Born April 7, 1506,
Sangüesa, Spain
Died December 3, 1552,
Shanq-ch’uan, China
Francis Xavier was born in his family’s castle of Xavier near the town of Sangüesa in the Basque country of northem Spain on April 7, 1506. His father, Juan de Jasso, was the president of the council in the court of the king of Navarre. Xavier grew up in Navarre, where he also received his early education. In 1525 he went to study at the University of Paris; he graduated with a master of arts degree in 1530, then lectured at one of the colleges of the university. While at the university Francis Xavier became an associate of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits. Xavier took the vows of poverty and chastity in August 1534; he studied theology until 1536 when he went to Venice, Italy, to be ordained as a priest on June 24, 1537.
Xavier was sent to Lisbon in 1540 by the pope with a recommendation to King João III of Portugal that he be assigned as a missionary to the Far East, where Portugal was the leading European trading nation. He left Portugal on April 7, 1541, spent the following winter in the Portuguese province of Mozambique, and arrived at the Portuguese city of Goa in India on May 6, 1542. He made a trip to Travancore in southern India in 1543 and is credited with baptizing 10,000 Indians into Christianity while there. On his return to Goa he was appointed chief of all Catholic missions east of the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa.
In 1545 Xavier traveled to Portuguese posts in southern India and then went to the great trading center of Malacca in what is now Malaysia. In 1546 he traveled to the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in eastern Indonesia. He returned to Malacca in July 1547. In Malacca he heard for the first time about the distant islands of Japan, where three Portuguese traders had landed in 1542 after having been shipwrecked while on a voyage to northern China. As news of Japan filtered back to the Portuguese trading stations, Xavier determined to go to the country himself. First, however, he returned to India.
Xavier left Goa bound for Japan on April 15, 1549, with two Jesuit companions and three young Japanese who had come with a Portuguese trader to Malacca and had been converted to Christianity. They arrived at the port of Kagoshima on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu on August 15, 1549. Xavier stayed in Japan for two years. During that time he traveled to the port of Hirado on a small island off the west coast of Kyushu.
Xavier then traveled to the castle town of Yamaguchi, which was the headquarters of the Ouchi clan, the feudal rulers of western Japan. At Yamaguchi he argued matters of theology with Buddhist monks of the Lotus and Zen sects. When he visited the capital of the emperor of Japan at Kyoto, he found the city in political turmoil, so he returned to Yamaguchi. At Bungo, the center of the Otomo clan, he was warmly accepted; the head of the Otomo clan converted to Christianity and welcomed Xavier’s successors.
As a result of Xavier’s visit, a Roman Catholic mission was founded on the southern island of Kyushu and had a great deal of success over the following decades. By the year 1615 there were an estimated 500,000 Christians in Japan. At that time, however, the Tokugawa military governor had started to persecute Christians and to cut Japan’s ties with the rest of the world. The Portuguese were expelled in 1639, and contact with Europe was limited to a small Dutch trading post in the southern city of Nagasaki, which had been founded by Christians in the 1560s and was sometimes ruled by Jesuits.
Xavier left Bungo in November 1551, reaching Goa in the middle of February 1552. He had decided his next goal was to start missions in China. However, the great Chinese empire, becoming wary of foreign influence and power, was zealously guarding entry into its domains. A Portuguese ambassador was sent out to try to get permission for Xavier to travel to China and to secure the release of some Portuguese who were being held in Canton. The Chinese refused even to talk to the ambassador. Having left Goa on April 17, 1552, Xavier was already in Malacca and he decided to enter China on his own, without official permission. At the end of August Xavier reached the small island of Shang-ch’uan in the Pearl River estuary near Canton, where the Portuguese had been allowed to set up a small trade fair. He became ill in November and died at Shang-ch’uan on December 3, 1552. He was made a saint of the Roman Catholic church in 1622.
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