Christ’s instruction to the Apostles:” Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give” (Matt. 10:8) resonates with the soul of Ignatius. He harked back to the same concept repeatedly - in the Spiritual Exercises, in the Constitutions, and in his personal correspondence. “People will listen to us only when we can show them that we have nothing to gain from what we are calling them to.”
When the first Jesuit school was opened in Messina in 1547 gratuitous teaching was a novelty which in the following 150 years was continued by all Jesuit schools. The need to get involved in education arose from the fact that young Jesuit students needed training. If the Society were going to have schools for their own students, why not give the same opportunity to young people who are not Jesuits? Ignatius commissioned his secretary, Father Polanco, to provide examples of how the schools might be funded: by the city, by some prince, by some private individual, or by a group of individuals.
“Thus not to charge for education was a corollary to one of the most fundamental graces Ignatius received: to give freely what one has freely received, to minister without worrying about benefit and without support of gold or silver, concepts almost foreign to the way” Some dioceses and congregations are seeing things perhaps in India today even in some highly Christianised States. When the secretary of Ignatius, Fr. Polanco, wrote the programme for non-Jesuit students, he began by saying: ”First of all, we accept for classes and literary studies everybody, poor and rich, free of charge and for charity’s sake, without accepting any remuneration.”
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