St. Francis Xavier

Who was St. Francis Xavier?

Francis Xavier was one of the seven men who made the first vows of the Jesuits in Paris in 1534, and the first of them to be sent overseas. In the ten years between his landing at Goa in May 1542 and his death in December 1552, he worked in India, Sri Lanka, Malacca, the Moluccas and Japan, and he died trying to reach China. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls him "the greatest missionary since the time of the Apostles." Pope Benedict XVI, marking the 500th anniversary of his birth in 2006, said his example "inspired a multitude of missionary vocations."

He was also a man of his age, a Spaniard working under the Portuguese crown, and some of what he wrote about the religions of India is hard to read today. Both sides of the record are given below.

The life of St. Francis Xavier

Navarre and Paris

Francisco de Jasso y Javier was born on April 7, 1506, in his family's castle of Xavier (Javier) near Sangüesa, in the kingdom of Navarre. In 1525 he went to the University of Paris and the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, where he shared a room with the Savoyard Pierre Favre. In 1529 an older Basque student moved in: Ignatius of Loyola.

According to the Jesuits' own account, Xavier wanted an academic career and resisted Ignatius longer than Favre did; he was teaching Aristotle at the College of Dormans-Beauvais when he finally gave way. On August 15, 1534, in a chapel at Montmartre, he and six companions vowed poverty, chastity and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This was the seed of the Society of Jesus. Read more in the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Venice, Rome and Lisbon

Xavier was ordained a priest in Venice with Ignatius on June 24, 1537, after weeks of nursing in the city's hospitals. The war with the Turks closed the route to Jerusalem, and the companions put themselves at the pope's service in Rome instead. When King John III of Portugal asked for priests for his colony in India, one of the two chosen fell ill. Ignatius sent Xavier in his place. The two friends never saw each other again.

Xavier sailed from Lisbon on April 7, 1541, his 35th birthday, carrying letters naming him papal nuncio in the East. The voyage, with a winter in Mozambique, took thirteen months.

Goa and the Pearl Fishery Coast

He landed at Goa on May 6, 1542, and spent five months preaching and nursing the sick. The Catholic Encyclopedia records his method: "He would go through the streets ringing a little bell and inviting the children to hear the word of God."

That October he went south to the Paravas, the pearl fishers of the coast near Cape Comorin, who had been baptized years before but had no priest. With local helpers he had the prayers and catechism translated into Tamil, learned them by heart and went from village to village. In a letter to his brothers in Rome he described the work:

I and Francis Mancias are now living amongst the Christians of Comorin. They are very numerous, and increase largely every day.

The same letter shows his impatience with Europe: "It often comes into my mind to go round all the Universities of Europe, and especially that of Paris, crying out everywhere like a madman." It also shows the attitudes of a 16th-century missionary. He called the Brahmin priests "liars and cheats" and described, with approval, children breaking village idols. Modern readers, including many Indian Catholics, find these passages painful, and they belong in an honest account of his work.

Malacca, the Moluccas and Japan

From 1545 he worked in Malacca and then in the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, among them Amboina and Ternate. Back in Malacca in 1547, he met a Japanese man named Anjirō who wanted to become a Christian. Anjirō was baptized in Goa as Paulo de Santa Fe, and on August 15, 1549, Xavier, the Jesuits Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández, and Paulo landed at Kagoshima.

The first year went to learning the language and translating a catechism. Xavier then traveled to Hirado, Yamaguchi and the capital, Miyako (Kyoto), where civil war kept him from seeing the emperor. Returning to Yamaguchi dressed as an envoy, with letters from the King of Portugal and gifts, he won permission to preach, and the Jesuits report about 500 converts in six months. He left Japan in late 1551, leaving Torres and Fernández in charge of small Christian communities that grew quickly after him. Japan's first martyrs, among them St. Paul Miki, came from that Church.

Death off the coast of China

In Japan Xavier had heard much about China, and he resolved to take the Gospel there. In April 1552 he left Goa and by autumn reached Shangchuan (Sancian), an island off the Chinese coast used by Portuguese traders and smugglers. No one would risk taking him to the mainland. On November 21 he fell ill with fever in a hut on the shore. He died there in the first days of December 1552, at 46. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives December 2; the Jesuits and the Church's calendar keep December 3.

