Apostle of the Far East
by Mike Oettle
THE banner of the Parish of St Francis Xavier, Kabega Park (this saint’s day is on 3 December), shows him in a very Chinese environment, with a sailing junk on the water behind him. It is not, however, a reflection of much of his life.
What’s more, popular legend has created an extraordinary picture of this man as one blessed with a “gift of tongues” – meaning a facility for rapidly mastering a foreign language for the purpose of evangelism – and having such a flair for conversions that he personally baptised a million people in Asia. Was he really like this?
To start with, his homeland is that of an extraordinary people, the Basque, or Euzkara[1] – Europe’s earliest human inhabitants and, as a nation, among the most devout Roman Catholics in the world. But since Francis, or Francisco,[2] was an aristocrat, he was probably Spanish, rather that Basque, and likely of Visigothic descent.
He was born on 7 April 1506 at castle Xavier[3] in Navarre, then still an independent kingdom in the Basque regions.[4] Since young Francisco de Xavier was the third son in his family (his father was
an influential nobleman, the president of the King of Navarre’s council), he
was earmarked for a career in the Church. In 1525 he was sent to the
University of Paris. Here, as it happened, his roommate was another Basque
nobleman, Ignacio de Loyola, an ex-soldier 15 years his senior, who had undergone a profound religious conversion and was gathering around him a group of men who shared his ideals – these men were to be the nucleus of Loyola’s Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), and although Francisco had reservations about Ignacio’s enthusiasm at first, he, too, was won over. He was one of seven men who, on 15 August 1534, took vows of poverty and celibacy and promised to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and thereafter devote themselves to the salvation of believers and unbelievers alike.
Ordained a priest in 1537, Francisco did not get to the Holy Land, but was willing enough to be sent as a substitute when one of the men Loyola had chosen to go to India couldn’t make it. In fact, he alone actually took ship from Lisbon. He was at sea when the Jesuit order was formally recognised in 1541, arriving in Goa in 1542. He began work among the Parava, a poor caste of pearl fishers, of whom 20 000 had accepted baptism as part of a package deal for Portuguese support against their enemies, but who knew virtually nothing of Christ. Two years later he turned his attention to the Macuans, a primitive people, and baptised 10 000 of them. Here, as elsewhere, he struggled to learn the languages of the people he worked among, but his work has endured: the Parava and the Macuans are Catholic to this day.
From 1545 to ’48 he worked in what is today Malaysia and Indonesia, founding missions at Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula and among the savage headhunters of the Molucca (or Spice) Islands. His work among the Malayans and Malaccans has endured, but brutal and prolonged persecution in the 17th century, entailing the martyrdom of thousands, eliminated his work in the Moluccas.
In 1548 he returned to Goa, taking responsibility for the education of native priests and catechists in a diocese stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to China. But his eyes were fixed on Japan, discovered by Westerners just five years before, and the following year he sailed into the port of Kagoshima with a party including a Japanese named Anjiro, whom he had met in Malacca and who had recently been baptised. In this new country he had to change his methods – the Japanese were not impressed by the poverty with which he had won over so many in the Indies – but the mission prospered and when he left in 1551, his companions were left in charge of some 2 000 Christians in five communities.
Sadly, this mission was to suffer the same fate as that in the Moluccas, but the Japanese were more steadfast and when, after some 2½ centuries of repression and persecution, Christianity was once again permitted, thousands of secret believers – many of them descendants of Francisco’s converts – were found to be practising Christianity.
After his return from Japan, Francisco again busied himself with administrative work in Goa – he was now superior of the new Jesuit Province of the Indies – but he had a new goal: China. To the Japanese, all wisdom came from China, and if he was to win Japan, he would first have to win China. Waiting to gain entry to the Forbidden Empire, Francisco died of fever on the island of Shang-ch’uan Tao, off the coast of China's Kwangtung province (and some 150 km from Macao), on 3 December 1552.
Legends aside, what he did achieve was immense. He actually baptised some 30 000 people, and always saw to it that those he had evangelised continued to receive pastoral care. Much of his work, in fact, was the instruction of people hastily baptised by others. Most importantly, “he pioneered the idea that the missionary must adapt to the customs and language of the people he evangelised”[5] and laid great emphasis on the education of native clergy – something not always followed by his successors.
Regarded as a saint in his own lifetime, Francisco was canonised in 1622 and in 1927 he was named patron of all missions.
