By Leon Bent –
St. Francis Xavier, Spanish San Francisco Javier or Xavier, Navarre [Spain] feast day December 3, the greatest Roman Catholic missionary of modern times who was instrumental in the establishment of Christianity in India, the Malay Archipelago, and Japan. In Paris in 1534 he pronounced vows as one of the first seven members of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, under the leadership of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Francis disembarked in Goa, the centre of Portuguese activity in the East, on May 6, 1542. After brief instructions he baptized 10,000 of them in the last months of 1544. He anticipated that the schools he planned and Portuguese pressure would keep them constant in the faith.
In the fall of 1545, news of opportunities for Christianity attracted him to the Malay Archipelago. Following several months of evangelization among the mixed population of the Portuguese commercial centre at Malacca (now Melaka, Malaysia), he moved on to found missions among the Malays and the head-hunters in the Spice Islands (Moluccas). In 1548 he returned to India, where more Jesuits had since arrived to join him. In Goa the College of Holy Faith, founded several years previously, was turned over to the Jesuits, and Francis began to develop it into a centre for the education of native priests and catechists for the diocese of Goa, which stretched from the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa, to China.
Francis’s eyes, however, were now fixed on a land reached only five years before by Europeans: Japan. His conversations in Malacca with Anjirō, a Japanese man deeply interested in Christianity, had shown that the people were cultured and sophisticated. On August 15, 1549, a Portuguese ship bearing Francis, the newly baptized Anjirō, and several companions entered the Japanese port of Kagoshima. Francis decided to return temporarily to India, leaving to the care of his companions about 2,000 Christians in five communities.
Even before his death, Francis Xavier was considered a saint, and he has been formally venerated as such by the Catholic Church, since 1622.
The sheer magnitude of the enterprise he undertook for the love of Christ staggers the imagination and captures the admiration of humanity.
Xavier’s dreams had been his own dreams—success, fame, the credit of a great name on earth. One breach after another Ignatius the patient besieger made in Francis’ defences. Ignatius bided his time, watched for a sortie of pride, and then flung his question: “Francis, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?” One day the ambitions of Francis Xavier returned reversed, ambitions now not for himself but for the glory of Christ, Our Lord, and on that day all the bells of heaven rang.
He was a man consumed with a divine impatience, a “saint in a hurry”. Sometimes he has been accused of restlessness, but God knows, as he would say himself, that his vagabondage was not due to an itch for change or a desire for more interesting labours. He “must go to open doors,” he said, and God knows too what each door cost him in privation and suffering.
During his decade in the East, Xavier’s trademark was his bell. “I went through the whole place with my bell in my hand, gathering all the boys and men that I could, and teaching them twice a day for a month.” “So great is the multitude which turns to the faith in this land where I wander,” he wrote to St. Ignatius, “that often my arms are weary with baptizing, and I have no voice left through so frequently reciting the creed and the commandments.”
In all he voyaged some 75,000 miles, three circumnavigations of the globe. He spent a total of two full years on shipboard, and we are not talking about the Queen Mary. The distance from Goa to Cape Comorin is roughly New York to Miami. Xavier travelled it thirteen times, either on foot or in those rickety, leaky, creaking tubs that passed for boats in those climes.
Just seventy years later on March 12th, Pope Gregory XV raised to the altars the two who were such fast friends on earth—Ignatius and Xavier. Pope Pius X declared St. Francis patron of the Propagation of the Faith and of all Catholic missions.
And, this final flourish! It is interesting to remember that Saint Therese of Lisieux and Saint Francis Xavier are co-patron saints of the missionary work of the Catholic Church. Therese, a contemplative religious saved souls from within the four walls of her monastery and Francis Xavier, a Jesuit priest, saving souls in the mission lands of the Church.
Leon Bent is an ex-Seminarian and studied the Liberal Arts and Humanities, and Philosophy, from St. Pius X College, Mumbai. He holds Masters Degree in English Literature and Aesthetics. He has published three Books and have 20 on the anvil. He has two extensively “Researched” Volumes to his name: Hail Full of Grace and Matrimony: The Thousand Faces of Love. He won The Examiner, Silver Pen Award, 2000 for writing on Social Issues, the clincher being a Researched Article on Gypsies in India, published in an issue of the (worldwide circulation) Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection, New Delhi. On April, 28, 2018, Leon received the Cardinal Ivan Dias Award for a research paper in Mariology.
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