He was buried on the island. His remains were later taken to Malacca and then to Goa, where they lie in the Jesuit church of Bom Jesus. Pope Gregory XV canonized him in 1622, with Ignatius; the bull was published in 1623.

The miracles of St. Francis Xavier

• Approved: the miracles examined in the canonization process. The Catholic Encyclopedia says "the list of the principal miracles may be found in the Bull of canonization," Rubens' altarpiece below shows the kinds of wonders the Jesuits told of him.
• Reported: healings in the villages of the Pearl Fishery Coast. Xavier's own letter says he sent children to pray the Creed with the sick, and that God "restored to a great number of sick persons health both of body and soul."
• Reported: the incorrupt state of his body in Goa, described in the Catholic Encyclopedia and by generations of pilgrims.
• Reported: the healing of Marcello Mastrilli, S.J., in Naples in 1634, the origin of the Novena of Grace (below).
• Traditional: the crab that brought back his crucifix after he lost it in the sea during a storm, a favorite subject of Jesuit art.

Why St. Francis Xavier is the patron saint of missions

His whole Jesuit life was a mission journey, and his letters, printed across Europe, drew young men into the Society for centuries. The Jesuits record that he was named patron of the Propagation of the Faith in 1910. Pope Pius XI, Benedict XVI recalled, proclaimed him "Patron of Catholic Missions," and on December 14, 1927, Pius XI named St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the cloistered Carmelite who prayed for missionaries, patroness of the missions equal to him. See all the patron saints by cause.

Symbols of St. Francis Xavier in art

Look for a Jesuit priest with a short dark beard and one or more of these:

• A black cassock, often with a white surplice and stole: the priest who preached and baptized.
• A crucifix, held up or clutched to his chest: his preaching, and his death holding one.
• A flaming heart, or his hands pulling open his cassock over his chest: the fire of his zeal, as in the Kobe portrait.
• A crab holding a crucifix: the legend of the lost crucifix.
• A bell, a baptismal shell or a pilgrim's staff: the catechist, the baptizer and the traveler.
• Kneeling on a beach under a palm hut: his death on Shangchuan.

Baroque painters such as Rubens show him in action, preaching and healing, while the Japanese portrait at the top of this page shows him in prayer.

Feast day, relics and where he is honored

The Catholic Church keeps his memorial on December 3. See the feast day calendar.

Bom Jesus, Goa

His body lies in a silver casket in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, the Jesuit church built about 1586. Once a decade it is carried to the Sé Cathedral for public veneration. The 18th exposition opened on November 21, 2024, with 12,000 people at the opening Mass, and ran into January 2025.

Between expositions the casket rests high in a side chapel of the basilica, where visitors can see it from below.

The Gesù, Rome

In 1614, by order of the Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva, the right arm was severed at the elbow and taken to Rome, where an altar was built for it in the Church of the Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuits. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports this plainly, and the reliquary is still displayed above the saint's altar there.

The Novena of Grace and prayer to St. Francis Xavier

The Novena of Grace began in Naples. A 1952 Jesuit pamphlet tells how Fr. Marcello Mastrilli was struck on the head by a falling hammer while decorating a church, and how on January 3, 1634, Xavier appeared to him, healed him and promised that all who asked his intercession for nine days in honor of his canonization would "receive whatever they asked that would contribute to their salvation." Mastrilli went to the East and was martyred. Jesuit parishes still pray the novena from March 4 to 12; the Jesuits in Britain note that many also pray it from November 25 to December 3.

The novena prayer, in the form printed in A Private Novena of Grace (St. Louis, 1952, with the imprimatur of Archbishop Joseph Ritter), reads:

O most amiable and most loving St. Francis Xavier, in union with thee I reverently adore the Divine Majesty. And because I exceedingly rejoice for the special gifts which God bestowed upon thee—of grace in thy lifetime, and of glory after thy death—I give Him devoted thanks. And I beseech thee with all my heart to obtain for me, by thy powerful intercession, the all-important grace of living and dying in a holy manner. I entreat thee to obtain for me (here mention the temporal or spiritual favor, or favors, you wish). But if what I ask is not for the glory of God, or for the greater good of my soul, obtain for me that which is most suitable for both alike. Amen.

The same booklet ends each day with the traditional prayer of his feast: "O God, who didst deign by the preaching and miracles of St. Francis Xavier to join unto thy Church the nations of the Indies, grant—we beseech thee—that we who reverence his glorious merits may also imitate his example, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen."