Saint Francis Xavier

Spanish religious leader

• Born: April 7, 1506
• Birthplace: The Castle of Xavier, Navarre (now in Spain)
• Died: December 3, 1552
• Place of death: Island of Sancian, China

Francis, who suffered many physical and mental hardships in order to bring the Christian message to countries of the Far East, was one of the first seven members of the Roman Catholic Church’s Jesuit Order as well as its most successful missionary.

Early Life

The youngest of a family of several children, Francis Xavier (FRAHN-sehs ZAY-vyuhr) was born to a prosperous nobleman, Don Juan de Jasso of Navarre, and a mother whose connection with the Xavier family brought property into her marriage. Francis’s parents focused on his education early in his life, and, since they determined he had a real love for learning, he was allowed to go to the College of Saint Barbara at the University of Paris, where, in 1530, he received a master of arts degree.

After graduating, Francis taught Aristotelian philosophy at the same institution. Francis was known to be a generous, helpful, and stirring lecturer, having a thorough knowledge of his subject. Yet it was his sense of adventure, combined with a serious, searching, and scholarly nature, that drew students to him and made him ready to embark on daring journeys to little-known or unknown lands.

It was Ignatius of Loyola, a fellow student of Francis at the University of Paris, who helped Francis find his calling that of Christian missionary work. For three years, Ignatius prodded Francis to dedicate his life to God rather than to the vain pursuits of the worldly minded, yet Francis ignored the summons. Finally, however, Francis’s resistance broke down, and he decided to serve God rather than scholarship. Together, Francis and Ignatius, along with five other idealistic youths, pledged themselves to church service at Montmartre in Paris, their group becoming the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Six of the original seven members went on to become ordained into the priesthood at Venice.

Francis and Ignatius then went to Rome and informed Pope Paul III that they would do whatever he asked of them. The pope, impressed by their youthful vigor and intellectual gifts, eventually gave official approval to the Society of Jesus. When the time came, the young men Ignatius, Francis, Peter Faber, Nicholas Bobadilla, Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmeron, and Simon Rodriguez not only took traditional monastic vows of perpetual poverty and chastity but also pledged total obedience to the pope’s wishes, going wherever he might find it necessary to send them.

From inauspicious beginnings in 1534, the society would help evangelize many nations and bring countless converts to the Church, while performing humanitarian deeds for the people converted and battling any heresy, vice, and spiritual lethargy they might encounter. Francis’s name would become forever intertwined with that of the society, for he came to exemplify all that was positive in it.

Life’s Work

After being ordained in the priesthood in 1537, Francis, in the company of Ignatius and the other Jesuits, worked long days to make the society into a successful venture, enthusiastically spreading the news about it to potential recruits. In 1540, the Portuguese king, John III , instructed his Vatican emissary to petition the pope to allow Jesuits the right to propagate the Christian faith within the new Portuguese possessions overseas. An opportunity for missionary work came after a vision of Ignatius, in which God told him to ask the pope a second time for a chance to do missionary tasks. In Ignatius’s vision, God said that he would make certain that the permission would be granted.

With Ignatius elected the general of the society and with orders from Paul to convert pagans in Portugal’s expanding empire, Francis joined fellow priest Rodriguez in Lisbon; then, with two trusted aides, he sailed on to Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, situated on the coast. While on board the ship taking him to Goa, Francis showed characteristic love for his fellow passengers by assisting those sickened by scurvy and other diseases, by saying Mass regularly, and by arbitrating arguments among the sailors. Once in Goa, which had been a Portuguese possession for only thirty years, Francis noted with dismay that the Europeans within the colony were dissipated by debauchery of all kinds and thus provided the indigenous people with a terrible example of Christian conduct.

Taking on himself the same selfless activities that he had performed on ship caring for the sick, comforting the dying, advising those in difficult situations, teaching the catechism, and saying Masses Francis slowly created order out of the Goan chaos, giving by precept as well as example a measure of self-discipline to the unruly inhabitants. Because he taught the residents of Goa the principles of the Catholic religion and put those principles directly into practice, Francis gained the residents’ complete trust and high regard.

