Saint Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the East, was a complete Hispanic (see Hispania): Navarran and Spanish, by birth; Portuguese, by loyalty; Catholic, above all, and a true glory of the Society of Jesus, of which he was one of the founders. The 500th anniversary of his birth will be marked by special celebrations in and around the Castle of Javier (Xavier), where he was born, on April 7, 1506.It is a good time to remember important moments in his life. Father John Laures, SJ, remembered, right after the war which devastated Japan (including the sad destruction of its most Catholic city, Nagasaki), some special moments of Xavier's apostolate in the Far East:
On June 24, 1549, Xavier set out from Malacca, accompanied by two European companions, three Japanese who had been prepared for the work of catechists, and two Indian servants. They landed at Kagoshima, Yajiro's birthplace, on August 15 of the same year. His ambition was to obtain permission from the Emperor to preach the Gospel and convert the Japanese in any part of the country. Shimazu Takahisa, Daimyo of Satsuma, greatly rejoiced to receive the foreign preacher and was anxious to keep him in Kagoshima, for he secretly hoped to attract Portuguese ships to his harbors by the presence of foreign missionaries. Xavier waited more than a year but seeing Shimazu was not interested in his journey to the capital, he left Kagoshima to proceed to Hirado, a port frequented by Portuguese ships. Nor did he linger at Hirado long but set out for Kyoto, the capital arriving on the way at Yamaguchi in the middle of November, 1549.
Yamaguchi was at that time a very important town, being the seat of the mighty Ouchi clan which ruled not only the Province of Suwo but also a number of neighboring provinces on the mainland of Honshu and the island of Kyushu. Having learned that Ouchi, the head of the clan was the slave of a most abominable vice, Xavier determined to stay in the city for some time to preach the Gospel. Every day, he and his companion, Brother Fernandez, took their stand at a crossroads, Brother Fernandez reading a passage from the handwritten catechism prepared by Xavier and Yajiro while they were at Kagoshima. After reading the account of the creation of the world, Fernandez would denounce in a loud voice what he believed to be the three cardinal sins of the Japanese people, viz. idolatry, sodomy, and infanticide. While he was inveighing against these vices, Xavier would stand by and pray fervently for the success of their mission. This was done twice every day and always in a different section of the city so that very soon there was no corner in Yamaguchi where the word of God was not heard.
What would Xavier have thought had he known that the barbaric sins of Japan would take over Christendom and be celebrated in his own Spanish motherland some hundreds of years later?
