Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez went to Vicenza, and found a lodging in a ruined monastery near the town. From this they went out daily to beg, and tend the sick, and startle townsfolk and villagers with explosive exhortations, in broken Italian, to lay aside their sins. Again the Inquisition summoned them, and dismissed them. At last, when it was clear that the road to the East was indefinitely closed, Ignatius called his followers from their several towns, and a council was held in the old convent. The events of these early days are known to us only from Jesuit writers of the next generation, and, discarding only the miracles with which they unnecessarily adorn the ways of their founders, we may follow them with little reserve. These men were, beyond question, in deadly earnest, though we shall see that some of them sheltered little human frailties under their hair-shirts. But it is quite plain that, however high and pure their aim was, they formed and carried their plans with a diplomacy, almost an astuteness, of which you will not find a trace in the founding of any other monastic body. One monastic virtue is conspicuously absent from the aureole of St. Ignatius--holy simplicity.
It was decided that Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez should go to Rome, and the others should return to work in their university cities until they were called to Rome. Before they parted, however, they gave themselves a name, since people demanded one. We are, said Ignatius, the "Compañia de Jesu," the "Company of Jesus"; although the prose of a later generation has translated it the "Society of Jesus." Then Xavier and Bobadilla went to Bologna, Rodriguez and Le Jay to Ferrara, Salmeron and Brouet to Siena, Codure and Hozes to Padua, to tend the sick, and instruct the children, and angle for recruits; and Ignatius and his companions went on foot, in the depth of winter, to Rome.
Paul III. occupied the papal throne in the year 1537, and looked with troubled eyes to the lands beyond the Alps, where the Reformation was now in full blast. He was by temperament a Pope of the Renaissance, a man of genial culture and artistic feeling, a man who owed his elevation to his sister's intimacy with a predecessor, and who might, if the age had not turned so sour, have carried even into the papal apartments the graceful vices of his youth. But there was now no mistaking the roll of the distant thunder; Rome was sobered and disposed to put its house in order. Paul, knowing that the appalling corruption of the Vatican, the clergy, and the monks must cease, or else the Vatican and clergy and monks would cease, had appointed a commission of the sterner cardinals to examine Luther's indictment of his Church, and one of the clearest points of agreement was that the unquestioned degradation of the monks throughout Christendom must be severely punished. The general feeling was that most, if not all, of the monastic orders should be suppressed. It was therefore a peculiarly inopportune time to propose the establishment of a new order. Was Ignatius more holy than Benedict, or Bruno, or Francis, or Dominic? And had not every order that had yet been founded fallen into evil ways within fifty years?