In 1542, having done much for Goa, Francis decided to journey to Cape Cormorin in southern India in order to teach a group of half-converted native Indians, called the Paravas, Christian values and beliefs; his message was well received by the poorest Paravas, who gathered in large numbers to hear him deliver his inspiring sermons. The love Francis had for the people of India was evident to almost everyone, even if his message sometimes became garbled or was incomprehensible. Once more, Francis’s actions did more persuading than did his eloquent words.

After working with the Paravas, Francis decided to return to Goa in order to find new priests for the Society of Jesus. Again he was forced to deal with the immoral behavior and often outright hostility of Portuguese traders, who found his preaching an affront to a libertine way of life. This time, he worked alongside two Goanese priests and a lay catechist, helping the Goanese people by protecting them from European harassment.

At Travancore, Francis founded many churches, but at the same time he tore down the native Indians’ ancestral places of worship and idols. He was said to have brought the dead back to life in the manner of Jesus Christ. Francis’s exploits and his miracles led to his being hated by the Hindu Brahmans as well as local Muslims, who on occasion massacred Christian converts. As for his mission at Goa, Francis often wrote in letters to John III about how difficult an endeavor the mission had been for him and his followers. Fighting the immorality of the Portuguese residents at Goa demanded so much of Francis’s time that he admitted to chronic weariness and, on more than one occasion, a sense of defeat.

It may well have been his exasperation with fellow Europeans that led to Francis’s departure from Goa in 1545, when he sailed to a city on the Malaysian peninsula called Malacca. People there, who had previously been hostile to Christianity, converted enthusiastically after Francis worked his miracles. He journeyed on to the southern Pacific Ocean, where he spent time on the Molucca Islands. There Francis once more battled the hardened, sinning Portuguese traders, some of whom would have liked to kill him.

From the Moluccas, Francis returned to Goa, this time by way of Ceylon, but he wanted to journey on to the little-known country of Japan . He traveled to Kagoshima on the island of Kyūshū, where he and his band were given permission to learn the Japanese language and to preach Christian doctrine to the city’s inhabitants; unfortunately, this budding mission was almost destroyed when the prince who gave permission for Francis’s evangelistic efforts became irate with him over the fact that Francis had dared use a base of Japanese operations other than his own city of Kagoshima.

Nevertheless, the converts that Francis had made remained faithful to the Church established in Japan. He made still more converts when he moved to the town of Hirado near Kagoshima. Other attempts at reaching the Japanese at the port city of Yamaguchi in 1549 were unsuccessful. At Kyōto, the imperial city itself, Francis found himself at another impasse, this time because he was so poorly dressed that the emperor believed that he could not possibly be an important Western dignitary and thus would not deign to see him. Francis, ever able to rise to a challenge, decided to purchase luxurious clothing for himself and for his fellow adventurers. Dressing as extravagantly as he could, he presented himself to Oshindono, prince of Nagote, who, after having been impressed by the splendor of Francis’s party, decided to allow him to preach the Gospel in his realm. This opening allowed Francis to baptize many in the Christian faith.

Still other missionary ventures opened at Bungo in Kyūshū province, where the ruler was friendly to Francis and his followers and friends. When Francis left Japan in 1551, he could look back on a considerable achievement: He had single-handedly converted more than seven hundred Japanese people to the Christian faith without bloodshed or turmoil, which often in the past had come with attempts to convert populations to Christianity.

Francis’s last major challenge was to find a way to establish a mission in the forbidding country of China , long closed to all outsiders on the pain of death. Encouraged solely by the fact that so many missions had already been established in places once thought to be totally inhospitable to Christianity, Francis believed that God wanted him to open China to his faith and gain many converts there. Yet from the outset, the venture proved impossible. Francis dreamed of being the first priest to enter China. After he had done much exhausting work for the lepers at Malacca, he asked the new governor, Don Alvaro d’Ataide, to provide him with a ship and supplies so that he might sail to China. The governor, knowing well that China remained closed to outsiders, at first refused the request but then, after reconsidering, grudgingly allowed it.

