Sr Virginia shares a reflection for the feast of St Francis Xavier, 3 December, missioner in Asia and formerly patron of Australia. 

I first ‘met’ Francis the day I entered religious life in 1963 and received the religious name ‘Xavier’. It was the day Paul VI became Pope. Soon after, the local parish priest loaned me a life of Saint Francis Xavier by James Brodrick SJ. Because it held the saint’s missionary letters, he told me it would be good for me. 

In a Novitiate in the small village of Lochinvar in the Hunter Valley of the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese, I read those letters of a Spanish missioner in Asia acting on behalf of the Portuguese King and the Roman Pope in the interests of the Gospel. I read of Francis’ sea voyage hugging the African coast, and then of his work amongst the peoples of Goa in Western India, Tamilnardu on its East Coast, parts of modern-day Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Japan. I read too an account of Francis’ death, aged 46, on the island of Shangchuan, 14 miles off the Chinese coast. He had longed to enter China, to unravel some of the mystery of its culture that he knew influenced the whole region. I learned too that Francis’ odyssey had brought him to Ambon, an island where Australian troops were stationed in 1942. Francis had touched the earth and met the people who lived as close to Terra Australis del Spiritu Santo as a few hundred miles from our near neighbours in West Papua and Timor-Leste. Thus, he was held to be Australia’s patron for some years. 

Francis’ missionary letters carried me across the threshold into adulthood. I loved them and they caught my imagination. In some respects, because of the interest they had generated in me, I readily studied then taught a newly developed curriculum in Asian Studies in the early 1970s. Then in my early 30s I spent a year on teacher exchange in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, with the Good Samaritan Sisters. Through their hospitality I had the chance to visit where Francis’ work still threw a long shadow, symbolised for me on the day I stood beneath the volcano towering over the southern city of Kagoshima where Francis, its first missioner, had entered the country in mid 1549.  

In Nagasaki Prefecture there were many descendants of martyred people living still in the faith Xavier helped sow. I was able to visit the Goto Islands, famous for its ‘hidden Christians’ who had sustained the faith for over 200 years without priests till the 1860s when Japan again opened to the West after years of deliberate seclusion. On Hirado island I climbed a hill where there is a large marble tribute to Francis. It stands at the spot where, according to oral tradition, he used to look out across the waters of the South China Sea, hoping to catch a glimpse of ships that might bring him longed-for letters from home, that he continually begged Ignatius and his other Jesuit Companions to send. 

High on another hill overlooking Nagasaki, with the sounds of ship-building rising from the very harbour where Western traders were already becoming unwelcome in Xavier’s time, I was able to stand within the stillness of the memorial honouring Paul Miki SJ and his companions, the 26 Japanese martyrs, whom the Church celebrates on 6 February each year. I learned that that feast tacitly also remembers the possibly 26,000 others who gave up their lives for the faith, showing what the grace of God can do in people’s lives once it receives a responsive home there. Thus, Nagasaki holds a living memory of God’s grace acting through Francis and his companions, who so inspired some Japanese that they took the step, against the grain of the prevailing climate of their day, to give a home within their identity to what others of their time and place saw as dangerously foreign. Fittingly, near this memorial to the martyrs stands a Jesuit museum housing a copy of the letter bearing Ignatius’ seal and signature by which Francis was missioned to the East.  

On yet another hillside in Nagasaki in the locality called Urakami, there is a large bronze bell of the Oura Tenshudo Cathedral. It lies 500m from the site of the epicentre of the atomic blast of 9 August 1945. Retrieved from the bomb crater, this bell was retained as a reminder of the power of survival and resurrection inherent in the Christian spirit. Ironically, that bomb exploded over the most Catholic part of Japan’s only Christian city and most of its victims were young religious, descendants of ‘hidden Christians’ who had been inspired by the zeal of Francis.  

Recently, I came upon another copy of Brodrick’s life of Xavier and I decided to read it again. I found myself again blessing God for the good things grace did in the world through the heart, head and human magnitude and spirit of Francis. 

Brodrick’s book holds a recommendation in French from p. 338 of the Revue des Deux Mondes of 1924: My translation of this is: 

Reading the letters again after a half century’s life experience, I still find Francis’ character remarkable, as much for the humanity of the man as for the good he did amongst the poorest of the poor he sought out everywhere he went. It has been exciting in this latest reading to discover the efforts Francis made to support with appropriate catechesis those Christians he had encouraged into the faith. I noted his zeal in translating texts, in committing what he was teaching into song form, and his use of pictures and drama to help make his work interesting. I loved reading that his words “went to the hearts of the people”. [2] Most of all, I noticed that Francis was known as a happy, personable man, one who could mix with civil and religious leaders, but whose preference was to live amongst poor pearl fishermen, visit prisoners and play cards with them, tend lepers and, on occasions, ensure that women in labour had the comfort and support they needed. Above all Francis loved people. He used to write to one of his assistants who tended to get vexed with them:

Twenty years after I entered the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1983, at his farm in the Riverina of southern NSW, surrounded by his horses in his stockyard, my father Jack died on 3 December, the day the Church honours Francis. I like remembering them now together in the Communion of Saints.

Virginia M. Bourke rsj

Footnotes:
[1] James Brodrick, Saint Francis Xavier, London, Burns and Oates, 1952, p. Inscription on title page.
[2] Ibid, p. 63
[3] Ibid, p. 167