When Ignatius Loyola gathered his nine companions together in the early months of 1539 to plan their future, it quickly became clear to them that the new religious order that was coming into being would be significantly different from previous foundations. Indeed, to the many sceptics in Rome at the time, the proposed Society of Jesus appeared to endanger the very basis of religious life itself. As the early Jesuits liked to point out, their preferred home was not the monastery but the road; their cloister was the messy world itself, and not a tranquil refuge from the world; and their single desire was to go out and ‘help souls’, which meant meeting people in all the raw reality of their hopes and struggles. Their ideal was dispersal, not enclosure; flexibility, not stability. Such a new vision of religious life demanded a new model of how this life could be lived, and over time Ignatius began to put together the elements that would characterise his apostolic vision. He called it Our Way of Proceeding.