Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552)

A birth at Xavier Castle (1506)

Francis was born on April 7, 1506 at Xavier Castle (Javier), near Sangüesa, in the Kingdom of Navarre, then an independent state caught between France and Spain.^[7][8] He was the youngest of the children of Juan de Jasso y Atondo, doctor in law of the University of Bologna and president of the Royal Council of Navarre, and of María de Azpilcueta y Aznárez, heiress of the castle and house of Xavier. It is from his mother that the child takes the name that would remain attached to his glory.^[9][10]

The family was noble, learned and profoundly Catholic. The future saint grew up in a fortified Pyrenean manor, the last generation of a line that political upheavals would soon strike head-on.

A Navarre shattered by war

The childhood of Francis coincided with the collapse of the Kingdom of Navarre. In 1512, Ferdinand of Aragon invaded and annexed Upper Navarre to the Crown of Castile. The Jasso family, loyal to the legitimate kings, paid dearly for its loyalty: the father died in 1515, and the Castilian troops partly dismantled the fortifications of the family castle.^[11][12] The elder brothers of Francis fought on the defeated side.

This context is no mere anecdote. The future Apostle of the Indies belongs, like Ignatius of Loyola himself — wounded in 1521 defending Pamplona, in that same war —, to that Basque-Navarrese nobility marked by military defeat and the loss of the old world. Providence would transform these two destinies of idle gentlemen into a spiritual adventure.

Student and regent in Paris

In 1525, at nineteen, Francis left Navarre for Paris, the intellectual capital of Christendom, and enrolled at the famous Collège Sainte-Barbe of the University of Paris.^[13][14] Brilliant, athletic, ambitious, he earned his licentiate in arts in 1530 and soon became regent (teacher) of philosophy at the Collège de Beauvais, teaching Aristotle's Logic.^[15][16]

He shared his room with another Savoyard, pious and poor, Peter Faber. Everything seemed to promise the young Navarrese a fine university and ecclesiastical career. It was then that a third companion, older, a lame former soldier and a convert, came to lodge in the same room: Ignatius of Loyola.

"What profit to gain the whole world..." (Mt 16:26)

Ignatius of Loyola quickly spotted the worth of the brilliant regent and set out to win him for God. But Francis resisted: he was ambitious, attached to academic honours, and at first regarded with suspicion this poor pilgrim suspected by the Paris Inquisition. Peter Faber let himself be convinced first; Francis held out for several years.^[17][18]

Tradition reports that Ignatius kept coming back, to bring him around, to the word of Christ:

"For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life?" — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 16:26^[19]

Repeated with patience, this question ended up cracking the young man's ambition. Francis made the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius and came out transformed: the apostle of the whole world was born from the conquest of a single soul. The episode has become one of the classic examples of the Ignatian pedagogy of the final end: subordinating everything to eternal salvation.^[20]

The vows of Montmartre (August 15, 1534)

On August 15, 1534, on the feast of the Assumption, in a chapel of Montmartre, seven companions together pronounced vows of poverty, chastity and pilgrimage to Jerusalem (or, failing that, of placing themselves at the pope's service). They were Ignatius of Loyola, Peter Faber — the only priest of the group, who received the vows —, Francis Xavier, Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Nicolás Bobadilla and Simão Rodrigues.^[21][22] This is the birth certificate of what would become the Society of Jesus, approved by Paul III in 1540.

Francis Xavier is thus one of the founders of the order. But his own vocation was not teaching or government: it was the distant mission, which he had not yet guessed.

Ordination and years of waiting (1537-1540)

The pilgrimage to Jerusalem proving impossible because of the war against the Turks, the companions placed themselves at the pope's disposal. Francis Xavier was ordained priest in Venice on June 24, 1537, at the same time as Ignatius.^[23][24] He exercised a ministry of preaching, care of the sick and catechesis in the cities of northern Italy, then joined Rome where the small group worked out the rule of the nascent order.

It was a twist of circumstance that decided his destiny. King John III of Portugal asked the pope for missionaries for his Asian possessions. Designated for the voyage, Nicolás Bobadilla fell ill. Ignatius then turned to Francis: "Go, set everything on fire" (Ite, inflammate omnia), according to the traditional phrase. Francis is said to have answered simply: "Here I am."^[25][26]

Apostolic nuncio of Paul III

Before departure, Pope Paul III conferred on Francis Xavier the powers of apostolic nuncio for all lands beyond the Cape of Good Hope — an immense jurisdiction, which made him the direct representative of the Holy See throughout the East.^[27][28] He left in the name of the universal Church, under the regime of the Portuguese padroado which at that time bound missionary expansion and Portugal's colonial expansion indissolubly together.

