François Xavier
1506-1552 16th century Feast day: December 3
Desire that never settles: always farther, as long as someone remains who has not heard of God.
Who was François Xavier?
A Basque, companion of Ignatius of Loyola from their student years in Paris, he sailed in 1541 for the Portuguese Indies. Eleven years on the road (Goa, the Pearl Fishery Coast, the Moluccas, Japan), baptizing and catechizing in languages he barely mastered, within a colonial empire whose methods and harshness he sometimes made his own. He died in 1552 on the island of Sancian, at the gates of a closed China he never entered.
In their own words
So many people here do not become Christians for one reason only: there is no one to make them Christians.
It often comes into my mind to go round all the universities of Europe, and especially Paris, crying out everywhere like a man who has lost his senses: how many souls are shut out of the glory of heaven through your neglect.
The people we have met here are the best that have yet been discovered; it seems to me that among peoples who do not know Christ, none will be found to equal the Japanese.