Feast day: December 3
St. Francis Xavier
Ignatius of Loyola's college roommate, who became the greatest missionary since Paul — baptizing tens of thousands across India, Indonesia, and Japan in ten years.
Francis Xavier was born in 1506 at the castle of Xavier in Navarre and went as a young man to the University of Paris, ambitious for a brilliant academic career. There he shared rooms with Ignatius of Loyola, who slowly won him over with the question, 'What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?' Francis became one of Ignatius's first companions and among the founding members of the Society of Jesus.
Sent at the king of Portugal's request to the East Indies, he reached Goa in 1542 and threw himself into a mission of staggering scope. He preached and baptized along the coasts of India, among the pearl-fishers of the south, in Malacca and the Spice Islands, ringing a little bell through the streets to gather children and the curious, and baptizing so many that, it was said, his arm grew weary.
In 1549 he carried the Gospel to Japan — the first Christian missionary ever to do so — learning enough of the language and culture to win converts and plant a Church that would endure heroically through later persecution. Always pressing toward the next frontier, he set his sights on the great closed empire of China.
He died in 1552 on the island of Shangchuan, within sight of the Chinese coast he longed to reach, worn out at forty-six. In barely a decade he had carried the faith farther than anyone since the apostles. Canonized in 1622 alongside Ignatius, he is the patron of all foreign missions and, with St. Thérèse, of missionaries everywhere.
Ignatius won over the ambitious young athlete by repeating one question: 'What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?' He died within sight of China, still going.
“Give me souls; take away the rest.”
— St. Francis Xavier
Image: artist unknown (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/06233b.htm
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