12/3/14
Today we honor St. Francis Xavier, who, like our Pope, was
named after Francis of . Assisi. His other name, Xavier, was a Basque word for
the new house, which his noble family had constructed in northern Spain.
A proud nineteen-year-old at the University of Paris, he was
angry with his fellow Basque students when they attached themselves to Ignatius
of Loyola, an older Spanish soldier with a limp from a war wound. However, when
he was forced to listen to Ignatius, he became one of the original seven who
formed the Jesuits.
Ten years before the birth of Francis Xavier, Pope Alexander
VI in 1496 had given the exploration of the Western world to Spain, while
giving the exploration of the far East to Portugal. Each country sent out it
explorers and traders to bring back wealth from afar, but they also took
seriously the task of planting the faith on those far shores.
The King of Portugal appointed a thirty-four-year-old Francis
Xavier to oversee spreading the faith over India, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Japan and China. He was forty-six when he died at Macao while trying to get in
to preach the Gospel in China.
Obedience was a big thing with Xavier. He always knelt while
writing reports back to St. Ignatius. His single-minded approach to
Christianity had him training boys to smash Hindu idols. He tried getting his
sermons translated into Japanese, and without getting through the language
barrier, he read them aloud to amazed people in Japanese market towns.
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