline of loving, active interpretation that Anglicans need for both ecumenical and intra-Anglican disagreement, paired with the corrective of "thinking with the Church" so charity does not collapse into mere tolerance. Useful chiefly for its candor about the conflict Ignatius represents for Anglican identity, and for a compact, well-sourced reading of the presupposition itself — a natural touchstone for any ASJ material on interpretive charity or communal discernment amid disagreement.
Sheldrake, Philip. “The Influence of the Ignatian Tradition.” The Way (Heythrop College), pp. 74–85.
A careful, source-critical survey of documented (as opposed to merely asserted) Ignatian influence outside the Roman Communion, organized in three parts: the Anglican tradition, other Reformed traditions, and Orthodoxy. Sheldrake is explicitly skeptical of loose claims of influence — he weighs and largely qualifies the Martz thesis linking Donne and Herbert to Ignatian meditative structure against Lewalski's Protestant-origins counter-reading — before turning to firmer ground: the Oxford Movement's revival of religious communities from the 1840s, above all the Society of St John the Evangelist (the "Cowley Fathers"), whose semi-monastic life and retreat practice were partly inspired by the Exercises, and W. H. Longridge's widely used 1919 translation and commentary. He also covers the American Episcopal communities (Nashotah, the Community of Companions of the Holy Saviour), the Society of Retreat Conductors (1923), and more tenuous cases in Wesley, Bonhoeffer, and Orthodox figures (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, Tikhon of Zadonsk). For ASJ's institutional self-understanding, this is the key historical-precedent essay: it documents, with real evidentiary caution, exactly the kind of prior Anglican engagement with Ignatian religious life that ASJ now extends, and it is the best available map of which historical claims are solid and which are contested.
A Jesuit ecumenical theologian's constructive (rather than historical-influence) argument that Ignatian spirituality and Anglican ethos converge because both are organized around the theology of the Incarnation. Working through Ignatius's Exercises and figures such as Hooker, Benson, Gore, and Rowan Williams, Gamberini identifies four shared traits flowing from that incarnational center: comprehensiveness (Anglican via media as a living tension rather than compromise), Ignatian indifference read alongside Anglican adiaphora, probabilism (Jesuit casuistry's accommodation to circumstance set beside Hooker's "probable persuasions" against claims of infallible certainty), and an apophatic sense of mystery, drawing on Rahner's account of consolation without preceding cause and radical theological agnosticism. He borrows Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" as the governing metaphor: not identity, but overlapping traits with no single essential feature shared by all. Closes by noting Frank Griswold's addition of Ignatius's feast to the Episcopal calendar. This is the most theologically substantive of the five sources for ASJ's purposes — it supplies a ready-made conceptual vocabulary (comprehensiveness, indifference, probabilism, apophatic mystery) for articulating why an Ignatian-Anglican synthesis is not eclectic borrowing but a genuine family resemblance rooted in shared Christology.
A practical-theology doctoral thesis written by an Anglican priest formed in an Ignatian religious congregation (the Sisters of St Andrew), directly addressing the question ASJ exists to answer. Using the "four voices of theology" method (normative, formal, espoused, operant) alongside contemplative enquiry, Carlsson interviewed ten members of different Ignatian religious congregations and studied the Ignatian founding texts and their commentators to identify what is genuinely distinctive about Ignatian religious life, then examined the Anglican ecclesial context to assess transferability. Her central finding is that not every component of Ignatian religious life is currently present in the Anglican Church, but that the flexibility, adaptability, and discernment-centered spirit of Ignatius's own approach — rather than the specific institutional forms of the Society of Jesus — are precisely what make the transplant possible, provided the adaptation is governed by clear norms distilled from the distinctive features she identifies. This is likely the single most directly relevant source in the set: a peer-vetted, methodologically rigorous precedent for founding an Ignatian religious community inside Anglican polity, worth engaging closely for both its findings and its proposed norms.
An action-research thesis testing whether Ignatian-based practice can nurture spiritual maturity in ordinary parish congregations, prompted by the author's observation that both new and long-standing churchgoers in small rural Church of England parishes often plateau spiritually, and that the Church's growth-strategy emphasis was crowding out attention to spiritual formation. Westmoreland builds a twelve-point theoretical model of spiritual maturity by putting human-potential psychology and faith-development theory into dialogue with Ignatian spirituality — locating a key divergence in psychology's self-actualization versus the Ignatian emphasis on surrender to God — then tracks twenty-four participants through an original experiential prayer course and sermon series using semi-structured interviews and ethnographic/action-research methods. Her threefold conclusion: clergy should attend more deliberately to spiritual nurture, Ignatian practice is usable at the congregational (not just individual-retreat) level, and corporate spiritual experience matters more than is usually credited. For ASJ, this is the most empirically grounded of the five sources on lay/parish-level application — useful less for theological argument than as a tested model and evaluative method for any ASJ-sponsored prayer courses or formation programs offered to Anglican congregations.