Missionary to the Indies

After the Apostle Paul, Francis Xavier was probably the greatest missionary ever to preach the Christian Gospel. In ten years time, the 16th century Jesuit fought his way through the rediscovered countries of the East, often by himself, to make thousands of Asian converts. Thanks in part to the range and speed of his missionary work, however, Xavier's legend has become barnacled with a mass of apocryphal stories, many of them still piously recounted.

A newly published book, St. Francis Xavier (Wicklow Press; $5), is a highly successful attempt to present the saint and his work stripped of the false romanticizing. The author, Father James Brodrick, 61, is a Jesuit himself. An Irishman who lives in England, he has spent most of his life writing readable but impeccably researched books on the history of the Jesuit order. In writing St. Francis Xavier, he has had the advantage of a mass of new material on Xavier's life, most of it compiled by fellow Jesuit scholars.

With Hat & Bell. Francis Xavier came out of his native Basque country of Navarre in 1525, an ambitious young nobleman, headed for studies and pleasure at the University of Paris. He was 23, a tutor and a convivial man about town, when he met his fellow Basque, Ignatius Loyola, who was to be the founder of the Society of Jesus. After that, his life changed. Sixteen years later, a priest and a single-minded evangelist, he left Lisbon on a Portuguese carrack to found the Jesuit missions in Asia. He never returned to Europe.

As a missionary, Xavier was more like a streetcorner preacher than the polished diplomat some historians make him out to be. In Bologna, Italy he had attracted attention "by standing on a vacant bench, waving his big hat, and shouting to loungers and marketing folk to come and listen to the Word of God." In "golden, heartless Goa," the citadel of Portugal's Asiatic colonies, he got crowds for his instructions by walking up & down the streets ringing a large bell. And when he found an audience, he held it. Writes Biographer Brodrick: "Perhaps they laughed at him to start with . . . but soon a hush would fall upon them because the love that shone in his dark bewitching eyes and burned on his stammering lips spoke to their hearts so eloquently."

There was no doubting Xavier's success. Starting out from Goa, he sailed and walked through southern India, Malaya and the Celebes, then to Japan. His only equipment was a breviary, his Mass kit and a large parasol to protect him from the sun. He impressed Malay sultans and Japanese feudal barons with his poise, and he could sway the commonfolk by his zeal. In three months on the island of Amboina he baptized 1,200. Some of his missionary conquests were permanent--there are Christian Indians today whose ancestors he converted. Others, like his great Japanese mission, were later nullified by persecutions and royal decrees.

Navarre Gone Wrong. Because Xavier's flame burned deep but narrow, Brodrick points out, he had some tragic limitations. His lack of sympathy with native cultures hampered him in getting close to the people he wanted to Christianize. "From all appearances," writes Father Brodrick, "he looked upon India as though it were a huge Navarre gone wrong, not as a land utterly new . . . For him, the old slogan always seemed to suffice, the Christians are right, the pagans are wrong, which, while being perfectly true, by no means precludes the existence . . . of genuine holiness in such a non-Christian religion as Brahmanism."

Although Brodrick believes that St. Francis worked miracles, he casts a skeptical eye on some of them. One is the famous story that, after Xavier lost a crucifix overboard at sea, a crab miraculously returned it to the shore the next day. The saint never mentioned this himself and, although the story was cited in the Papal Bull announcing Xavier's canonization, Brodrick does not believe it. ("It is entirely a matter of evidence.") Another legend: Xavier's reputedly miraculous "gift of tongues." Father Brodrick notes that the Basque saint was a notoriously poor linguist, not even fluent in Latin. But before visiting different groups of Asian converts, he would spend hours laboriously memorizing simple sermons in Tamil, Malay or Japanese.

Just 400 years ago this month, weary and wasted, St. Francis Xavier died on Sancian Island, off the China coast. He was 46. Concludes Father Brodrick: "It was a poor and humble death, not unperplexed, such as befitted a poor and humble man who had no notion whatever that the world would want to remember him . . . He remained to the end a man, a passionate, obstinate man, capable at times of fierce resentments and highly autocratic actions, which, however, did not prevent him from being one of the most generous, large-hearted, lovable human beings this sad world has ever known."

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