Churches

Comunità in cammino

Nel 1568 viene costruita la prima chiesa a Roma dedicata al “nome di Gesù”. Oggi le comunità affidate alla Compagnia sono 21, da Trieste a Catania, Tirana compresa. Siamo tra la gente, accanto a ciascuno per un cammino di riconciliazione e giustizia.

Celebrazione solenne in una chiesa dei padri gesuiti

Art and spirituality

In 1568 the Jesuits built their first church in the center of Rome and dedicated it to the “Name of Jesus”. It was imitated, for centuries, in countless churches that the Jesuits built throughout the world, becoming a model of Jesuit architecture.

Among the key features of our churches:

the central location in the city, reflecting Ignatius’ intuition to seek God in the heart of the human experience;
the plan as a “classroom”, to facilitate the proclamation of the Word;
the “trigram” IHS, an abbreviation of the Name of Jesus, that emphasizes the personal relationship with Christ;
the importance of the Eucharist (in the context of the Catholic Reformation);
the presence, on the sides or in the transepts, of the two main saints of the Society as symbols of the institution’s centrality (St. Ignatius) and of the passion that leads to the last frontiers (St. Francis Xavier),
the baroque style (as art that gets the “5 senses” involved in the experience of the encounter with God).