Francis Xavier

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Xavier died early in December 1552, in a small hut on the Chinese island of Shangchuan, fourteen kilometres from the mainland he so badly wanted to reach. Only one companion was with him at the end, a Chinese man called Antonio. He had paid a large sum to a man who promised to take him across to the mainland, and he was still waiting when he fell ill. The man who lay dying within sight of China had once been an athlete in Paris, a high-jumper with aspirations of worldly advancement. He had sailed to Mozambique, Goa, the Pearl Fishery Coast, the Maluku Islands, and Japan. Born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta in the Kingdom of Navarre, he would be called the Apostle of the Indies, of the Far East, of China, and of Japan. How did a Navarrese nobleman's youngest son become the first Christian missionary to Japan? Why did one of his arms end up in Rome while his body crossed four thousand kilometres of ocean? And why, more than a century after his death, did people plead to throw away the keys to his tomb?

• 2. A Castle Half Demolished

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  In 1512, Ferdinand, King of Aragon and regent of Castile, invaded Navarre and began a war that lasted over eighteen years. Francis Xavier was a small child of this conflict. Born in the Castle of Xavier on the 7th of April 1506, he was the youngest son of Don Juan de Jasso y Atondo, Lord of Idocin and president of the Royal Council of the Kingdom of Navarre. His father held a doctorate in law from the University of Bologna and served as finance minister to King John III of Navarre. His mother, Dona Maria de Azpilcueta y Aznarez, was sole heiress to the Castle of Xavier. Basque and Romance were the boy's two mother tongues. The war reached the family home. In 1515, when Francis was nine, his father died. The next year his brothers joined a failed Navarrese-French attempt to expel the Spanish invaders. The Spanish Governor, Cardinal Cisneros, confiscated the family lands, demolished the outer wall, the gates, and two towers, and filled in the moat. The height of the keep was cut by half, leaving only the family residence inside the castle. In 1522, one of Francis's brothers fought with two hundred Navarrese nobles in a last stand against the Castilian Count of Miranda at Amaiur in Baztan, the final Navarrese position south of the Pyrenees. From that diminished house Francis left for Paris in 1525, to study at the College Sainte-Barbe, where he would spend the next eleven years.

• 3. The Reluctant Convert

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  At twenty-three, Francis Xavier regarded his new roommate as a joke. In 1529 he shared lodgings with his friend Pierre Favre when a new student came to room with them: Ignatius of Loyola, then thirty-eight and much older than the other two. Ignatius convinced Pierre to become a priest but could not persuade Francis, who had set his sights on advancement and was sarcastic about the older man's efforts to convert students. Persistence wore Francis down. When Pierre left to visit his family, Ignatius was alone with Francis and slowly broke his resistance. Most biographies report that Ignatius posed the question, "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" The historian James Broderick doubts this, arguing such a method was not characteristic of Ignatius and that there is no evidence he ever used it. The friendship turned to vocation on the 15th of August 1534, in a crypt beneath the Church of Saint Denis on the hill of Montmartre, overlooking Paris. Seven students gathered there: Francis, Ignatius, Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Lainez, Nicolas Bobadilla, Peter Faber of Savoy, and Simao Rodrigues of Portugal. They made private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Pope, and vowed to go to the Holy Land. Francis was ordained on the 24th of June 1537. In 1539 Ignatius drew up the formula for a new order, the Society of Jesus, approved by Pope Paul III the following year. Francis's path east began with an illness that was not his own.

• 4. An Accidental Apostle

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  In 1540, King John III of Portugal asked the Holy See for Jesuit missionaries to spread the faith in his possessions in India, where he believed Christian values were eroding among the Portuguese. Diogo de Gouveia, rector of the College Sainte-Barbe, urged the king to recruit the newly graduated founders of the Society of Jesus. Ignatius appointed Nicholas Bobadilla and Simao Rodrigues. At the last moment Bobadilla fell seriously ill. With some hesitance, Ignatius asked Francis to go in his place, and so Francis began his life as the first Jesuit missionary almost accidentally. Leaving Rome on the 15th of March 1540, Francis carried little: a breviary, a catechism, and a Latin book by the Croatian humanist Marko Marulic. According to a 1549 letter of F. Balthasar Gago from Goa, it was the only book that Francis read or studied. He reached Lisbon in June 1540, and four days later he and Rodrigues were summoned to a private audience with King John and Queen Catherine. On the 7th of April 1541, his thirty-fifth birthday, Francis left Lisbon aboard the Santiago with two other Jesuits and the new viceroy Martim Afonso de Sousa. As he departed he carried a brief from the pope appointing him apostolic nuncio to the East. He remained in Portuguese Mozambique from August until March 1542, and arrived at Goa on the 6th of May 1542, thirteen months after leaving Lisbon.

