Francis Xavier (born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta; 7 April 1506 – 3 December 1552), venerated as Saint Francis Xavier, was a Navarrese cleric and missionary. He co-founded the Society of Jesus and, as a representative of the Portuguese Empire, led the first Christian mission to Japan.
Born in the town of Xavier, Kingdom of Navarre, he was a companion of Ignatius of Loyola and one of the first seven Jesuits who took vows of poverty and chastity at Montmartre, Paris in 1534. He led extensive missionary work across Asia, primarily within the Portuguese Empire in the East, and played a significant role in the evangelization of early modern India, particularly through his activities in Portuguese India. In 1546, Francis Xavier wrote to King John III of Portugal proposing measures to strengthen the Christian faith in Goa. Some historians interpret this letter as a request for the establishment of the Goan Inquisition, while others contend that he instead called for the appointment of a special minister dedicated solely to promoting Christianity in Goa.
As a representative of the King of Portugal, he was the first major Christian missionary to venture into Borneo, the Maluku Islands, Japan, and other areas. In those areas, struggling to learn the local languages and in the face of opposition, he had less success than he had enjoyed in India. Xavier also extended his mission to Ming China, where he died on Shangchuan Island.
He was beatified by Pope Paul V on 25 October 1619 and canonized by Pope Gregory XV on 12 March 1622. In 1624, he was made co-patron of Navarre. Known as the "Apostle of the Indies", "Apostle of the Far East", "Apostle of China" and "Apostle of Japan", he is considered to be one of the greatest missionaries since Paul the Apostle. In 1927, Pope Pius XI published the decree Apostolicorum in Missionibus naming Francis Xavier, along with Thérèse of Lisieux, co-patron of all foreign missions. He is now co-patron saint of Navarre, along with Saint Fermin. The "Day of Navarre" marks the anniversary of Francis Xavier's death, on 3 December.
Early life
Francis Xavier was born in the Castle of Xavier, in the Kingdom of Navarre, on 7 April 1506 into an influential noble family. He was the youngest son of Don Juan de Jasso y Atondo, Lord of Idocín, president of the Royal Council of the Kingdom of Navarre, and seneschal of the Castle of Xavier, a doctor in law by the University of Bologna, belonging to a prosperous noble family of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, later privy counsellor and finance minister to King John III of Navarre.
His mother was Doña María de Azpilcueta y Aznárez, sole heiress to the Castle of Xavier, related to the theologian and philosopher Martín de Azpilcueta. His brother Miguel de Jasso, later known as Miguel de Javier, became Lord of Xavier and Idocín at the death of his parents, a direct ancestor of the Counts of Javier. Basque and Romance were his two mother tongues.
In 1512, Ferdinand, King of Aragon and regent of Castile, invaded Navarre, initiating a war that lasted over 18 years. In 1515, Francis's father died when Francis was only nine years old. In 1516, Francis's brothers participated in a failed Navarrese-French attempt to expel the Spanish invaders from the kingdom. The Spanish Governor, Cardinal Cisneros, confiscated the family lands, demolished the outer wall, the gates, and two towers of the family castle, and filled in the moat. The height of the keep was reduced by half. Only the family residence inside the castle was left. In 1522, one of Francis's brothers participated with 200 Navarrese nobles in dogged but failed resistance against the Castilian Count of Miranda in Amaiur, Baztan, the last Navarrese territorial position south of the Pyrenees.
In 1525, Francis went to study in Paris at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, University of Paris, where he spent the next eleven years. In the early days he acquired some reputation as an athlete and a high-jumper.
In 1529, Francis shared lodgings with his friend Pierre Favre. A new student, Ignatius of Loyola, came to room with them. At 38, Ignatius was much older than Pierre and Francis, who were both 23 at the time. Ignatius convinced Pierre to become a priest, but was unable to convince Francis, who had aspirations of worldly advancement. At first, Francis regarded the new lodger as a joke and was sarcastic about his efforts to convert students.
