St. Francis Xavier

Summary

Podcast Summary: Catholic Saints – Episode on St. Francis Xavier

Podcast Information

• Title: Catholic Saints
• Host/Author: Augustine Institute
• Episode: St. Francis Xavier
• Release Date: December 3, 2024
• Description: This episode delves into the life and legacy of St. Francis Xavier, one of the first Jesuit missionaries, exploring his missionary journeys, his dedication to evangelization, and his enduring influence on the Catholic Church.

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Introduction

In this episode of Catholic Saints, hosted by Mary and featuring Dr. Carl Venerstrom, listeners are welcomed to explore the life of St. Francis Xavier. Dr. Venerstrom provides an insightful biographical sketch of St. Francis Xavier, highlighting his role as a foundational member of the Jesuit order and his significant contributions to missionary work.

Biographical Sketch of St. Francis Xavier

Early Life and Education

St. Francis Xavier was born in 1506 at the Castle of Xavier, located in the Basque region on the border of Spain and France. Dr. Venerstrom notes, “Francis was the youngest in his family, which was wealthy, elite, and deeply devoted” (02:16).

Francis pursued higher education at the University of Paris, a premier institution of the time, where he met St. Ignatius Loyola. Their friendship formed after St. Ignatius experienced a profound conversion, transitioning from a soldier to a religious leader. St. Francis Xavier was instrumental in shaping the early Jesuit community, taking vows of poverty and chastity and initially aiming to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a plan thwarted by ongoing wars (03:17).

Formation of the Jesuit Order

In 1534, St. Francis Xavier, along with five companions, took vows that would lay the foundation for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). They offered their services to the Pope in 1537, rapidly developing their mission-focused community. Dr. Venerstrom explains, “They had an eager readiness to do whatever God wanted at a moment’s notice” (07:08).

Missionary Journeys and Evangelization

Journey to India and Japan

By 1540, St. Francis Xavier embarked on his first mission to India, marking the beginning of his extensive evangelization efforts. His commitment to missionary work is evident through his meticulous letter-writing, which serves as a historical record of his journeys and activities. Dr. Venerstrom remarks, “You can track his progress and everything he's doing by all these letters he was sending back to Ignatius in Rome” (09:23).

St. Francis Xavier later extended his mission to Japan, where he founded churches and engaged in catechesis amidst a complex religious landscape. He demonstrated an exceptional dedication to understanding local cultures and languages, believing it essential for effective evangelization. “[He] thought it was easy enough” to learn the Japanese language, facilitating his interactions with the locals (14:22).

Final Mission and Death

His ambition to reach China was cut short when he fell ill shortly before departing, leading to his death in 1552 on an island en route. Despite efforts to prevent disinterment, his body remained incorrupt, symbolizing his sanctity to this day (10:39).

Legacy and Impact on the Church

Founding the Jesuit Mission Model

St. Francis Xavier’s approach to missions profoundly influenced the Jesuit order and the broader Catholic Church. His emphasis on education, cultural adaptation, and personal engagement set a standard for future missionaries. Dr. Venerstrom highlights, “He and the other Jesuits tailored their message after taking on a good understanding of the kinds of people they were talking to” (14:46).

Enduring Contributions

Xavier is recognized as the patron saint of Catholic missions, reflecting his lasting legacy in evangelization efforts worldwide. His life's work exemplifies the Jesuit commitment to the "reformation of souls," focusing on individual salvation through diverse ministries and educational institutions.

Key Virtues Exemplified by St. Francis Xavier

Obedience and Sacrifice

One of the standout virtues of St. Francis Xavier is his unwavering obedience. Dr. Venerstrom cites St. Thomas Aquinas, noting that “obedience is the highest moral virtue” due to the significant personal sacrifice it entails (17:44). Xavier’s readiness to follow God’s will, even when it meant personal hardship, serves as a powerful example for believers today.

Cultural Sensitivity and Adaptability

Xavier’s approach to missions was characterized by deep respect and understanding of local cultures and traditions. His ability to adapt his preaching to resonate with diverse populations underscores the importance of cultural sensitivity in evangelization.

