On 27 September 1540, Pope Paul III issued the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, formally approving the Society of Jesus. The document gave canonical existence to the group organized by Ignatius of Loyola and his companions. It also defined a mission centered on preaching, teaching, spiritual ministry and service under papal direction.
The approval concerned a small company. Its first papal charter limited membership to sixty, a restriction removed in 1550. Yet the organization recognized in 1540 would become one of the most influential religious orders of the early modern world, active in education, missions, scholarship, diplomacy and the Catholic Reformation.
From Loyola’s conversion to a company of companions
Ignatius had been a soldier. After being wounded at Pamplona in 1521, he underwent a religious conversion and eventually studied in Paris. There he gathered a circle that included Peter Faber and Francis Xavier. In 1534, the companions made vows at Montmartre, initially hoping to travel to the Holy Land.
War and travel conditions frustrated that plan. The group instead went to Italy and offered its service to the pope. Its members were ordained and undertook preaching, charitable work and instruction. The question then arose whether they should disperse permanently on separate missions or bind themselves into a continuing body.
Deliberation and a new institute
In 1539, the companions deliberated about their future. They decided to remain united and to add obedience to an elected superior to their existing commitments. Their proposed “Formula of the Institute” described the purpose and organization of the new community.
That formula emphasized mobility. Members might be sent wherever the pope judged service most useful, among Christians or non-Christians. The structure differed from a monastic order rooted in one enclosed house. The Society was designed for movement, schools, missions and direct engagement with cities and courts.
The bull of 27 September
Paul III’s bull incorporated the foundational formula and approved the Society as a religious order. The title—often translated “To the government of the Church Militant”—reflected the era’s ecclesiastical language, not a charter for a conventional army. The text placed the new body within Catholic law and authorized its way of life.
The first approval was cautious. Membership was capped at sixty. The order’s full institutional form, including its constitutions, developed over time. In 1550, Pope Julius III issued Exposcit debitum, confirming the Society and removing the numerical restriction.
Ignatius was elected the first superior general in 1541. From Rome, he coordinated a network that expanded with remarkable speed. Francis Xavier left for Asia, reaching India, Southeast Asia and Japan. Other Jesuits worked in European cities, universities and princely courts.
Education became central. Colleges trained both members and lay students, while the order’s humanist curriculum joined classical learning with Catholic formation. Jesuit scholarship ranged across languages, mathematics, astronomy, geography and natural history. Missionaries also gathered knowledge—sometimes with acute observation, sometimes through the assumptions and power structures of European expansion.
The Society’s founding coincided with the era commonly called the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Jesuits became prominent defenders and reformers of Catholic practice, but the order cannot be reduced to reaction against Protestantism. Its original formula addressed preaching, spiritual exercises, education, reconciliation and works of mercy.
Jesuits participated in the Council of Trent, advised rulers and established institutions across Europe. Their direct relationship to the papacy and their influence in education made them powerful—and controversial. Admirers valued discipline and learning; opponents feared political influence and doctrinal control.
By the seventeenth century, Jesuit missions stretched from the Americas to Africa and Asia. Encounters produced linguistic dictionaries, maps, scientific exchanges and new Christian communities. They also unfolded within colonial systems and generated disputes about accommodation, conversion and authority.
European monarchies pressured Pope Clement XIV to suppress the Society in 1773. It survived in limited settings and was universally restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814. Today the Society of Jesus remains a worldwide Catholic order associated especially with education, intellectual work and social ministry.
A rule designed for movement
The formula approved in 1540 differed in emphasis from older monastic models. The companions did not organize their common life around one monastery or a fixed daily choir office. They imagined a body whose members could be sent where need was greatest. Alongside the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a professed core would make a special vow of obedience to the pope concerning missions. The vow did not make Jesuits the pope’s private political agents; it gave the order a mechanism for availability across diocesan and national boundaries.
Governance was equally important. The companions elected Ignatius as the first superior general in 1541. His later Constitutions developed a centralized structure, long formation and careful selection of ministries. Members corresponded with Rome, allowing information from distant missions to move through the institution. That paperwork became one source of the Society’s durability and now gives historians an unusually rich archive of early modern global encounters.
The original bull capped the professed membership at sixty. The restriction reflected caution toward an unfamiliar organization, not a prediction of its eventual size. Pope Julius III’s 1550 bull Exposcit debitum confirmed the Society and removed the limit. By then its members were already working in several regions and the small company had become an expanding order.
Schools become a central mission
Education was not the only purpose named in the founding document, but it soon became one of the Society’s most influential activities. Jesuits opened colleges for their own formation and for lay students. The colleges connected classical languages and rhetoric with philosophy, theology and, in many places, mathematics and the sciences. In 1599 the Ratio Studiorum codified a shared program for Jesuit education across a far-flung network.
These institutions trained clergy and lay elites during the Catholic Reformation. They also made the Society prominent in urban life and brought it into competition with universities, other religious orders and secular authorities. Education gave Jesuits long-term influence that an itinerant preaching mission alone could not have produced. It also tied them to patrons and political systems whose interests could shape what their institutions were able to do.
The educational legacy resists a simple verdict. Jesuit schools promoted scholarship, language learning and disciplined teaching. They could also reproduce confessional boundaries and social hierarchy. Their history belongs to the broader early modern expansion of institutions that offered knowledge while serving religious and imperial projects.
A global reach—and global entanglements
Francis Xavier left Lisbon for Portuguese Asia in 1541, worked in India and later Japan, and died in 1552 while attempting to reach China. Later Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci pursued accommodation with Chinese scholarly culture, learning languages and presenting European mathematics, astronomy and cartography. Elsewhere, Jesuit missions developed very different relationships with local societies, colonial states and Indigenous communities.
In Spanish and Portuguese America, the reductions associated with Jesuit missions created communities that offered some protection from enslavement while also advancing Christian conversion and colonial reorganization. Missionaries recorded languages and customs, but they interpreted them through their own religious aims. The same global network that transmitted knowledge could never be separated from the unequal power of European expansion.
The order’s international connections, corporate wealth and perceived political influence produced powerful enemies. Portugal expelled the Jesuits in 1759, France suppressed them in 1764 and Spain expelled them in 1767. Under pressure from Catholic monarchies, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society in 1773. Pope Pius VII restored it in 1814. That cycle of suppression and restoration shows how an order founded for mobility could become both useful and threatening to centralized states.
The Society continues today in schools, universities, parishes, social ministries and scholarship around the world. Its scale would have been unimaginable to the small group recognized in 1540. Yet the durable elements were already present in the papal approval: a mission-oriented body, centralized enough to act across distance and flexible enough to enter new cultural and political settings.
Why the 1540 approval matters
The papal bull did not create every characteristic later associated with the Jesuits in a single stroke. Constitutions, colleges and global networks came afterward. What it did was recognize a durable institutional framework for the companions’ shared vocation.
That framework proved unusually adaptable. The small company approved on 27 September 1540 could send members across borders while maintaining common governance and identity. Its history reveals how an administrative document can become the starting point for centuries of religious, educational and political influence.
Return to the September 27 daily edition, explore Major Historical Events, and continue with the abolition of the French monarchy, the Judiciary Act, and Sandra Day O’Connor’s oaths.
Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises shaped the Society’s culture of reflection, discernment and disciplined decision-making. Members were trained to examine motives and to understand mission as a choice made in service. The Exercises were not a constitution, but they supported the habits that made a mobile organization coherent.
The Society did not require the communal choral prayer that structured many older religious orders. That difference freed members for teaching, travel and ministry. Centralized governance under a superior general helped coordinate people dispersed across great distances, though communication could still take months or years.
Education was not the sole purpose stated in the 1540 bull, yet schools quickly became one of the order’s most visible works. Jesuit colleges taught grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and theology. They served future clergy and lay students, linked local patrons to a transregional network and gave the Society lasting influence over elite formation.
The later Ratio Studiorum standardized much of the curriculum. Classroom methods, disputation and theatrical performance became characteristic. Jesuit education was intellectually ambitious, but it also defended confessional commitments in an age of religious conflict.
Jesuit missionaries learned languages, translated Christian texts and recorded information about societies they encountered. Matteo Ricci in China used mathematics, cartography and classical learning in dialogue with Chinese scholars. In the Americas, Jesuits established missions whose histories include community-building, cultural exchange, coercion and entanglement with colonial states.
Missionary records are therefore rich and difficult sources. They preserve linguistic and ethnographic observations, but they were written within projects of conversion. Modern historians read them both for the information they contain and for the assumptions of their authors.
The Society’s direct papal orientation, educational reach and presence at royal courts generated suspicion. Critics accused Jesuits of excessive influence and divided loyalty. Conflicts over missions, trade, theology and monarchy accumulated during the eighteenth century.
Portugal, France, Spain and other governments expelled Jesuits from their territories before Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order in 1773. The decision reflected pressure from Catholic monarchies as much as an internal judgment about the Society. Some communities survived under rulers who did not promulgate the suppression. Pius VII restored the Society in 1814.
The sixty-member limit in the 1540 approval reveals how experimental the new institute still seemed. Expansion soon made the cap impractical. The 1550 confirmation under Julius III removed it and restated the order’s purpose with greater institutional confidence.
That development also cautions against reading the 1540 bull as a complete blueprint. Governance, constitutions, educational systems and global missions evolved through practice. The bull supplied authorization and identity; later generations built the structures associated with the Jesuits.
The Society’s legacy includes universities, scientific work, pastoral ministry and advocacy for marginalized communities. It also includes participation in confessional struggle and colonial expansion. A credible history holds these dimensions together.
The approval of 27 September 1540 matters because it created the legal space in which that complicated history unfolded. A handful of companions became a durable institution not by remaining small or static, but by combining central coordination with the ability to enter very different cultural and political settings.
