By Corazon Damo-Santiago
What Saint Paul is to the early Christians, Saint Francis Xavier is to the present times.
For the zeal Saint Francis Xavier exemplified, the extraordinary miracles he performed and the great number of souls he brought to the Catholic Faith, he is considered as the greatest missionary since the epoch of the apostles, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Dubbed as the “Patron of the Propagation of Faith and All Foreign Missions,” he traveled great distances in the most inaccessible places to evangelize.
In his 10 years of missionary work in more than 50 kingdoms, he won almost a million souls, a lasting foundation for the “six great Asiatic mission fields.”
Apostolic Nuncio to the Indies
Saint Francis Xavier was born on April 7, 1506, in Navarre, Spain, to Don Juan de Jassu and Maria Alpilcueta.
Worldly and ambitious, he went to the University of Paris to study Philosophy or an ecclesiastical career and follow the fame of his father who was president of the Royal Council in Navarre. He met a brilliant student, Ignatius of Loyola, in the university who impressed on him the worthless aspiration for earthly glory. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffers the loss of his own soul?” Ignatius advised him.
He was persuaded to join Ignatius and five other friends to dedicate themselves to a life of holiness. The seven became the nucleus of the Jesuit Order. They took their vows on August 15, 1534, Feast of the Assumption, in the church in Montmartre, Paris, and were ordained priests on June 24, 1537, in Venice.
After a 40-day fast and spiritual preparation, Francis celebrated his first Mass.
Imbued with the zeal to save souls, he desired to go to universities in Europe. To Ignatius, he wrote: “I wish students would settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them…meditate on spiritual realities, to listen actively to what God is saying to them…forget their own desires, their human affairs, and give themselves over entirely to God’s will and His choice.”
While he was serving as Ignatius’s secretary in Rome, there was a call from King John III of Portugal for Jesuit missionaries to East Indies. In a parting message to Ignatius, he wrote: “For what is left of this life, I am well assured, it will be by letter only that we shall be together—in the other we shall embrace face to face.”
With a letter appointing him as Apostolic Nuncio to the Indies, Francis set sail on April 7, 1541, with the Portuguese ambassador.
A missionary in 50 kingdoms
The 11,000-mile sea voyage was a 13 months journey. The vessel landed in Goa, India—the center of Portuguese activity in the East on May 6, 1542.
After learning the language, he nursed the sick and taught catechism. He also went along fishery coasts, ringing bells to attract children and their mothers for catechism lessons.
His friendliness and utmost charity won him the admiration of the sick, the lepers and the natives, so the task of conversion was a considerable success, among the poor, tribal and lower-caste population.
But he was frustrated by the “immorality, greed and violence of European colonists,” according to Robert Ellsberg in All Saints, for such behavior “undermined the credibility of Christianity.”
In 1544 Francis went to Ceylon, Malacca, Spice Island and Cochin, China, to spread the faith. Having met a fugitive from Japan, he went on a missionary journey, landing in Kagoshima, southern Japan, on August 15, 1549. Learning the language and opposition from Buddhist monks were challenges he had to contend with. But his teachings, accompanied by numerous miracles, drew 2,000 Japanese to the faith.
While in Japan, he had a glimpse of Chinese civilization, and Francis planned to evangelize the Celestial Empire. He sailed for China and in 1552 reached the desolate island of Shanchuan (formerly Sancian), 6 miles off the coast of China. The Chinese pirates who were promised a great sum to smuggle him to Canton never arrived. After three months of waiting, he succumbed to fever on December 3, 1552, at the age of 46. Four people attended his funeral, his servant boy, a Portuguese and two slaves.
In 1553 his incorrupt body was returned to Goa, India, and placed in a glass container in the Basilica of Born Jesus.
In 1614 his right arm, which he used to bless and baptized converts, was detached and sent to Rome on the order of the Jesuit General Claudio Acquaviva and enshrined in the Church of Gesu. Beatified on October 25, 1619, by Pope Paul V, he was canonized on March 12, 1622, by Pope Gregory XV.
On December 2, 1637, his body was encased in a silver casket with 32 silver plates, which depict the important episodes of his life. Among them, as cited by Wikipedia: a crab restores his crucifix which had fallen in the sea, cures miraculously a man full of sores, restores the hearing of a Japanese, heals a dumb paralytic man in Amanguchi, resuscitates a boy who died in a well at Cape Camorinto. Francis levitates while distributing communion in the College of Saint Paul and cures a religious there.
He was visited by Saint Jerome while he was sick in Vicenza and while lying on the ground with arms and legs tied but the cords broke miraculously.
In 1927 Pope Pius XI published Apostolicorum in Missionbus, which declared Saint Francis Javier as Patron of Foreign Missions together with Saint Therese of Lisieux.
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Santiago is a former regional director of the Department of Education National Capital Region. She is currently a faculty member of Mater Redemptoris College in Calauan, Laguna.