St. Francis Xavier

Who they were

Francis Xavier was a Navarrese athlete and academic at the University of Paris whose roommate, an odd limping older student named Ignatius, spent years asking him one question: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. It eventually took. One of the first seven Jesuits, Xavier was sent east in 1541 and never came back. Goa, the pearl-fishery coast of India where he baptised so many that he said his arms gave out, the Moluccas, and in 1549 Japan, where he began the Church's first mission there, learning the language badly and revering the culture openly. He died in 1552 on an island off the Chinese coast, waiting for a smuggler's boat into the closed empire, at forty-six. His body rests in Goa.

Why people turn to St. Francis Xavier

Missionaries and mission societies formally. Informally, families with someone serving, studying or deployed very far from home. He wrote letters across oceans that took two years to answer, and knew exactly what that distance costs.

How to ask their intercession

For someone far away, by name and by place. His feast opens December, a fitting month to pray for the people who will not make it home.