St. Francis Xavier

Francis Xavier was born on 7 April 1506 in the castle of Xavier, near Sangüesa in the Kingdom of Navarre, in what is now northern Spain. He came from a noble family — his father was a privy councilor to King John III of Navarre — and received a thorough classical education. He studied at the University of Paris, where he arrived around 1525, and there earned a reputation as a brilliant, ambitious, and worldly young man. Paris is where his life began to turn toward a deeper purpose, in large part through his roommate and friend Ignatius of Loyola, the former soldier who was gathering companions for a new kind of Christian life. The small group, which also included Peter Faber and Diego Laínez, took vows together in 1534 at Montmartre and committed themselves to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, if that proved impossible, to placing themselves at the service of the pope. They were never able to sail to the Holy Land, and in 1540 the group was formally approved by Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — with Francis among the founding members.

In 1541, Francis was sent by King John III of Portugal as a papal legate to the East, sailing from Lisbon with the ambassador to Goa, the Portuguese colonial capital on the western coast of India. He arrived in 1542 and began an extraordinary decade of travel that would take him across much of Asia. He worked among the Portuguese settlers, preached to the local populations along the southern coast of India, and made a significant visit to the pearl-fishing communities of the Mannar coast and the fisher-folk of the Coromandel coast, where he adapted his preaching to the Tamil-speaking peoples and reportedly learned some of their language. He is said to have baptized enormous numbers of people — the figure most often cited is around 30,000 in his first year in India, though the actual count is impossible to verify and the number has long been questioned by historians. From Goa he also organized the Jesuit mission to the Maluku Islands (the Spice Islands) and made two difficult attempts to reach China, the second of which proved fatal.

In 1549 Xavier crossed to Japan, arriving at Kagoshima, the home territory of the daimyō who had invited him. He spent roughly two and a half years in Japan, working in Kagoshima, Yamaguchi, and Kyoto, and trying to understand Japanese culture in order to present Christianity in a way that would make sense to it. He sent back to Europe his famous letters describing Japanese society, including his observations on the dignity he found there. Even during his relentless travel he remained a man of prayer: he is often depicted with a crucifix in one hand and a rosary in the other, and his missionary diary records long stretches of catechesis, confession, and Mass celebrated in frontier conditions. He is also remembered for his care of the sick during outbreaks of disease, and the rosary he carried became a devotional object associated with him after his death.

In late 1551 Xavier set out from Goa once more, hoping to enter China, which was then closed to foreign missionaries. He spent the spring of 1552 waiting on the small island of Shangchuan, off the coast of Guangdong, ill and unable to secure passage to the mainland. He died there on 3 December 1552, reportedly of a fever, and was buried on the island. His body was later moved to Goa, where it remains enshrined in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, a major pilgrimage site. He was canonized in 1622 alongside his old friend Ignatius of Loyola, and his feast day is kept on 3 December. Xavier is one of the great patrons of missions, and his life helped shape the global imagination of Catholic mission work for centuries after his death.