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This article seeks to understand how and by what means epistolary correspondence played a formative role in the case of the Society of Jesus, a congregation founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola. One of the order’s main principles was its commitment to the evangelization of new worlds, which meant that it was essentially a fragmented movement. Correspondence formed a crucial link between its “membra disjecta.” What was this link? What was its institutional component, and its spiritual component? How did these two aspects interact? This paper attempts to provide precise answers to these questions by focusing on exchanges between Ignatius and one of his closest companions, Jerónimo Nadal, who was sent to Messina, Sicily, to found a Jesuit school in the late 1540s.