Saint Francis Xavier

The man dying alone on that empty beach was Francis Xavier (Francisco de Jaso y Azpilicueta), the greatest missionary since the Apostles themselves. In just eleven years in the Far East, he sailed more than a hundred thousand kilometers on creaking wooden sailing ships, set foot on the shores of India, Sri Lanka, Malacca and the wild Moluccas, and was the first to plant the Cross in Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun. His own hands baptized tens of thousands of converts, and he opened the way for millions in Asia to come to Christ.

When Francis was nine, war broke out and the kingdom of Navarre was annexed to Castile. The castle of Xavier was partly destroyed, the lands confiscated, and his father died in sorrow soon afterward. Growing up as the family’s fortunes declined, the young man nursed a burning ambition: not to choose a soldier’s career like his older brothers, but to use the highest learning to restore his family’s name and wealth.

In 1525, at nineteen, Francis left the family castle and set off for Paris to study at the Sorbonne, the most renowned university in Europe. There he earned his master’s degree in philosophy with distinction in 1530 and began teaching Aristotle’s philosophy at the Collège de Beauvais. Francis was a dashing, handsome young man, tall, an excellent high jumper and a brilliant speaker. Scholars and noble students praised him to the skies. A brilliant future, a prestigious professor’s chair, perhaps a richly endowed bishopric: all seemed already within the grasp of the twenty-four-year-old.

On April 7, 1541, on his thirty-fifth birthday, Father Francis Xavier boarded the ocean-going ship Santiago in the port of Lisbon. He carried the title of Apostolic Nuncio given him by the Pope, but refused every comfort due to that rank: he slept on the deck with the sailors, cared for the seasick himself, washed clothes for the sick, and shared his meager food with the slaves on board. The voyage around the Cape of Good Hope lasted thirteen long months full of storms and disease. On May 6, 1542, he set foot on the quay of Goa, the capital of Portuguese India.

Tens of thousands of poor pearl divers lived there. About ten years before Francis arrived, the Parava community had asked the Portuguese for help against Arab traders competing for their fishing grounds, and in return nearly twenty thousand of them had been baptized en masse under an agreement more political than religious. As a result they were Christians in name only: no one had taught them the faith, and they lived in ignorance and under cruel exploitation.

For three long years, from 1542 to 1545, Father Francis Xavier lived wholly among those poor people. He ate rice with dried fish as they did, drank plain water, and slept on the burning sand or on a torn mat in a palm-leaf hut. In one hand he carried a little bell, ringing it through every lane to draw children and adults to him. He translated the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Creed and the Ten Commandments into Tamil and set them to folk tunes so that even the illiterate could sing and remember them. He taught the children to sing the catechism, then sent them home to teach their parents.

He worked with tireless zeal, baptizing thousands of people every day. He wrote back to Saint Ignatius in Rome:

“There are days when my arm is so tired I cannot lift it, from baptizing so many people, and my voice gives out from repeating the prayers and the catechism so many times!”

According to many witnesses of the time, God worked astonishing miracles through him, healing the paralyzed, the deaf and the mute, and raising several people from the dead to strengthen the faith of the new converts.

He also wrote fiery letters to the professors and students of the Sorbonne in Paris, where he had once studied:

“How many times I have thought of running straight to the universities of Europe, above all to Paris, and shouting into the ears of the scholars who are more taken up with learning than with charity: How many souls here are being lost for lack of someone to proclaim the Gospel, while you are absorbed only in seeking empty academic honors!”

For more than two years in Japan, from 1549 to 1551, he faced a completely different culture: a highly civilized people who valued honor and reason, quite unlike the tribal communities he had met in India or the Moluccas. He learned Japanese, wore a kimono to fit local custom, and patiently engaged Buddhist monks and samurai lords in conversation. He walked hundreds of kilometers through freezing winter snow all the way to the capital, Kyoto, to ask to see the Emperor. By his holiness and sound reasoning, he laid a firm foundation for the Church in Japan, baptizing more than two thousand people. That young Church would later give heroic martyrs in the brutal persecutions of the seventeenth century. He praised them:

“The Japanese are the greatest consolation of my heart... They are the people with the noblest sense of honor and virtue of all the pagan peoples I have ever met!”

Defying every danger, in August 1552 Father Francis boarded the ship of his friend Diogo Pereira to the desolate island of Shangchuan (Thượng Xuyên), about fourteen kilometers off the coast of Guangdong. He used all the money he had left to hire a Chinese merchant to take him secretly by small boat across the water to land in Guangdong in the dead of night. He was ready to be thrown into a dark prison, as long as he had the chance to proclaim the Gospel to the Emperor of China. But the merchant took the money and vanished, leaving him stranded on the barren island. Winter set in, and one by one the Portuguese trading ships weighed anchor and left the island to avoid the storms, until only he remained, with a young interpreter named Antonio.

Pope Paul V beatified him in 1619. And on March 12, 1622, Pope Gregory XV solemnly canonized Francis Xavier, on the same day as his spiritual father Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In 1927, Pope Pius XI proclaimed Saint Francis Xavier the principal patron of all the missions of the world, together with Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus. The Church celebrates him on December 3 each year.

In Vietnam, Saint Francis Xavier is much loved by the faithful: he is the patron of the missions, of the catechist movement, and of hundreds of thousands of Catholic men who bear the baptismal name Francis Xavier. The Cha Tam Church in Chợ Lớn, Saigon, is dedicated to him.