I found it: a small plaque on a stone edifice alerts passersby that this was the house of Isabel Roser. Some 500 years after she lived there the stone structure still stands across the plaza from Santa Maria del Mar Church in Barcelona, where Ignatius of Loyola prayed, preached, and begged for support.
I wanted to see this place during a recent trip to Spain, because here is where one of the most important relationships in Ignatius’s ministry began. As I gazed up at open shutters on Isabel’s former home, a woman appeared at the window, reached out both arms, and pulled the shutters closed.
Someone was living in Isabel’s house! The tenant’s open arms felt like a welcome. Perhaps she simply wanted to protect her furniture from the powerful afternoon sun. She would still feel the balmy air and hear the sounds of the plaza filtering through the barrier of wooden slats. Did this current resident know about the noblewoman who gave everything to the Society of Jesus?
I imagined the young woman was Isabel—a member of Catalan nobility married to a wealthy merchant in the early 1500s. I pictured her dressed in fashionable attire and seated at her writing desk.
Suddenly she would hear a man’s clear, passionate voice drift upward. Isabel heard him say, “Ask yourself three questions as you gaze at the cross: What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ?”
In my mind’s eye, Isabel’s pen paused in mid-air. She did not recognize the bold voice. She knew every local priest. Moving across the room, she opened her shutters just a little to peek at the speaker. The orator in tattered shoes and worn garment surprised her even as he held her attention. She opened the shutters wide as he spoke about finding God in every situation, good or bad.
She noticed the crowd gathering around the stranger. “One person really can make a difference, even if one looks unassuming. I want to know more.”
Then the man looked up and held her eye as if answering a divine prompt. Isabel turned from the window and called her husband. “Come hear this preacher. His message is something new.”
Half an hour later the couple, still listening at their window, agreed, “We need to invite him to dinner.”
After dinner with Ignatius, the influential Isabel became a patron of the ex-soldier on the road to sainthood. According to Jesuit scholar Cándido de Dalmases, SJ, “From that day on, Isabel became so fond of the pilgrim that she became his greatest benefactor in Barcelona, Paris and Venice” (Elizabeth Liebert and Annemarie Paulin-Campbell, The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed, 2nd Edition: Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women). And Ignatius wrote sincerely about his deep appreciation. Isabel held house parties for affluent friends to solicit their financial support.
When Isabel’s husband died in 1541, she moved to Rome to help finance, organize, and manage St. Martha’s House, an Ignatian ministry offering refuge to women labeled as fallen.
Isabel, with two other women, applied to the pope for permission to take vows in the Society of Jesus. Their vowed status only lasted a few months, when Ignatius asked the pope to release the women from their vows. After a period of estrangement, Ignatius and Isabel eventually reconciled. Isabel ended her days in a Franciscan convent.
I wish I could meet Isabel and her companions, who served in ways atypical of women in their century. Instead, I could only stand outside the house and ponder how God labored through them.
If someone like Ignatius stood in that plaza today and preached, I suspect people would think him strange. Would the woman in the upstairs window throw open her shutters and invite him up for dinner?
