The Hospital of Santa Lucia and the Chapel of the Rapture
Ignatius spent most of his eleven months in Manresa at the Hospital for the Poor of Saint Lucy, eating with the poor, serving the sick, and praying in the adjoining chapel. And in his final months in Manresa, he offered the very first "Spiritual Exercises" on the steps of the chapel's entrance. The Pilgrim experiences an encounter with the Mystery of God, both when he places himself among the last of the earth in a hospital for the poor and when he prays "ecstatically" in its chapel.
The Santa Lucía Hospital for the Poor
The simple steps leading into the Hospital Chapel retain the charm of being the birthplace of the "Tandas de Ejercicios" (Teams of Exercises). Here, during this period, Ignatius gathered groups of people for the first time, to whom he gave the first drafts of the Exercises. This place retains the charm of something new and original, the first page of a very long, five-hundred-year history of Ignatian Exercises.
The Chapel of the Rape of St. Ignatius
A Manresa tradition tells of an afternoon when Compline was being sung in the Hospital chapel, when he suffered a "rapture" that left him immobile on the Hospital floor for eight days. Whatever this tradition may have been, it is undeniable that the eleven months in Manresa were like a "rapture" that made him "leave himself" to find himself completely with God and before God.