When Pierre left their lodgings to visit his family and Ignatius was alone with Francis, he was able to slowly break down Francis's resistance. According to most biographies Ignatius is said to have posed the question: "What will it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" However, according to James Broderick such method is not characteristic of Ignatius and there is no evidence that he employed it at all.
In 1530, Francis received the degree of Master of Arts, and afterwards taught Aristotelian philosophy at the Collège de Beauvais, University of Paris.
Missionary work
On 15 August 1534, seven students met in a crypt beneath the Church of Saint Denis (now Saint Pierre de Montmartre), on the hill of Montmartre, overlooking Paris. They were Francis, Ignatius of Loyola, Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Laínez, Nicolás Bobadilla from Spain, Peter Faber from Savoy, and Simão Rodrigues from Portugal. They made private vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the Pope, and also vowed to go to the Holy Land to convert infidels. Francis began his study of theology in 1534 and was ordained on 24 June 1537.
In 1539, after long discussions, Ignatius drew up a formula for a new religious order, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Ignatius's plan for the order was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540.
In 1540, King John III of Portugal had Pedro Mascarenhas, Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See, request Jesuit missionaries to spread the faith in his new possessions in India, where the king believed that Christian values were eroding among the Portuguese. After successive appeals to the Pope asking for missionaries for the East Indies under the Padroado agreement, John III was encouraged by Diogo de Gouveia, rector of the Collège Sainte-Barbe, to recruit the newly graduated students who had established the Society of Jesus.
Ignatius promptly appointed Nicholas Bobadilla and Simão Rodrigues. At the last moment, however, Bobadilla became seriously ill. With some hesitance and uneasiness, Ignatius asked Francis to go in Bobadilla's place. Thus, Francis Xavier began his life as the first Jesuit missionary almost accidentally.
Leaving Rome on 15 March 1540, in the Ambassador's train, Francis took with him a breviary, a catechism, and De institutione bene vivendi per exempla sanctorum (Instructions for a Virtuous Life According to the Examples of the Saints) by Croatian humanist Marko Marulić, a Latin book that had become popular in the Counter-Reformation. According to a 1549 letter of F. Balthasar Gago from Goa, it was the only book that Francis read or studied. Francis reached Lisbon in June 1540 and, four days after his arrival, he and Rodrigues were summoned to a private audience with King John and Queen Catherine.
Francis Xavier was the first Jesuit missionary in Asia. He devoted much of his life to missions in Asia, mainly in four centres: Malacca, Amboina and Ternate (in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia), Japan, and off-shore China. His growing information about new places indicated to him that he had to go to what he understood were centres of influence for the whole region. China loomed large from his days in India. Japan was particularly attractive because of its culture. For him, these areas were interconnected; they could not be evangelised separately.
In India
Francis Xavier left Lisbon on 7 April 1541, his thirty-fifth birthday, along with two other Jesuits and the new viceroy Martim Afonso de Sousa, on board the Santiago. As he departed, Francis was given a brief from the pope appointing him apostolic nuncio to the East. From August until March 1542 he remained in Portuguese Mozambique, and arrived in Goa, then the capital of Portuguese India, on 6 May 1542, thirteen months after leaving Lisbon.
The Portuguese, following quickly on the great voyages of discovery, had established themselves at Goa thirty years earlier. Francis's primary mission, as ordered by King John III, was to restore Christianity among the Portuguese settlers. According to Teotonio R. DeSouza, recent critical accounts indicate that apart from the posted civil servants, "the great majority of those who were dispatched as 'discoverers' were the riff-raff of Portuguese society, picked up from Portuguese jails." Nor did the soldiers, sailors, or merchants come to do missionary work, and Imperial policy permitted the outflow of disaffected nobility. Many of the arrivals formed liaisons with local women and adopted Indian culture. Missionaries often wrote against the "scandalous and undisciplined" behaviour of their fellow Christians.