• 5. Burning Huts And A Bell

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  Walking the streets of Goa, Francis Xavier rang a bell to summon the children and servants to catechism. The Portuguese had established themselves there thirty years earlier, and his first task, ordered by King John III, was to restore Christianity among the settlers themselves. According to the historian Teotonio R. DeSouza, many of those dispatched as discoverers were drawn from Portuguese jails, and missionaries often wrote against the scandalous and undisciplined behaviour of their fellow Christians. Francis spent his first five months preaching and ministering to the sick in the hospitals before turning to the children. Along the Pearl Fishery Coast he found the Paravas, a people who had been baptised ten years before merely to please the Portuguese who had helped them against the Moors, yet remained uninstructed. He set sail for Cape Comorin in October 1542 with several native clerics from the seminary at Goa. The work was dangerous. In Travancore, Brahmin and Muslim authorities opposed him with violence. Time and again his hut was burned down over his head, and once he saved his life only by hiding among the branches of a large tree. He devoted almost three years to southern India and Ceylon, building nearly forty churches along the coast, among them St. Stephen's Church at Kombuthurai, named in his letters dated 1544. He visited the tomb of Thomas the Apostle in Mylapore. His successors, such as Roberto de Nobili and Matteo Ricci, would court the noblemen first, whereas Francis had begun with the lower classes, a difference in tactics he would later reconsider far to the east.

• 6. The Door To Japan

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  In Malacca in December 1547, Francis Xavier met a Japanese man named Anjiro. Charged with murder, Anjiro had fled Kagoshima and travelled to Malacca after hearing of Francis in 1545. He spoke at length about his homeland's customs and culture, became the first Japanese Christian under the name Paulo de Santa Fe, and later served as mediator and interpreter. The Portuguese had first landed in Japan in 1543 on the island of Tanegashima, where they introduced matchlock firearms. Writing to his companions from Cochin on the 20th of January 1548, Francis reported the words of Portuguese merchants: that in Japan he would do great service for God, for they were a very reasonable people. He left Goa on the 15th of April 1549, accompanied by Anjiro, two other Japanese men, Father Cosme de Torres, and Brother Juan Fernandez, carrying presents for the King of Japan. Francis reached Japan on the 27th of July 1549, but was not allowed ashore until the 15th of August, when he landed at Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu. As a representative of the Portuguese king he was received in a friendly manner. Shimazu Takahisa, daimyo of Satsuma, welcomed him on the 29th of September 1549, but the following year forbade his subjects to convert under penalty of death. Francis brought paintings of the Madonna and of the Madonna and Child to teach the faith. The language defeated him for a long time; Japanese was unlike anything the missionaries had met. He resided in Yamaguchi, then set out for Kyoto shortly before Christmas in 1550, where he failed to meet Emperor Go-Nara.

• 7. Silk, A Watch, And A Word

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  Having learned that evangelical poverty held no appeal in Japan, Francis Xavier changed his approach completely. When a Portuguese ship reached the province of Bungo in Kyushu and the prince there wished to see him, he set out in a fine cassock, surplice, and stole, attended by thirty gentlemen and as many servants, all in their best clothes. Five of them carried valuable articles on cushions, including a portrait of Our Lady and a pair of velvet slippers, offered solemnly to Xavier himself to impress the onlookers with his eminence. Before Oshindono, the ruler of Nagate, he presented letters and gifts meant for the emperor: a musical instrument, a watch, and other attractive objects given him by the authorities in India. A single word caused trouble. The Shingon monks first welcomed Xavier because he used the term Dainichi for the Christian God, adapting the concept to local tradition. As he grasped the word's religious nuances, he switched to Deusu, from the Latin and Portuguese Deus. The monks then realised he was preaching a rival religion and grew resistant. Many Japanese were already Buddhist or Shinto, and some interpreted Catholic teaching to mean that demons had been created evil, concluding that the God who made them could not be good. Much of Francis's preaching answered such challenges. He grew to respect the rationality and literacy of the people he met, and congregations took root in Hirado, Yamaguchi, and Bungo. After more than two years he decided to return to India, possibly travelling by way of Tanegashima and Minato while avoiding Kagoshima because of the daimyo's hostility.

• 8. The Body That Crossed The Sea

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  Antonio got a shroud from some Portuguese merchants and, with another servant, placed Francis Xavier's body in a wooden coffin on the beach at Shangchuan Island. They added lime so that the bones could be carried back to India. When the merchants dug it up in February 1553, they noted there was no smell at all and the body was whole. A slice was cut from the thigh for the captain, who smelled it and agreed to transport the body. It reached Our Lady of the Hill in Portuguese Malacca on the 22nd of March 1553, where workers tamped down the dirt so hard they broke bones and flattened the nose. Around the 15th of August 1553, Jesuits exhumed the body and found it incorrupt, with a sweet smell and a shroud still wet with blood. The body was then moved four thousand kilometres to Goa, arriving on the 16th of March 1554, greeted by some six thousand people. Father Melchior Nunes Barreto wrote that, had the priests not been present, people would have tried to take pieces of the body. They later did. The right forearm, which Xavier used to bless and baptise, was detached in secret in 1614 at the request of Superior General Claudio Acquaviva and sent to the church of Il Gesu in Rome. The rest of the right arm was removed in 1619, the year of his beatification, for distribution to colleges in Cochin, Macau, and Malacca. Pope Paul V had beatified him on the 25th of October 1619, and Pope Gregory XV canonized him on the 12th of March 1622, at the same time as Ignatius Loyola. When the Jesuit provincial examined the body in 1686, he found the face deformed, the skin ravaged by moths, and the limbs shrunken. At one point the rector of the Basilica wrote to Rome, pleading to be allowed to lose the keys to the reliquary by throwing them into the sea. The relics are still brought to ground level for public exposition roughly every ten years, a rhythm that turns the death on a forgotten island into a recurring pilgrimage in Goa.