Luis Martín García

Luis Martin

Luis Martín García SJ (born August 19, 1846 in Melgar de Fernamental near Burgos , † April 18, 1906 in Rome ) was the 24th general of the Jesuits .

Life

Luis Martín was accepted into the Episcopal Boys' Seminary of the Archdiocese of Burgos at the age of twelve . In 1864 he entered the Society of Jesus and spent his two-year novitiate in the ancestral home of the order in Loyola . As a religious student he was expelled from Spain in 1868 and spent several years in exile in France, where he completed his ecclesiastical studies and was ordained a priest at the age of 30 . He then worked as a theology lecturer in various houses of his order. Three years after the lifting of the Jesuit ban in Spain (1874), he finally returned to his homeland. From 1880 to 1885 he was rector of the central Spanish Jesuit seminary in Salamanca , which was reformed under his leadership. From 1885 he headed the magazine El Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús in Bilbao , which he gave a professional and modern orientation. In the same year he became superior of the Jesuit college in Deusto near Bilbao and then for a few months founding rector of the University of Deusto , which was emerging from this college . From 1886 to 1891 he served as the Order Provincial of the Jesuit Province of Castile (which at that time included the Basque Country , Navarre , Logroño , Santander , Asturias , Galicia , León and Old Castile ) and then became Vicar General of his Order in Fiesole near Florence , where at that time the General Curia of the Jesuits was located. After the death of the 23rd general, Anton Maria Anderledy, on January 18, 1892, the extraordinary general assembly of the Jesuits that met under his chairmanship in Loyola in October of the same year elected him as his successor. Shortly after his election, he moved the headquarters of the Order from Fiesole back to Rome , where he has stayed since then and died in 1906. During his generalate he wrote an autobiography under the title Memorias, begun in 1895 at the latest , which also contains extensive copies of original documents on more than 2,700 handwritten fair copy pages as well as testimonies of numerous personalities from political and religious life and which was edited and edited in the order archive of Loyola in 1988 after their rediscovery has been published. The chronicle-like treatise deals, among other things, with the internal affairs and public projects of the Jesuit order in Spain with which Martín was connected, the tense relationship between the order and the Spanish state and with Carlism , cultural projects such as the founding of the important Jesuit magazine Razón y Fe in 1901 and the position of the Jesuits in the Basque independence movement that was awakening in the last decade of the 19th century. In 1905 Martín's right arm was amputated, but this did not prevent him from continuing to work in the last year of his life.

source

• Ignacio Arana Pérez: Memorias del P. Luis Martín, General de la Compañía de Jesús (1846–1906) (review of the memorias published in Rome, Madrid and Bilbao in 1988 ). In: Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos 35 (1990), pp. 297-301.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Luis Cano Medina: La devoción al Sagrado Corazón ya Cristo Rey en España y su recepción por los metropolitanos españoles (1923–1931) (PDF; 3.3 MB). Inaugural dissertation submitted to the Theological Faculty of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross , Rome 2007, p. 225 and Note 101.

predecessor	Office	successor
Anton Maria Anderledy	Superior General of the Society of Jesus 1892–1906	Franz Xaver Wernz