The Christian population had churches, clergy, and a bishop, but there were few preachers and no priests beyond the walls of Goa. Xavier decided that he must begin by instructing the Portuguese themselves, and gave much of his time to the teaching of children. The first five months he spent in preaching and ministering to the sick in the hospitals. After that, he walked through the streets ringing a bell to summon the children and servants to catechism. He was invited to head Saint Paul's College, a pioneer seminary for the education of secular priests, which became the first Jesuit headquarters in Asia.
Conversion efforts
Xavier soon learned that along the Pearl Fishery Coast, which extends from Cape Comorin on the southern tip of India to the island of Mannar, off Ceylon (Sri Lanka), there was a Jāti of people called Paravas. Many of them had been baptised ten years before, merely to please the Portuguese who had helped them against the Moors, but remained uninstructed in the faith. Accompanied by several native clerics from the seminary at Goa, he set sail for Cape Comorin in October 1542.
He taught those who had already been baptised and preached to those who were not. His efforts with the high-caste Brahmins remained unavailing. The Brahmin and Muslim authorities in Travancore opposed Xavier 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 the work of preaching to the people of southern India and Ceylon, converting many. He built nearly 40 churches along the coast, including St. Stephen's Church, Kombuthurai, mentioned in his letters dated 1544.
During this time, he visited the tomb of Thomas the Apostle in Mylapore, now part of Madras/Chennai then in Portuguese India. He set his sights eastward in 1545 and planned a missionary journey to Makassar on the island of Celebes, today's Indonesia.
As the first Jesuit in India, Francis had difficulty achieving much success in his missionary trips. His successors, such as Roberto de Nobili, Matteo Ricci, and Constanzo Beschi, attempted to convert the noblemen first as a means to influence more people, while Francis had initially interacted most with the lower classes. Later in Japan, Francis changed tack by paying tribute to the Emperor and seeking an audience with him.
Southeast Asia
Arrived of Cavite in the spring of 1545, Xavier started for Portuguese Malacca. He laboured there for the last months of that year. About January 1546, Xavier left Malacca for the Maluku Islands, where the Portuguese had some settlements. For a year and a half, he preached the Gospel there. He went first to Ambon Island, where he stayed until mid-June. He then visited the other Maluku Islands, including Ternate, Baranura, and Morotai.
Shortly after Easter 1547, he returned to Ambon Island. A few months later he returned to Malacca. While there, Malacca was attacked by the Acehnese from Sumatra. Through preaching, Xavier inspired the Portuguese to seek battle, achieving a victory at the Battle of Perlis River, despite being heavily outnumbered.
Japan
In Malacca in December 1547, Francis Xavier met a Japanese man named Anjirō. Anjirō had heard of Francis in 1545 and had travelled from Kagoshima to Malacca to meet him. Having been charged with murder, Anjirō had fled Japan. He told Francis extensively about his former life, and the customs and culture of his homeland. Anjirō became the first Japanese Christian and adopted the name 'Paulo de Santa Fe'. He later helped Xavier as a mediator and interpreter for the mission to Japan that now seemed much more possible.
In January 1548 Francis returned to Goa to attend to his responsibilities as superior of the mission there. The next 15 months were occupied with various journeys and administrative measures. He left Goa on 15 April 1549, stopped at Malacca, and visited Canton. He was accompanied by Anjirō, two other Japanese men, Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernández. He had taken with him presents for the "King of Japan" since he intended to introduce himself as the Apostolic Nuncio.
Europeans had already visited Japan. The Portuguese first landed in 1543 on the island of Tanegashima, where they introduced matchlock firearms to Japan.
From Amboina, he wrote to his companions in Europe: "I asked a Portuguese merchant, ... who had been for many days in Anjirō's country of Japan, to give me ... some information on that land and its people from what he had seen and heard. ...All the Portuguese merchants coming from Japan tell me that if I go there I shall do great service for God our Lord, more than with the pagans of India, for they are a very reasonable people." (To His Companions Residing in Rome, From Cochin, 20 January 1548, no. 18, p. 178).
