The Exercises are made under a trained director, never from the book alone; the book is written for the one who gives them. The shape is fixed. They open with the Principle and Foundation, on why we exist and what indifference to created things means. The First Week considers sin and God's mercy, and often includes a general confession. The Second Week contemplates the life of Christ and includes the meditations on the Kingdom, the Two Standards, the Three Classes of Men and the Three Kinds of Humility, and it carries the Election — the decision the retreat exists to serve. The Third Week accompanies the Passion. The Fourth Week contemplates the Resurrection and ends with the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God. In the full thirty-day form the retreatant keeps silence, prays four or five hours a day in distinct periods, meets the director daily and reviews each period afterwards. In the nineteenth-annotation form — the retreat in daily life — the same material is given over eight or nine months with an hour of prayer a day and a weekly meeting with the director. Throughout, the Rules for the Discernment of Spirits govern how consolation and desolation are read, and the rule holds that no decision is made or reversed in desolation.

St Ignatius composed the Exercises between 1522 and 1541; they were approved by Paul III in 1548 and have shaped the Ignatian school of spirituality ever since. The Catechism describes such schools of spirituality as essential guides for the faithful, refractions of the one light of the Holy Spirit.

Other

Ignatian

Once, or at long intervals, in a lifetime

other