SERVICE WINS
When Ignatius Loyola and his band of nine–bearing glittering degrees and doctors of divinity–went to petition Pope Paul III in the sixth century to form a new religious order, the Pope was unimpressed. And then came the winter of 1538, the most desperate in Roman memory. These same ten individuals took upon themselves the burden of the city’s destitute. They put the sick in their own beds, begged straw pallets and food for the rest, and at times, had as many as 300 to 400 crowded into a ramshackle residence. So dramatic were their ministries of love that the Pope could not ignore them, and in 1540 granted them the right to found an official religious order: the Society of Jesus.
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