The Life of Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier - Book Report/Review Example

St. Francis Xavier San Francisco de Xavier was a saint and Jesuit missionary, universally identified in English as St. Francis Xavier as well as referred to as the "Apostle of the Indies." Francis was the youngest lad of Juan de Jasso, then a privy councilor to a king of Navarre, Jean dAlbret , and his spouse, Maria de Azpilcueta y Xavier, the only heiress of two loyal Navarrese families. Xavier was born at the castle of Xavier also known as Xavero, just at the foot of Pyrenees and near to a small town called Sanguesa, on the 7th of April 1506, as per to the family chronicle, although his previous biographers set his birth in 1497. In accordance to the Spanish tradition of the moment, which kept the family name of either parent optional with kids, he was named after his own mother; the most excellent authorities inscribe Francisco de Xavier (Latin Xaverius) instead of Francisco Xavier, as Xavier was initial used as a name of a place. In 1524 he attended the University of Paris, where he enrolled in the College of St. Barbara, which was back then the headquarters of both the Spanish and the Portuguese students and in 1528 he was selected university lecturer in Aristotelian philosophy at the College de Beauvais. In 1530 he enrolled for his degree in Master of Arts. Xavier and the Savoyard Pierre Lefevre, with whom he shared his lodge, had by now in 1529 made the associate of Ignatius of Loyla – who also like St. Francis was a local of the Spanish Basque state. Ignatius did succeed, even if in St. Francis' case after a little opposition, in gaining their kindness for his missionary scheme; furthermore they were among the companionship of seven persons, as well as Loyola himself, who took up the novel Jesuit vow on the 15th of August 1534. They kept back in Paris for two years more; but on November the 15th, 1536, they set off for Italy, to concert together with Ignatius' plot of converting Muslims of Palestine. In January 1537 they reached Venice. As a few months must pass by before they can sail for Palestine, Ignatius decided that the instance should be used up partly in hospital labor at Venice and then afterward in the expedition to Rome. Consequently, St. Francis dedicated himself for nine weeks to the hospice for the incurables and afterward set out with eight friends for Rome, where then Pope Paul III authorized their endeavor. Heading back to Venice, St. Francis was feted priest on a Midsummer Day 1537; but the eruption of conflict between Venice and Turkey put a stop to the Palestine mission, and the company broke apart for a year for some home duty labor in the Italian towns. St. Francis and Nicolas Bobadilla went by themselves initially to Monselice and then from there they headed to Bologna, where they stayed until recalled to Rome by Ignatius just at the close of 1538. St. Francis was among the supreme missionaries as he descended from a noble kin- Basque family- and his mentor St Ignatius Loyola. They did meet in Paris, at a point in time which Xavier was an motivated and proud chap. nevertheless, for close to three years, Ignatius was enduring with him and did encourage him to consider his days in a different way. Ignatius is quoted querying Francis “What profits a man if he gains the whole and loses his soul?” at last; Xavier was later ordained in the year 1537. So much later on in the year 1541, Portugal’s King John asked St. Ignatius to take some priests to India for work and in effect he chose Francis though he knew he could not meet him yet again. St. Francis embarked on his expedition to India and reached the city of Goa later in the year 1542. For almost a decade since his entrance into India, he went around India-, for example sections of south India as well as West Indies, and afterward went to Japan. He was filled with ambition that he even went to the point of attempting to get authorization to go into China as a missionary. Ignatius kept St. Francis at Rome till 1541 as secretary to the Society of Jesus. Meanwhile king of Portugal, Joao III, had decided on distributing a mission to his many Indian dominions, and furthermore had applied through his emissary Pedro Mascarenhas to the then pope for a team of six Jesuits. Ignatius would spare just but two as he chose Bobadilla and a Portuguese by the name Simao Rodrigues for the function. Rodrigues went at once for Lisbon to talk with the king, who in the end decided to keep him in still Portugal. Bobadilla, who had been summoned to Rome, got there just ahead of Mascarenhas who was about to head off, but became too ill to heed to the call made out to him. His major objective was to bring humanity to Christ. He used the majority of his time with those in need, unwell in addition to the poor and preaching as he ministered to their desires. He was a self-sacrificing man, hardly ever eating sufficiently and his only individual consideration was just having a pair of boots. In his life, he left behind numerous of flourishing that churches that were the main fundamentals for the Asian Catholic faith. St. Francis died in 1552 on a small island from exhaustion from fasting and the laboring. In manifestation St. Francis was not either Spanish or Basque. Xavier had blue or else grey eyes, with fair hair and beard, which became white throughout the hardships he did endure in Japan. That he was also of squat stature is has been proved by the span of the casket in which his corpse is still conserved, fewer than 5 feet 1 inch. Being a Spartan and a mystic, to whom all things spiritual were even more real than the observable world, he also had the sturdy common sense which famed the rest of the Spanish mystics, St. Theresa, Luis de Leon or Raymond Lull. This excellence is nowhere else better exemplified than through his mail to Caspar Baertz (Barzaeus), the Flemish Jesuit that he sent off to Hormuz, otherwise in his suggestion for the institution of a Portuguese staple out in Japan. Top as an organizer, he does seem also to have had a rarely attractive character, that won him the companionship even of the bravos and pirates with whom he was required to ensemble on any of his voyage. Contemporary