Francis’s plan was to sail to Japan in company with a Christian brother and a Chinese Christian, and then to travel secretly to China in the hope of somehow gaining entry. In the late summer of 1552, he landed at the port of Sancian, where he hired a merchant to take him by night into Canton province. At a time when he needed all the strength he could find, Francis fell ill with a raging fever and was summarily left alone by most of the Portuguese on the island, who made a precarious living trading with mainlanders. Although one ship would have taken him home to Europe, Francis could not bear the ship’s motion as it made its way out to sea, and he begged the captain to take him back to Sancian, where he died asking God’s forgiveness and praising him.

Significance

Saint Francis Xavier, canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 at the same time as was his great friend Ignatius, was one of the Catholic Church’s most daring, astute, and productive leaders. He used his fine intellectual gifts and his ability to deliver powerful speeches and sermons to glorify God when he very well might have pursued far less arduous and far more lucrative careers than that of a missionary.

Francis was fortunate to have been born during Spain and Portugal’s Golden Age of the sixteenth century, when empire building was the pursuit of the Hispanic nations and their kings. Both countries, out to counter the Reformation brought on by followers of Martin Luther and to add to national coffers, needed able priests to subdue, through converting, the indigenous peoples of conquered lands. Thus, Francis found the kind of support he needed for his missionary efforts.

Without Francis and his fellow Jesuits, India, Japan, and other places in Asia would have remained untouched by the Church’s message and, without Francis’s support, Ignatius might not have been able to found and properly organize the Jesuit Order. Today, with a debt owed to its founders, the society remains the preeminent scholarly order of the Catholic Church as well as its greatest supplier of educators, who teach children in secondary schools, colleges, and universities around the world. Appropriately, Francis remains the patron saint of all involved in missionary work and the guiding influence of multitudes of priests who have served their God in foreign places.

Bibliography

Aveling, J. C. H. “The Dangerous Missions.” In The Jesuits. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1981. This superb study of the Society of Jesus and its dynamic of faith, though it chooses not to dwell for long on Francis, does a fine job of discussing the magnitude of his opening the Far East to the Christian faith.

Barthel, Manfred. “The Light of the World: The Jesuit as Missionary.” In The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus. Translated by Mark Howson. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Explains Francis’s contribution to the founding of the Society of Jesus and to its early mission work, and how he is to be remembered. Good for those readers wishing to have a grounding in the Jesuit Order’s history and Francis’s place in it. The general bibliography is useful.

Bartoli, Daniello, and J. P. Maffei. The Life of St. Francis Xavier, Apostle of the Indies and Japan. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1862. This account is one of the handful of studies of the saint in English translation. Serves as a basic guide to the subject of Francis’s travels.

Bermejo, Luis M. Unto the Indies: Life of St. Francis Xavier. Anand, Gujarat, India: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2000. A life of the saint that seeks to reveal the real Francis behind the various myths that have accumulated about him. Includes maps and bibliographic references.

Clarke, C. P. S. “St. Francis Xavier.” In Everyman’s Book of Saints. Revised by Rosemary Edisford. New York: Philosophical Society, 1969. Elementary but helpful introduction to Francis’s place in the canon of saints.

D’Costa, Anthony. The Call of the Orient: A Response by Jesuits in the Sixteenth Century. Mumbai, India: Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, 1999. A study of fifteen of St. Francis Xavier’s companions and their missionary work in South Asia. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Foss, Michael. “Reform of the Church and the Life of Renewal.” In The Founding of the Jesuits, 1540. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969. Foss traces the society from its inception to the modern era. Francis is given credit for his pioneering work.

Lacouture, Jean. Jesuits: A Multibiography. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995. Provides biographies of the most important and influential Jesuits, including St. Francis Xavier. Includes illustrations, map, bibliographic references, and index.

Maynard, Theodore. The Odyssey of Francis Xavier. Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950. Compelling study of Francis and his importance to the Catholic Church’s missionary outreach.