God often works in mysterious ways, and for one particular saint, he used a cannonball to redirect him in the right way. If St. Ignatius Loyola hadn't been struck in battle, who knows what might have happened.
Before that fateful day, St. Ignatius was quite the womanizer, gambler, and fighter. Practicing the Catholic faith wasn't his highest priority.
Instead, his chief priority was military life. He loved the battlefield and his imagination was enraptured by classic tales of knights and ladies.
Then one day his life took a radical change. A cannonball broke his leg.
Here is how St. Ignatius narrates it in his autobiography (written in the third person).
He endured many surgeries and was subsequently forced to stay bedridden for several weeks.
This period of convalescence was exactly the thing needed to change Ignatius' heart.
While recuperating, he desired to read more stories of knightly adventures. Providentially, there were no such books around. This forced him to read two books that deeply shaped him and transformed him into another person.
This set him on a much different path, where he would found the influential Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits.
It all started with a cannonball shot to the leg.
