Path to Priesthood

In 1596 John Ogilvie, aged 16, was registered, by Father William Crighton, as a student at the Scots College of Douai, France, which had been moved at the time to Louvain in Belgium. The college occasionally received students who were not Catholics and among his instructors was Cornelius Lapide, (Cornelius Van Der Steen) then a young Professor of Scripture and later to become a great scholar. Poverty at the college meant that some students had to be dispersed, and in 1598 Ogilvie was sent to the Scots Benedictine College at Ratisbon, Bavaria, and in 1599 went on to the Jesuit College at Olmutz in Bohemia, supported by a Papal bursary, and it is here that he became a Catholic. Having embraced the faith, John Ogilvie wanted to become a priest. The Jesuit order was close to his heart and he traversed the Continent to achieve his aim. His application, along with others, was deferred because of plague but he persisted and in 1599 was admitted to the Jesuit order at Brunn in Moravia, by the Austrian Provincial, Father Ferdinand Albers. From there he was sent to Graz in the Austrian Tyrol, where he made his first vows on the 26 th of December 1601, and stayed there until 1606, teaching grammar in the lower school and studying philosophy and science at the university. He spent a time teaching at Vienna in 1605, and then returned to Olmutz in 1607 for more studies. In 1609, though not yet ordained, he was appointed, along with another young Scot, Father Green, to the charge of encouraging devotion to Our Lady as a means of fortifying a faith that was under siege. He achieved success and a Jesuit historian would later recount one Lenten exercise which saw Ogilvie lead young pupils, after 5am Mass and Communion, in making a Way of the Cross through the streets of the unfriendly city, carrying crosses and dressed in sacking, returning to the chapel to set their crosses before the altar and lie prostrate in prayer for an hour. In 1610 he received orders from Father Aquaviva to go to the French Province, and was sent back to Paris. He travelled via Prague and was joined by his uncle Father George Elphinstone. He was ordained a priest of the Society of Jesus in 1610, at the age of 31. His prayer had been answered. The newly-ordained Father Ogilvie was appointed confessor to the students at Rouen where he met priests exiled from Scotland for saying Mass or ministering to people, and realising the heavy burden of Catholics in his native land he longed to return there. He applied to his Jesuit superiors for permission to go home. Twice he was refused, but his persistence eventually paid off. Then there was no other Jesuit priest in Scotland, almost no priests at all, so this represented an extraordinary vote of confidence in this inexperienced priest. It was a dangerous mission.