Francis Xavier reached Japan on 27 July 1549, with Anjirō and three other Jesuits, but he was not permitted to enter any port his ship arrived at until 15 August, when he went ashore at Kagoshima, the principal port of Satsuma Province on the island of Kyūshū. As a representative of the Portuguese king, he was received in a friendly manner. Shimazu Takahisa (1514–1571), daimyō of Satsuma, gave a friendly reception to Francis on 29 September 1549, but in the following year he forbade the conversion of his subjects to Christianity under penalty of death; Christians in Kagoshima could not be given any catechism in the following years. The Portuguese missionary Pedro de Alcáçova would later write in 1554:
In Cangoxima, the first place Father Master Francisco stopped at, there were a good number of Christians, although there was no one there to teach them; the shortage of labourers prevented the whole kingdom from becoming Christian.
Francis was the first Jesuit to go to Japan as a missionary. He brought with him paintings of the Madonna and the Madonna and Child. These paintings were used to help teach the Japanese about Christianity. There was a huge language barrier as Japanese was unlike other languages the missionaries had previously encountered. For a long time, Francis struggled to learn the language. He was hosted by Anjirō's family until October 1550. From October to December 1550, he resided in Yamaguchi. Shortly before Christmas, he left for Kyoto but failed to meet with Emperor Go-Nara. He returned to Yamaguchi in March 1551, where the daimyō of the province gave him permission to preach.
Having learned that evangelical poverty did not have the appeal in Japan that it had in Europe and in India, he decided to change his approach. Hearing after a time that a Portuguese ship had arrived at a port in the province of Bungo in Kyushu and that the prince there would like to see him, Xavier now set out southward. The Jesuit, in a fine cassock, surplice, and stole, was attended by thirty gentlemen and as many servants, all in their best clothes.
Five of them bore on cushions valuable articles, including a portrait of Our Lady and a pair of velvet slippers, not for the prince, but solemn offerings to Xavier, to impress the onlookers with his eminence. Handsomely dressed, with his companions acting as attendants, he presented himself before Oshindono, the ruler of Nagate, and as a representative of the great Kingdom of Portugal, offered him letters and presents: a musical instrument, a watch, and other attractive objects which had been given him by the authorities in India for the emperor.
For forty-five years the Jesuits were the only missionaries in Asia, but the Franciscans began proselytizing in Asia, as well. Christian missionaries were later forced into exile, along with their assistants. However, some were able to stay behind. Christianity was then kept underground so as to not be persecuted.
The Japanese people were not easily converted. Many of the people were already Buddhist or Shinto. Francis tried to combat the reservations of some of the Japanese. Many mistakenly interpreted Catholic doctrine as teaching that demons had been created evil, and they thus concluded the God who had created them could not be good. Much of Francis' preaching was devoted to providing answers to this and other such challenges. In the course of these discussions, Francis grew to respect the rationality and general literacy of those Japanese people whom he encountered. He expressed optimism at the prospect of converting the country.
Xavier was welcomed by the Shingon monks since he used the word Dainichi for the Christian God; attempting to adapt the concept to local traditions. As Xavier learned more about the religious nuances of the word, he changed to Deusu from the Latin and Portuguese Deus. The monks later realised that Xavier was preaching a rival religion and grew more resistant towards his attempts at conversion.
With the passage of time, his sojourn in Japan could be considered somewhat fruitful as attested by congregations established in Hirado, Yamaguchi, and Bungo. Xavier worked for more than two years in Japan and saw his successor-Jesuits established. He then decided to return to India. Historians debate the exact path by which he returned, but from evidence attributed to the captain of his ship, he may have travelled through Tanegeshima and Minato, and avoided Kagoshima because of the hostility of the daimyo.
China
During his trip from Japan back to India, a tempest forced him to stop on an island near Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, where he met Diogo Pereira, a rich merchant and an old friend from Cochin. Pereira showed him a letter from Portuguese prisoners in Guangzhou, asking for a Portuguese ambassador to speak to the Jiajing Emperor on their behalf. He arrived back in Goa by early 1552 and planned to travel on to China.