"Set everything on fire, set the whole world ablaze." — phrase attributed to Saint Ignatius of Loyola sending his companions on mission^[29]

The departure from Lisbon (April 7, 1541)

Francis Xavier embarked at Lisbon on April 7, 1541 — the day of his thirty-fifth birthday — on the Santiago, bound for India.^[30][31] The crossing was long and deadly: thirteen months of sailing, heat, scurvy, the storms of the Cape of Good Hope. The ship wintered in Mozambique, where Xavier nursed the sick. He refused all the privileges attached to his office of nuncio and travelled as the poorest.

Arrival in Goa (May 6, 1542)

On May 6, 1542, after more than a year at sea, Francis Xavier landed at Goa, capital of Portuguese India.^[32][33] He discovered there a city Christian in name but lax in morals: greedy settlers, slavery, concubinage, contempt for the local peoples. Before leaving for the mission lands, he devoted several months to reforming the city — visiting hospitals and prisons, catechizing children in the streets at the sound of the bell, preaching to the Portuguese. He relied on the future College of Saint Paul, the first great Jesuit institution in Asia.^[34]

The Fishery Coast and the Paravas

In the autumn of 1542, Francis Xavier reached the Fishery Coast, in south-eastern India, toward Cape Comorin. There lived the Paravas, Tamil pearl fishers, baptized en masse a few years earlier to obtain Portuguese protection against their enemies, but left without instruction or priests.^[35][36]

Xavier spent nearly three years among them. Knowing no Tamil, he had the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the commandments translated for him, learned them by heart phonetically, then went through the villages, handbell in hand, gathering children and adults for catechism. The work was exhausting. In a famous letter, he confided:

"There is such a multitude of people converting to the faith of Christ that, very often, from baptizing, my arms fall with weariness and my voice fails me." — Saint Francis Xavier, letter from India^[37]

His missionary method

The method of Xavier remained a model for the missionaries of the following centuries, despite its limits. The table below sums up its main features.

It is this last dimension — concrete charity toward the poorest — that authenticates his preaching in the eyes of the peoples. Xavier baptizes, but he nurses, defends the oppressed against the exactions of the Portuguese settlers, and literally dies at the task.^[38][39]

Travancore, Ceylon, Malacca, the Moluccas

From 1544 to 1548, Francis Xavier kept widening his field of action. He evangelized Travancore (south-west India), considered Ceylon (Sri Lanka), then pushed eastward: Malacca (Malaysia), crossroads of Asian trade, and the far-off Moluccas — Amboina, Ternate, the island of Moro —, archipelagos of the "Spice Islands" where no missionary had yet arrived durably.^[40][41]

Everywhere he observed the same urgency: whole peoples ready to receive the Gospel, and no one to proclaim it to them. From this observation sprang the most famous cry of all his correspondence, addressed to his brothers in Europe.

From Cochin, on January 12, 1544, Francis Xavier wrote to Ignatius of Loyola and the companions in Rome a heartrending letter. In it he implored learned Europe to come to the rescue of souls: the doctors of the universities, he said, have more learning than charity.

"I have very often had the idea of going through all the universities of Europe, and first that of Paris, to cry out everywhere like a madman and shake those who have more learning than charity: Alas! what an immense number of souls, through your fault, is shut out of heaven and hurled into hell!" — Saint Francis Xavier, letter from Cochin, January 12, 1544^[42]

And he summed up, in a sentence that became the manifesto of the whole modern mission, the drama consuming him:

"Many people do not become Christians for the sole reason that there is no one to make them Christians." — Saint Francis Xavier, letter from Cochin, January 12, 1544^[43]

This cry is not merely an appeal of circumstance. It expresses the conviction that animated his whole life: the harvest is immense, the workers are too few, and the salvation of the peoples depends, under God, on the generosity of those who can leave.