Notable Quotes

• Dr. Carl Venerstrom on Jesuit Readiness:
  “They had an eager readiness to do whatever God wanted at a moment’s notice.” (07:08)

• On the Importance of Obedience:
  “Obedience is the highest moral virtue because it involves the greatest sacrifice. It sacrifices the highest created thing that you can sacrifice.” (17:44)

• On Cultural Adaptation in Missions:
  “He and the other Jesuits tailored their message after taking on a good understanding of the kinds of people they were talking to.” (14:46)

Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive exploration of St. Francis Xavier’s life, emphasizing his pivotal role in establishing the Jesuit order and his innovative approach to missionary work. Dr. Venerstrom’s insights reveal how Xavier’s dedication, obedience, and cultural sensitivity continue to inspire and guide the Catholic Church’s evangelization efforts today. Listeners are left with a profound appreciation for Xavier’s legacy and his embodiment of Christ-like virtues in spreading the Gospel across the globe.

End of Summary

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Timestamps:

• 02:16: Discussing Francis Xavier’s birthplace and family background.
• 03:17: Formation of friendship with St. Ignatius and initial vows.
• 07:08: Jesuits' readiness for missions.
• 09:23: Importance of letter-writing in tracking Xavier’s missions.
• 10:39: Details of Xavier’s death and incorrupt body.
• 14:22: Xavier’s approach to learning Japanese for missions.
• 14:46: Tailoring the Gospel message to different cultures.
• 17:44: Discussion on obedience as a virtue.

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith. Hello. Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary, and I am with Dr. Carl Venerstrom. Thank you for being here.

[B]

So glad to be here, as always.

[A]

We are indeed recording from Fluorescent, Missouri. This is your first time on the podcast here in Missouri, and the listeners are curious. How's it going, Dr. Wenderstrom? How's life on campus been in this new season of life?

[B]

It has been very good. I was pleased to move from Colorado to Missouri. Nothing against Colorado, but I love deciduous trees.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And we have hundreds, maybe thousands of deciduous trees on campus, so I've really enjoyed walking through the woods.

[A]

Yes. Have you walked along the trails on the perimeter of campus?

[B]

Yeah. Beautiful. Started mushroom hunting.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

It's been a big development in my life. So.

[A]

Okay. Exciting new hobbies, new frontier.

[B]

And the campus, of course, is beautiful, and we're able to host guests, and our students live on campus here, and they're very much enjoying it, so. So all good things as far as I'm concerned.

[A]

Absolutely. It's been a great gift. Well, thank you for coming on today to teach us a little bit about St. Francis Xavier. We love to look at the saints, to look for wisdom for our own lives and learn from them today. So can you please start with a biographical sketch of St. Francis Xavier?

[B]

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So St. Francis Xavier, not of Assisi, but St. Francis Xavier was one of the first six companions of St. Ignatius. He's a little more famous. Superior. So together they made up the first band of Jesuits. So Francis was born in 1506 at the castle of Xavier. Okay. So it's.

[A]

So Xavier is indeed a small town.

[B]

Yeah. And so, yeah. On the border of Spain and France on the Spanish side, like the Basque region.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So, yeah, he was one of the original companions. You can kind of tell from where he was born in this castle that he came from a rather wealthy and elite family, but one also that seem to have been characterized by their great devotion. So he was the youngest. His eldest sister, she was in line to be the lady in waiting to Queen Isabella of Castile. She became a poor. Claire. Okay, so one quick interruption question. Yeah.

[A]

Do you know if St. Francis Xavier, was he friends. Buddies with St. Ignatius Loyola during, like, the wartime, or did they. And when St. Ignatius was in battle as a soldier, or did they become friends after his conversion?

[B]

Yeah, they became friends after. So they became friends in Paris. So the way their stories join up is that St. Francis Xavier went to the University of Paris as a young man in his, like, in his teenage years for a few degrees in philosophy and theology. And the University of Paris was like the greatest university in the western world. And St. Ignatius had had his conversion. He lived this period of his life that was deeply ascetic, like long fingernails. He wore satin.

[A]

I didn't know that part about his story.

