(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)