On 17 April he set sail with Diogo Pereira on the Santa Cruz for China, planning to introduce himself as Apostolic Nuncio, and Pereira as the ambassador of the king of Portugal - but then realized that he had forgotten his testimonial letters as an Apostolic Nuncio. Back in Malacca, he was confronted by the captain Álvaro de Ataíde da Gama who refused to recognize his title of Nuncio, asked Pereira to resign from his title of ambassador, named a new crew for the ship, and demanded the gifts for the Chinese Emperor be left in Malacca.
In late August 1552, the Santa Cruz reached the Chinese island of Shangchuan, 14 km away from the southern coast of mainland China, near Taishan, Guangdong. He was accompanied only by a Jesuit student called Álvaro Ferreira, a Chinese man called António, and a Malabar servant called Christopher. Around mid-November, he sent a letter saying that a man had agreed to take him to the mainland in exchange for a large sum of money, and that he was waiting for the man. He had sent back Álvaro Ferreira and was staying in a small hut when he fell ill. He died, with only António as company, early in December 1552. His feast is celebrated on December 3, but it is not clear that this is the day he actually died.
Burials and relics
Xavier was first buried on a beach at Shangchuan Island. António got a shroud from some Portuguese merchants, and with another servant put his body in a wooden coffin. They added lime so that his bones could be taken back to India if requested. His body was buried until February 1553, when the Portuguese merchants dug it up. They noted that there was no smell at all, and that his body was whole. A slice was cut from the thigh for the captain, who smelled it and agreed to transport the body.
His body was taken to Our Lady of the Hill, a Jesuit church, in Portuguese Malacca on 22 March 1553. It was removed from the coffin and put in a shroud. The pit was small and workers tamped down the dirt on top of his body, causing lesions and breaking bones, and flattening the nose. There were no Jesuits present at the church during this process. An open grave in the church now marks the place of Xavier's burial.
The first time his body was inspected by non-laymen or servants was around 15 August 1553, when a group of Jesuits exhumed his body and found it incorrupt, emanating a sweet smell, "more like the garden of the bridegroom when the south wind blows than that of human flesh". The shroud was stained with blood, which was still wet. His body was then moved 4,000 km to Goa, where it arrived on March the 16th, 1554.
It was greeted by a crowd of some 6,000 people, including the Viceroy and other key colonial figures, and carried in procession to the Jesuit College of St Paul. For the following four days, people went to St Paul's in crowds to venerate it. Contemporary observers recorded "a great deal of shouting and disorder" and people shoving violently to have rosaries and other articles touch his body. Father Melchior Nunes Barreto opined in a letter to Igiatius Loyola the following May his belief that, if the priests had not been present, people would have even tried to obtain pieces of his body.
In 1559, his body was moved from St Paul's church, which was to be demolished, moved to the rector's room for a time and then to several other locations.
In subsequent decades, pieces of his corpse were removed and kept as relics. The right forearm, which Xavier used to bless and baptise his converts, was detached by request of Superior General Claudio Acquaviva in 1614.
This was done in secret, his body being exhumed again for the lower portion of the arm to be surgically detached. It was sent to and has been displayed since in a silver reliquary at the main Jesuit church in Rome, Il Gesù.
The rest of the right arm was removed in 1619, the year that Francis was beatified, to be distributed to other Jesuit colleges in Cochi, Macau, and Malacca. Intestines and internal organs were removed in 1620 and distributed as relics more widely around the world.
The main body was enshrined in a silver reliquary in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa in 1659. It had been placed there on 2 December 1637, and remains there now, in a glass container encased in a silver casket. This casket was constructed by Goan silversmiths between 1636 and 1637 and was a blend of Italian and Indian aesthetics. It included 32 silver plates on all four sides of the casket, depicting different episodes from the life of Xavier. Several of them depict Xavier's mission as having been planned by God, such as the one that depicts a recurrent dream that Xavier had of carrying a man on his shoulders. Another depicts the story of the healing of Antonio Rodrigues, a blind man who according to the story regained his sight when he placed the dead hand of Xavier's body over his eyes when it was lying at St Paul's. The casket was restored in 2021.