[B]

Yeah, it's really interesting. And he had these divine inspirations, and during this period, he wrote at least the basics of the Spiritual Exercises, but he kind of realized that he needed a formal education in theology and that he also kind of cleaned up his act a little bit. He started to dress normally, cut his fingernails. Cut his fingernails, yeah. So. Yeah. But anyway, so it was after that kind of change in Ignatius that they met together at the University of Paris. And in general, it's kind of interesting. Ignatius was the superior, but his first companions were all better educated than him. They were all scholars in a true sense, and he was kind of catching up as an older person.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But we'll mostly leave St. Ignatius for another day. As for St. Francis, these companions with Ignatius take vows in 1534, and it was kind of unclear at this point what exactly they were going to be.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But they took vows of poverty and of chastity and a vow to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This was a fixation for Ignatius. He really wanted to go to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. So unfortunately, or fortunately, as Providence would have it, they were prevented by the war, the wars that were happening in the Holy Land, from going. So they. Well, there's a tangled set of details here that I'm going to just skip over, but they end up offering their services basically to the Pope. And so one of their chief hopes was to go on mission. And so they take their original vows in 1534. They offer their services to the Pope in 1530, 1937. And then by. And then in this period, they're in a real life. They're making concrete what their form of life is going to be, what their way of proceeding. That was one of their favorite phrases, their mode of proceeding in life, what that was going to look like. So they decided, we are here on Earth for the care of souls. And so they did some unusual things. Like, they didn't. They didn't celebrate the Divine Office in common, except for. With a couple of exceptions, but they would do their choir, as it were, in their own rooms. And this was partly so that they could be ready to go at a moment's notice to care for souls. So they had this eager readiness to do whatever God wanted at a moment's notice. And that had a general characteristic to their form of life, too, that they were ready to go on mission to the far reaches of the globe.

[A]

I bet they didn't snooze in the morning.

[B]

They. I'm sure they didn't sneeze.

[A]

Woke up right when that alarm went off. Eager to care for souls.

[B]

Yeah. And actually, there's some great things in the catechesis that St. Francis wrote on his missions, and this is kind of one of them. It's like as soon as you are conscious, you need to begin by calling upon the Trinity, and then you need to recite the Creed, and then you need to begin your prayers.

[A]

So that's good. That's very practical.

[B]

Yeah. So there's a very intense group, a very energetic group, and a very learned group as well. So. And things moved fast. So I said 1534, they take their vows. 1537, they offer their services to the Pope. And then in 1540, Francis is already on his way to India. So the ink was not even quite all the way wet on their constitutions and official documents. They had to be approved after. After Francis had. Had gone. So, yeah, it's a really quick turn around, a really quick gelling of this group of men.

[A]

So he was from Spain, Is this correct? He was learned and became. He went to France to study.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's where he encountered St. Ignatius. And then as the community was developing, he pretty quickly was sent off to India as a missionary.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Did he spend the majority of his life as an. A priest? As a missionary in India, yeah.

[B]

So not quite the majority, only insofar as he died at a young age. So born in 1506, he died in 1552. But, yeah, he did go to India. And one of the great things about the Jesuits is they were intensely purposeful about letter writing. And actually, you can find a letter from St. Ignatius on how Jesuits should write letters.

[A]

What? That's me.

[B]

And St. Ignatius himself has over 7,000 letters that we can still read. So it's the same with Francis as he's making his travels. You can track his progress and everything he's doing by all these letters he was sending back to Ignatius in Rome. So you can see him going around the Horn of Africa, you can see him arriving in India and all the catechesis, all the baptisms, all the work he was doing after his time in India, he Actually went for a shorter time on a mission all the way to Japan. And so there are some fascinating letters from his time in Japan where he founds churches and then his great hope was to make it to China. So he goes back to India after his time in Japan, and then he's on the cusp of making it to China. He convinced someone with a ship to take him there secretly because their presence wasn't welcome. And I think it was the day after the ship was supposed to come, but didn't. He fell ill and then died.

[A]

God closed that door.

[B]

He did. Yeah. So he was on an island at the time he died. And then they took him to be buried in India, where he had spent a lot of time in Goa. And he was buried and they filled his coffin with lime, which is supposed to degrade people. Right. And then a while later, they exhumed his body and found it incorrupt. So his incorrupt body is still in India.

[A]

That's incredible.

[B]

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So if you're an incorruptible saint, there's really nothing you can do to corrupt you. No chemical process.

[A]

That's amazing. It turns out, well, fascinating. This blends to the next question of what was St. Francis Xavier's legacy to the church? That integrates with the biographical sketch, but how many communities were there in this time period? So if he was one of the initial founders of the Jesuits, how rare, how unique were communities like the Jesuits at this time period? And what were they responding to in history, in. In time that there is a need for this type of community.

