Madmen for Christ
Following Xavier’s example might look different today, but we could learn from his zeal.
There is now in these parts a very large number of persons who have only one reason for not becoming Christian, and that is that there is no one to make them Christians. It often comes into my mind to go round all the Universities of Europe, and especially that of Paris, crying out everywhere like a madman, and saying to all the learned men there whose learning is so much greater than their charity, "Ah! what a multitude of souls is through your fault shut out of heaven and falling into hell!"
-St. Francis Xavier, Letter from India to the Society of Jesus in Rome, 1543
I’ve been giving a series of talks and retreats across Singapore and Malaysia, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Francis Xavier this week, as I visited the city of Malacca. This was Xavier’s home base for several years and the site where he wrote many of his other famous letters.
A more recent document from a Jesuit named Francis can help translate St. Francis Xavier’s witness for our contemporary context.
In his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis wrote, “If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life.”
When I look at the US in the ten years since that document was published, I see continued religious disaffiliation, skyrocketing rates of mental distress among young people, an epidemic of loneliness, and a widespread crisis of meaning. The pope’s words seem truer than ever.
We don’t have to travel around the world to find our mission territory. There is plenty around us that “should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences.”