Today December 3

Today is the feast of St. Francis Xavier (1506 - 1552), patron of the missions and the most successful unsuccessful missioner there ever was. He did so much while feeling such a failure! And yet he won so many souls to Christ and the Church you would have to admire him. Even Sir Walter Scott, a Protestant, said of him, "The most rigid Protestant, and the most indifferent philosopher, cannot deny to him the courage and patience of a martyr, with the good sense, resolution, ready wit and address of the best negotiator that even went upon a temporal embassy." Wow!

He started out in a castle in Navarre, in the Basque country, a prince and a scholar. Indifferent at first to St. Ignatius of Loyola, he soon became one of his most ardent followers and one of the "band of seven." But he swore himself not to the person of St. Ignatius, attractive as that was, but to the service of God. And serve Him he did.

He set sail for India under the flag of Portugal. He landed in Goa, an area on the western coast, and instructed the Christians there as well as made many new converts. Both tasks were made much, much harder by the atrocious, racist behavior of the Portuguese. St. Francis felt he was fighting a losing battle wherever he went in colonial Asia: as fast as he was baptizing, catechizing and treating the natives (he knew some rudimentary medicine), his own European compatriots were destroying his work with concubinage, violence and slavery! St. Francis even had the nerve to point this out, both to them and to people back home -- in many letters which are still extant.

Not content to Christianize Goa, Francis made the dangerous journey to Manar, an island off India, to give spiritual aid to the natives there, who were Christians in name only. He baptized so many, he could hardly lift his arm at the end of the day. He confirmed those already baptized, catechized all, and stayed as long as he could. He must have been horrified to learn that the king of Ceylon (which ruled Manar) slew 600 Christians there in an effort to wipe out the faith. But the Paravas (such were the natives known) kept their faith, though fewer in numbers.

He next turned to Malaysia and the Moluccas, where he suffered physically a great deal but made many converts. In Malaysia they all fell away, and back in India he was disappointed not to have reached a single Brahmin. Then he was on to Japan, a closed country that he heard about from a Japanese fugitive named Anjiro. He struggled to learn the difficult language. (A pious rumor went around in later years that he had miraculous powers of languages, but it was most definitely not true.) His first efforts to reach the people were scorned, as "evangelical poverty had not the appeal in Japan that it had in India." He realized he had to dress richly, act important, and most of all, bring costly gifts! He received permission from the daimyo (local ruler) to teach, and he quickly made many converts among the common people, about 2000 in all.

They, for their part, told him of an even greater civilization than their own: China. Francis died trying to reach it. He died of fever on the island of Sancian, about 6 miles off the coast. Til the end he was treated with contempt by the maritime authority, Don Alvaro da Gama (son of Vasco da Gama). But God had the last laugh. Though his body was buried in mud in a hot, tropical climate -- and additionally packed with lime to speed decomposition -- St. Francis' body remained perfectly incorrupt, as it does today, in the church of the Good Jesus in Goa. St. Francis Xavier, pray for us.