St. Francis Xavier (December 3rd)
Dec. 3rd -- Saint Francis Xavier, Priest
Dec. 4th -- Saint John Damascene, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Dec. 6th -- Saint Nicholas, Bishop
Dec. 7th -- Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Dec. 8th (this year Dec. 9) -- Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
I am choosing to write about St. Francis Xavier. Other saints / feast days, including St. Nicholas (who provided inspiration for many of the secular “Santa Claus” traditions celebrated in the United States on December 25th) as well as St. Ambrose, (mentor to St. Augustine of Hippo, and a great saint in his own right) to say nothing of the Immaculate Conception of Mary ( which serves as the Catholic patronal feast day for the United States), also deserve their own articles.
However, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” :-) … and if nothing else one can have plenty of subject matter to write about in years to come ;-)
The future St. Francis Xavier, SJ, who came to be one of the Church’s greatest missionaries, was born on April 7, 1506 as Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta at the Castle of Xavier in what was then the Kingdom of Navarre, today part of Spain.
He was the youngest son of Don Juan de Jasso y Atondo who was one of the highest officials in the Kingdom of Navarre, indeed the president of the King’s Council of Advisors. His mother was the sole heiress to the Castle of Xavier where Francis Xavier was born.
Yet as wellborn as the future St. Francis Xavier was, as is often the case, change was not far down the horizon:
In 1512 when the future St. Francis Xavier was six years old, Ferdinand, King of Aragon and regent of Castille – Spain was still a tentative creation of the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castille – invaded Navarre.
With its clear connections to the King of Navarre, Francis' family opposed the invasion and … lost. As a consequence the family lost most of its lands, including much of said Castle of Xavier where Francis was born and grew up.
To make the point of who was going to be in charge, the victorious Spanish army apparently: (1) destroyed the outer wall of the family's castle at Xavier, (2) knocked down its gates as well as two of its towers and (3) filled-in its moat. All that was left was the quite exposed family residence. So there …
Still the family did remain with some money…
So in 1525, the future St. Francis Xavier was sent by the family to study at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, University of Paris, where he spent the next 11 years of his life.
Now this chapter of the future St. Francis Xavier life is also fascinating and remarkably comprehensible:
The apparently strapping 19-20 year old future St. Francis Xavier arrived in Paris for his studies as any number of young, fit, entitled feeling, rich families' children and … at least in his first years of study, came to be known as being quite the athlete, including apparently being quite good as a high jumper.
It was only a few years into his studies that his life began to change when he and his room mate Pierre Favre opened their doors to the significantly older, future St. Ignatius Loyola to live with them.
Why would they do that? Well, if Pierre Favre was from the Duchy of Savoy in southwestern France, the future St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier were from the same, notably Basque, part of Spain – both Pamplona from where the future St. Ignatius Loyola hailed and Navarre from where the future St. Francis Xavier was from were basically “Basque Country.” They were fellow countrymen. The future St. Ignatius Loyola was also “a vet,” and the older brothers of the future St. Francis Xavier had also fought in the wars against the conquering Spaniards. The future St. Francis Xavier may have even been asked by his family to take-in the future St. Ignatius Loyola or felt a kinship for him because of their common histories.
Be all that as it may, the two initially didn’t get along – with the younger, “frat boyish” future St. Francis Xavier dismissing the older, far along in his conversion, future St. Ignatius Loyola as something of a “religious fanatic.”
Yet, truth be told, the future St. Ignatius Loyola, had been in more or less the same position as the future St. Francis Xavier, when he was in his 20s as well – the future St. Ignatius Loyola had begun his adulthood wanting to be a soldier for Pamplona. It was only after he was wounded, and this ceased to be an option for him, that he had his conversion.
Anyway, at some point, Pierre Favre, who also became one of the founding seven members of the Jesuit Order, had to go home to Savoy for a while, leaving the two future Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier together for an extended period, and while the future St. Ignatius would have still been practicing with the application of his “Ignatian Exercises”, through extended discussions with the future St. Francis Xavier he was able to convince the latter to put aside his 20-year-old’s still quite worldly dreams of vain-glory, and put his energies into a pursuit “For the Greater Glory of God.”
And there it was … On August 15 (Sol. of the Assumption of Mary) 1534, seven students, including the future St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, and their roommate Pierre Favre, met _in the crypt_ under the Parisian Church of St. Denis (the Patron Saint of Paris) and took private vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to the Pope, creating the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit Order.
Honestly, what a “college thing” to do … and it changed the world.
After much debate, a formal set of statutes for the Society of Jesus was written and they were approved in 1540 by Pope Paul III.
That same year, the Portuguese King John III asked for missionaries to be sent to the Portuguese colony in Goa, India. By mutual agreement between the Pope and King, it seemed to them that members of this new Society of Jesus would be perfect for this purpose, and the future St. Francis Xavier was soon on his way.
He left Portugal for Goa, India on April 7, 1541 and never returned to Europe. Instead, he spent the rest of his life consolidating and creating missions in Goa, the East Indies (notably East Timor in today’s Indonesia) Macau, China and ultimately Nagasaki, Japan.
How did he succeed in creating such faithful enclaves of faith?
Much can, of course, be written about this. However a characteristic of the Evangelization efforts of St. Francis Xavier and later the Jesuits in general was that they respected and sought to protect and elevate the best of the local culture.
I can not help but believe that at part of this characteristic of Jesuit missionary work was that both St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier came from a small but beautiful culture – Basque – themselves. So they sought to respect rather than try to beat down the local culture and hence they were accepted and even defended as “among their own.”
St. Francis Xavier eventually died, of fever, in Shangchuan, Taishan, China, by Macau on 3 December 1552. Today his still mostly incorrupt body is interred at the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa, India.
One could wonder what would have happened if the Spanish King hadn't ordered his family's castle to be knocked down... and the future St Francis Xavier had simple lived of to be another rich man's son.
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