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 9:37-38^[44]

Anjirô and the decision for Japan

At Malacca, in 1547, Francis Xavier met a fugitive Japanese, Anjirô (sometimes Yajirô), who sought peace of soul after a murder. Xavier had him instructed and baptized at Goa under the name of Paul of the Holy Faith (Paulo de Santa Fé). Anjirô described to him a refined people, curious, hungry for truth. Xavier conceived from it the ardent desire to evangelize that unknown country — he would be the first Christian missionary to Japan.^[45][46]

The Kagoshima landing (August 15, 1549)

On August 15, 1549, again on the feast of the Assumption, Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima, in the south of the island of Kyūshū. He was accompanied by the Jesuits Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández, and by Anjirô serving as interpreter.^[47][48] He discovered a civilization of great intellectual and moral demandingness, where one is not converted by fear but after debate. Xavier adapted his method: he traded the ostentatious poverty of India for a more dignified presentation, required by Japanese social codes.

"The Japanese are the best of all the peoples we have discovered so far, and I believe that, among non-Christians, none will be found to surpass them." — Saint Francis Xavier, letter from Japan, 1549^[49]

Yamaguchi, Bungo and the dispute with the bonzes

After difficult beginnings, Xavier understood that he had to obtain the favour of the lords (daimyō) to preach freely. He went to Yamaguchi, then toward the capital Miyako (Kyōto), then ruined by civil war, which he found inaccessible. Back in Yamaguchi in 1551, he offered the daimyō European presents — including a mechanical clock and instruments —, and obtained permission to preach. Conversions multiplied; the disputes with the Buddhist bonzes were lively yet respectful.^[50][51] He finally reached Bungo, where the daimyō Ōtomo Sōrin welcomed him favourably.

In a few months, Xavier and his companions laid the foundations of a Japanese Christendom which, despite later persecutions, would count hundreds of thousands of faithful. For the rest of this story, see The Church in Japan.

Departure and the Japanese record (1551)

In November 1551, Francis Xavier left Japan to return to India, leaving the young mission to Cosme de Torres. His two-year stay had been decisive: he had discerned that the key to Japan — and beyond, to the whole Far East — passed through China, whose culture and authority fascinated the Japanese. "If the Chinese accept the faith, the Japanese will soon abandon what they received from the Chinese," he understood in substance.^[52][53] The Chinese dream was born.

The great Chinese plan

Back in Goa in 1552, having become provincial of the Jesuits for India, Francis Xavier organized an embassy to China, then closed to foreigners on pain of death. He embarked eastward again, reached Malacca, then Sancian Island (Shangchuan, in Portuguese Sancião), a few kilometres off the Chinese coast, near Canton. There, he awaited a clandestine smuggler who was to bring him onto the mainland.^[54][55]

Death on Sancian Island (December 3, 1552)

The smuggler never came. Exhausted by ten years of mission and consumed by fever, Francis Xavier died at Sancian, in the hut the Portuguese of the island had fitted out for him, assisted by his companion Antonio de Santa Fé, a young Chinese convert —, on December 3, 1552, at 46.^[56][57] Far from being alone on a desert island, he passed away amid the Portuguese merchants who frequented that trading post toward Canton, while waiting for the smuggler who was to bring him onto the mainland; his burial on the spot gathered four people, including a Portuguese.^[58] (Some ancient sources date the death to December 2.) He gazed at the China he had been unable to reach. His last words are said to have been an act of trust drawn from the psalm: "In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in æternum" ("In you, Lord, I have hoped: let me never be confounded").^[59]

"It is enough, Lord, it is enough." — Satis est, Domine, satis est, words attributed to Saint Francis Xavier, overwhelmed by divine consolations^[60]

The incorrupt body

First buried in quicklime to ease the transport of his bones, the body of Francis Xavier was found intact a few months later. Transferred to Malacca then to Goa in 1554, it is kept there still today, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where it is the object of solemn expositions (ostensions) drawing millions of pilgrims. His right arm, the one that baptized so many faithful, was detached in 1614 and sent to Rome, where it is venerated in the Church of the Gesù.^[61][62] For the meaning of this phenomenon, see incorrupt bodies.

A witness of choice confirms these facts: Saint Francis de Sales himself, Doctor of the Church, recalls in his Controversies the marvels worked by the missionary and the state of his body after death:

"Blessed Francis Xavier healed paralytics, the deaf, mutes, the blind, raised a dead man; his body could not be consumed although it had been buried with quicklime, as those who saw it whole fifteen months after his death testified." — Saint Francis de Sales, The Controversies^[63]

Zeal for souls

The whole interior life of Francis Xavier rests on a single passion: the salvation of souls. In him this was no militant voluntarism, but a burning charity that cannot bear a soul to be lost for want of proclamation. It is this charity that made him cross the oceans, beg for workers, write his heartrending letters to Europe. His spiritual motto could be borrowed from Saint Paul:

