Francis of Jassu and Xavier, from a noble Navarrese family, was born in the castle of Javier, near Sangüesa. He studied in Paris, where he became close to Saint Ignatius of Loyola. He was ordained a priest in Venice and later helped in Rome with the writing of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
In 1541, he left Lisbon for the East Indies, sent both as an emissary of the King of Portugal and as papal legate. This began ten years of intense missionary work across India, Malacca, the Moluccas, other Pacific islands, and Japan. The center of his mission was Goa, where he lived as the first Jesuit provincial of India. During his years of preaching, the saint baptized around 30,000 people.
He died on the island of Sancian at the age of forty-six, on December 3, 1552, as he was preparing to begin the evangelization of China. His body was later taken to Goa, where it is still venerated. Canonized in 1662, he was named patron of the East, and later, together with Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, patron of all missions.
Full of zeal and a gifted organizer, Francis Xavier has sometimes been criticized for trying to do too much in his missionary efforts; some say that a slower, more focused approach would have given his work more permanence. Still, Francis Xavier stands as the first missionary, in the modern sense, who taught his successors to adapt as much as possible to the cultures and ways of the people they were evangelizing.