critics of his labor note that he did not make any attempt to appreciate the oriental religions upon which he launched attack, and reprimand him for invoking the assistance of the investigation and sanctioning maltreatment of the Nestorians in Malabar. He strived, with a triumph catastrophic to the Portuguese realm, to convert the administration in Goa into a proselytizing organization. all through his life he kept in close contact with Ignatius of Loyola, who is thought to have chosen St. Francis as his own heir apparent as the head of the Society of Jesus. In a not many weeks of St. Francis’s death, certainly, Ignatius did send correspondence recalling him back to Europe with that very end in view. REVIEW Since the missions are so significant to the Jesuits, St. Ignatius considered that at all times being accessible and prepared to acknowledge any mission was utmost for a Jesuit. The currently legendary rejoinder of St. Francis Xavier to the famous call by Ignatius' to a mission in the distant East, epitomizes the significance of Ignatius’ hint of "interior freedom". The Jesuit is to agree to any mission no matter what, everywhere, and to anyone it may be. These are the principles upon which Francis Xavier and the Jesuit missions in the Far East is built. On the other hand, this inner freedom does not come without human intervention for every Jesuit (at least not initially). Relatively, it comes in the course of the difficult route of "dying to oneself" as well as "self abnegation". It comes during the track of his development and incessantly throughout his spiritual life. It is therefore with superior reason that these two terms ("dying to oneself" and "self abnegation") are instituted repeatedly all through both the Spiritual Exercises also the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Certainly, it is merely through liberty from one’s attachments, even if they are good or evil, that one can turn up at the Ignatian logic of “indifference” and “interior freedom”. For the old monastic ritual, this could be what Francis called apatheia, i.e. autonomy from muddled passions of papers. St Francis was renowned as one of the Catholic’s most effectual distant missionaries, but yet more vital in the popular thoughts was his reputation as worker of several miracles, be they straightforward and modest, such as that of the crab as Osswald (2002) notes and that retrieved the Je'suit’s cruci?x misplaced in the sea, or further astounding and brilliant, such as the many cases of natives allegedly raised from death by Xavier (Cat. 23, p. 99). even though enduring fame in the writings and iconography adjacent to Xavier, lots of these miracles, on the other hand, have at the moment been confirmed to be not based in genuineness by Jesuit scholars on their own. For example, as St. Francis’ British born Jesuit biographer, James Brodrick says, “The legend that St. Francis ‘spoke in tongues’ was traced to its source . . . and shown to be quite baseless. The story of the Crab and the Cruci?x, which Pere [Hippolyte] Delehaye [eminent sr/yo/ar afC/arirtz'an bagz'ograpby] dismissed as merely a borrowing from Japanese mythology, received even rougher treatment from his successor as Director of the Bollandists, that great scholar and man, Pere Paul Peeters” who holds that “the whole story was an invention of the seedy ex-gunner and refugee, Fausto Rodriguez, a Portuguese living on Spanish charity in the Philippines.” In reality, uncertainties and opposition over Xavier’s noted miracles, particularly the many cases of raising the dead, blew up very early on in this crusade for canonization, and precisely inside the Society of Jesus itself. The disagreement was brought out by the unbelievable pages dedicated to Xavier and his miracles integrated in the Lg?e oflgnatz'm Loyola (Vita Ignatz'i Lain/ac) printed by one of the most renowned members of the Jesuit curia, Pedro de Ribadeneira (1526-1611). As the very James Brodrick lamented, from the “seeds” of Ribadeneira’s report of Xavier’s many miracles, there came about “a substantial tree of legend.” Ribadeneira’s hagiographical text, concluded by 1569, was simply allowed to be in print in 1572; which they still consider a work not finalized, the Lzfe of Ignatius sent out to the very Far East to two of the principal Jesuit authorities on the East Indian missions and Xavier, Manuel Teixeira (also worked beside Xavier inside India) and Alessandro Valignano (The director of mission operations in that very part of the globe) for their verdict on its stuffing. mutually the men wrote a response to the Jesuit Curia, severely criticizing the print on Xavier. Each and every one of the above-described workings and actions finely served, in manners direct and not direct, the purpose of the enormous, unrelenting, and vigorous campaign for Xavier’s canonization which began in1553 and then finally came to fine completion on March 12, 1622: on that date, the official ceremony of the canonizations of Xavier along with Ignatius (the Jesuit Society’s “premier” saint) were carried out in St. Peter’s Basilica, amid great pomp and sumptuous festivity. These celebrations lasted some days and were of a degree deemed remarkable even in the Baroque Rome where out of this world pomp and events were things of daily life. The canonizations were a victory for the Society of Jesus that finally “had arrived.” They were a success also for the other chief party that had all through lobbied firmly for them, the Spanish loyalty, whose influence was at its very stature in Europe, most particularly in papal Rome where the “Spanish imperial domination” signified “the key political reality.” References Osswald, Maria Christina. “The Iconography and Cult of Francis Xavier, 1552-1640.” Arehiunm I-Iistorieurn Sueietalir Iern 71 (2002): 259-77. Oswald,Julius, “Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier.” Arehivurn Hirtorienm Societati: Iesu 71 (2002): 231-47 Schurhammer, Georg. Francir Xavier: Hi: Life, Hi: Timer. 4 vols. Trans. M. Joseph Costelloe. Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973-82 Standaert, Nicolas. “The Transmission of Renaissance Culture in Seventeenth-Century China.” Renaiuanee Six/die: 17 (2003): 367-91 Read More