Having entered the Order in 1583, overcoming the fierce opposition of his noble family through an appeal to Gregory XIII, he became a respected preacher, professor of philosophy and theology, provincial in Rome and Naples, Assistant for Italy (1608), and finally, on 15 Nov. 1615, General.
His thirty years of leadership, marked by a particular note of gentleness and fatherly care (Urban VIII used to call him an “angel of peace”), may be counted among the happiest and most flourishing for the Order, especially in the Latin nations, above all in France. The number of Colleges and their students grew, producing an outstanding array of theologians and philosophers (e.g., J. De Lugo, moralist and jurist; A. Tanner, polemicist; D. Pétau, master of positive theology) and even more so of humanists, preachers, and writers (e.g., F. Florencia, A. Vieira, J. Gretser, F. Strada, M. K. Sarbiewski, J. Balde, and Cardinal Paluzzo Altieri). Parallel and consoling was the development of the missions; besides the fields of India and China, already extended toward new conquests, others opened up: Fr. A. de Andrade penetrated into Tibet, Fr. A. White into Maryland (United States), and others into Angola and Guinea; Canadian missions among the Native Americans were founded, as well as a college in Quebec (1635) and the celebrated Paraguayan Reductions; penetration into the Levant, from Turkey to Chaldea, promoted returns to union with Rome or awakened and sustained such desires. There were, however, thorns amid the roses: the dispersions and ruin caused by the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and Sweden, the decline of the Japanese mission under the worsening of a merciless persecution, the failure of the Ethiopian mission, and the harsh difficulties arising from the trepid situation of confessors, sometimes only nominal, of kings and princes, especially in France and Bavaria. Vitelleschi had to regret some imprudence or defection on the part of the confessors, but he had far more cause to rejoice in the many evils averted and the great good achieved, particularly in countering the anti-ecclesiastical designs of Cardinal Richelieu.
Vitelleschi also had the joy of witnessing the canonization of Ignatius and Francis Xavier (1622), the beatification of Stanislaus Kostka, Aloysius Gonzaga, and the three Japanese martyrs, Paul Miki, John de Goto, and James Kisai; and the celebration of the 19th centenary of the Society, in which Urban VIII took part, attending the ceremony at the Gesù with his court and granting the Jesuits a jubilee of spiritual graces. This did not go unnoticed by his adversaries, who redoubled their accusations of insufferable pride and triumph in a commemorative work by the Jesuits: *Imago primi saeculi Societatis Jesu* (Antwerp 1640), which was rather the fruit of understandable youthful enthusiasm, aggravated by the hyperbolic style of the time, than of history or criticism. At his death, Vitelleschi left more than 16,000 Jesuits, distributed across 35 provinces, 3 vice-provinces, 521 colleges, 49 seminaries, and more than 360 residences in Europe and the missions.