"For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" — Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 9:16^[64]

Obedience and abandonment

Xavier is the very type of the saint of obedience. It is in obedience that he left for the Indies, overnight, unprepared. It is in obedience that he accepted the offices of nuncio and provincial. He preciously kept, so tradition says, the signature cut out from the letters of Ignatius, which he carried on him like a relic. This obedience was not servile: it was the expression of a total abandonment to the will of God manifested through superiors, a fundamental trait of the Ignatian spirituality inherited from the first Jesuits.^[65][66]

"Satis est, Domine": the mystical experience

Behind the overflowing activity of the missionary hid a great contemplative. Several witnesses report that Xavier was at times flooded with divine consolations to the point of having to beg God to moderate them — hence the cry "Satis est, Domine, satis est" ("It is enough, Lord, it is enough"), inscribed on the scroll of the famous Japanese portrait at Kobe.^[67] Far from being a mere man of action, he drew his apostolic strength from an intense interior union, spending his nights in prayer between two days of evangelization.

"My God, I love you" (attributed hymn)

Tradition attributes to Francis Xavier one of the most beautiful acts of pure love in Catholic spirituality, the hymn O Deus ego amo te — "My God, I love you". The attribution is debated among scholars, but the poem perfectly expresses the spirit of the saint: to love God not from fear of hell nor hope of heaven, but for himself.

"My God, I love you, not so that you may save me, nor because those who do not love you will be punished with eternal fire; but you embraced me on the Cross, you bore the nails, the lance, the shame... Why then should I not love you, O loving Jesus?" — hymn O Deus ego amo te, traditionally attributed to Saint Francis Xavier^[68]

Beatification and canonization (1619-1622)

The reputation for holiness of Francis Xavier was immense from his death onward. He was beatified by Paul V on October 25, 1619, then canonized by Gregory XV on March 12, 1622, the same day as Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri and Isidore the Laborer — one of the most extraordinary "bouquets" of canonizations in history (canonizatio quinque sanctorum).^[69][70] The bull of canonization would only be published in 1623, after the death of Gregory XV.

Patron of the missions

The Church progressively entrusted to Francis Xavier the very patronage of the missionary work. Pius XI, by the decree Apostolicorum in missionibus, proclaimed him in 1927 patron of all Catholic missions, jointly with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux — a striking union between the great traveller of Asia and the cloistered Carmelite who never left her convent but carried the missions in her prayer.^[71][72] His feast is fixed on December 3.

The debate over his method

Contemporary historiography has debated the method of Francis Xavier, sometimes judged too tied to the Portuguese padroado, too hasty in mass baptisms, too inattentive to local cultures — notably in India, where he is said to have "missed the riches of Hinduism".^[73] The reproach is partly fair, but anachronistic: Xavier acted in the missionary urgency of the sixteenth century, without the tools of modern orientalism, and it was precisely in Japan that he first understood the need to adapt the presentation of the faith to the codes of a great civilization. This intuition would open the way to the great Jesuit experiments in inculturation — Matteo Ricci in China, Roberto de Nobili in India — and to the long Chinese Rites controversy.

Relics, charisms and posterity

The posthumous glory of Francis Xavier is considerable. He is credited, in his lifetime, with the gift of tongues (xenoglossia) and many miracles, gathered from the earliest biographies, notably that of Orazio Torsellino (De Vita Francisci Xaverii, Rome, 1594).^[74] His incorrupt body at Goa and his arm-relic at the Gesù remain major pilgrimage sites. He is, after Paul of Tarsus, the most universal figure of the Christian missionary impulse — and his name, given to countless churches, colleges and cities on five continents, testifies to it.^[75]

"Give me souls, and take all the rest." — motto of apostolic zeal, inspired by Genesis (14:21), which the missionary impulse of Francis Xavier illustrates above all^[76]

• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) — his spiritual father and the founder of the Society of Jesus, canonized the same day as he.
• The Foundation of the Society of Jesus — the order of which Francis Xavier was one of the six first companions.
• The Church in Japan — the Christendom born of his 1549 mission, its martyrs and its "hidden Christians".
• The Chinese Rites controversy — the great inculturation debate opened by the Jesuit missions in Asia.
• Incorrupt bodies — the phenomenon of which his body at Goa is one of the most famous cases.
• The Catholic Reformation — the generation of reforming saints to which he belongs.
• Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Philip Neri — canonized with him on March 12, 1622.