[B]

For the Jesuits in particular, they were actually one of many different kinds of confederations or brotherhoods or orders. So there were a lot of different associations of priests or religious in this time, and not all had the longevity of the Jesuits. Often when people talk about the Jezos, they want to say that it was a response to the Reformation, that is the Protestant Reformation. And some people who like Dominicans, say that, you know, Dominic founded the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians and they don't exist anymore. But Ignatius founded the Jesuits to fight the Protestants and they're still around. So obviously St. Dominic is the superior saint, but Ignatius didn't actually see it that way, and his companions didn't see it that way. They cared about Reformation, but they cared about the reformation of souls of particular people. So their focus was not even so much on the reform of the church, considered broadly. They wanted the salvation of souls, and so they went to all different kinds of souls through many different ministries and through schools. That became a characteristic feature of the Jesuits. And they had an abiding attention for human persons. And you can see that in Francis Xavier's missions. In one of his letters from Japan, he talks about how they had to learn the language. He thought it was easy to learn the language. I don't think I would find it easy, but he thought it was easy enough. And he has these very detailed descriptions of the character of the Japanese people. And he learns a lot about their different forms of law and religion and religious practice. And they had sort of the equivalent of monks and nuns. And so he tailors his message. He and the other Jesuits tailored their message after taking on a good understanding of the kinds of people they were talking to. And so he says they're very rational people, and you can reason with them. You just kind of have to figure out what they actually think, what kind of things they're attached to. So it's a real model, I think, for evangelization. Both of foreign lands, but also of people who are close to you.

[A]

Absolutely. How would you say St. Francis Xavier influenced the church or left a great legacy for us to look at today in his life?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's still a sort of concrete instantiation of his missions in the East.

[A]

Did a lot of the. Did all the original six. Did they go two by two? Were they all sent out separately to different countries across.

[B]

Yeah. So the original six weren't sent out two by two, but he was sent. Sent out with another Jesuit who had joined after the original six.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. And I think he definitely was this forerunner for the modern mission to people who had never heard the gospel in any way, shape, or form.

[A]

I appreciate that. I love what you said with the. The Japanese mission, how he really learned their language, tried to understand their culture as the foundation of delivering and giving the gospel in a way they could receive it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And there were. He talked about there's, like, basically nine different sort of denominations of Buddhism. And so you each have their different kind of law code. And all the Jesuits who came to Japan had to. To learn that whole system in order to be able to talk to the Japanese people in a way that they could be understood.

[A]

Yes. Have you read some of his letters?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Mentioned.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. That would be really fun to read between himself and St. Ignatius or the people that he was ministering to. It is very reminiscent of the apostolic age.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's neat because in Ignatius letter on letters, he says we are interested in your personal life, but you can put your sort of own anecdotes or complaints or whatever at the end of the letter. But we really need to know exactly what's happening. And so they were very systematic about it. So you can get this pretty good historical sense of exactly what was happening in all these different places. And there's a. There is an urgency to it that is like the apostolic letter. So it's.

[A]

Yeah. Wonderful. Do you know, did Mother Cabrini have a devotion to St. Francis Xavier? Mother Cabrini? Her name is St. Francis Xavier Cabrini.

[B]

I must assume she did.

[A]

I must assume, too, because she also was sent across to America as a missionary. And I wonder if she had a devotion to St. Francis.

[B]

Yeah. Unfortunately, I suffer from ignorance of Mother Cabrini, and so I'll have to be healed of that malady at some point.

[A]

Well, I have learned St. Francis Xavier is the patron of Catholic missions, missionaries, foreign missions, parish missions. So if you have that missionary heart, he wants to be interceding for you in a unique way. Is there anything else you'd like to add about St. Francis Xavier that summarizes how he really captured and reflects the heart of Christ to the world during his time?

[B]

Yeah, I think one thing that we might learn from St. Francis Xavier is the virtue of obedience. And I was just reading in St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa, when he talks about obedience, he says it's the highest moral virtue. So it's not a theological virtue like faith, hope and love, but it's the highest moral virtue because it involves the greatest sacrifice. It sacrifices the highest created thing that you can sacrifice like. And it's the most difficult because you have to renounce your own will. And the Jesuits put a great emphasis on obedience. And because they were willing to make this great sacrifice of their will, they were always ready to go. So we can practice this both in a practical way with the people to whom we owe obedience, but then also in an eagerness and a readiness to obey God's will, even in those situations when obeying God doesn't mean something in the short term, pleasant for us. And he's a great example of that virtue.

[A]

Absolutely beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Vanisham, for sharing about the life of St Francis Xavier and St Francis Xavier. Pray for us.

[B]

Pray for us.