Patrick Comerford
This is the Season of Advent. Before a busy day begins, I am taking some time early this morning (3 December 2021) for prayer, reflection and reading.
Each morning in the Advent, I am reflecting in these ways:
1, Reflections on a saint remembered in the calendars of the Church during Advent;
2, the day’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
Today [3 December 2012] is the feast day of Saint Francis Xavier, the patron saint of European missionaries, who is said to have preached to more people than anyone else since Saint Paul. As we journey through Advent with the saints, Saint Francis Xavier is a reminder that this is a time not merely of waiting for but preparing for the coming of Christ and his Kingdom.
Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552), or Francisco do Yasu y Javier, was was born on 7 April 1506 in his family’s castle at Xavier, near Pamplona in what is now the Basque Country in northern Spain.
He studied at the University of Paris, where he earned his licentiate in 1528. In Paris he also met Ignatius Loyola and they were two of the seven founders of the Society of Jesus of Jesuits at Montmartre in 1534. Together, the seven made the vow of Montmartre on 15 August 1534.
Francis left Paris in 1536 to join Ignatius in Venice. They and their companions hoped to set out from Venice as missionaries to Palestine, but the planned journey never materialised. Instead, Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola were ordained in Venice on 24 June 1537.
From Venice, Francis went to Rome in 1538. There in 1540, the Pope formally recognised the Society of Jesus and decided to send Francis Xavier and Father Simon Rodriguez to the Far East as the first Jesuit missionaries. However, King John III of Portugal kept Father Simon in Lisbon.
During a year-long voyage, Francis spent six months in Mozambique, before arriving in Goa, a Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, on 6 May 1542 with two companions, Father Paul of Camerino, an Italian, and Francis Mansihas, from Portugal.
In Goa, Francis began to preach to the local people but also tried to reform his fellow Europeans, He also adopted a lifestyle of living among the local people and adopting their customs on his travels.
He visited prisons and hospitals in Goa, led worship among the lepers, and walked the streets ringing a bell to call the children for religious instruction. His principal method of teaching people was to write verses in their language, setting out the truths of Christianity, and then setting them to music.
He was shocked by the brutal treatment of local people in Goa by the Portuguese settlers and soldiers, and wrote to the King of Portugal, asking: ‘It is possible that when our Lord God calls your highness to his judgment that your highness may hear angry words from him: “Why did you not punish those who were your subjects and owned your authority, and were enemies to me in India?”’
During the next decade, Saint Francis converted tens of thousands of people to Christianity. He visited the Paravas at the tip of India, near Cape Comorin, Tuticorin (1542), Malacca, which was also a Portuguese colony (1545), the Moluccas near New Guinea and Morotai near the Philippines (1546-1547), before arriving in Japan (1549-1551).
In Japan, he learned the language, where he was the first person to preach the Gospel. It is said, he made as many as 2,000 converts in Japan.
Francis set out for China in 1552 and landed on the island of Shangchuan. But he died there on 3 December 1552 without ever reaching the Chinese mainland. He was only 46. His body was brought back to Goa, where he was buried.
The estimates of the number of converts he personally baptised vary, but some put them at six-figures. One biographer says he preached to more people than anyone else since the New Testament period.
He was canonised in 1622 and Pope Pius X later proclaimed him the patron of all foreign missions.
Saint Francis Xavier is also a pre-Reformation saint who can be shared by the universal church – he arrived in Japan even before the first Book of Common Prayer. He is commemorated on this day in the Calendar in Common Worship in the Church of England, in the Calendar of the Episcopal Church in the US, in other Anglican and Lutheran churches, and in the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church.
Matthew 9: 27-31 (NRSVA)
27 As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, crying loudly, ‘Have mercy on us, Son of David!’ 28 When he entered the house, the blind men came to him; and Jesus said to them, ‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’ They said to him, ‘Yes, Lord.’ 29 Then he touched their eyes and said, ‘According to your faith let it be done to you.’ 30 And their eyes were opened. Then Jesus sternly ordered them, ‘See that no one knows of this.’ 31 But they went away and spread the news about him throughout that district.
The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (3 December 2021, International Disabilities Day) invites us to pray:
Let us work towards a more accessible world, with inclusion and diversity at its core.
Yesterday: Saint Mungo
Tomorrow: Nicholas Ferrar
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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