The Face of Mercy / Daniel Conway

Francis Xavier, Theodore Guérin were passionate, Spirit-filled evangelizers

(En Espanol)

Earlier this year, Pope Francis used his weekly general audience on Wednesdays to offer his reflections on the Church’s missionary work, highlighting several of the saintly women and men who have preached the Gospel with extraordinary apostolic zeal.

On May 17, the Holy Father chose one of the patron saints of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, St. Francis Xavier, to illustrate what he means by “an exemplary model of apostolic zeal.”

As Pope Francis says: “St. Francis Xavier was born into a noble but impoverished family in Navarre, northern Spain, in 1506. He went to study in Paris. He was a worldly young man, intelligent, good.

“There, he met Ignatius of Loyola, who made him do spiritual exercises and changed his life. And he left all his worldly career to become a missionary. He became a Jesuit, took his vows. Then he became a priest and, sent to the East, he went to evangelize. At that time, the journeys of the missionaries to the East meant being sent to unknown worlds. And he went, because he was filled with apostolic zeal.”

To be “filled with apostolic zeal” is to be infused with the grace of the Holy Spirit and to feel compelled to share the good news of Jesus Christ as the Apostles did.

Pope Francis frequently refers to those who are called to be missionary disciples as “Spirit-filled evangelizers.” In fact, this is a calling that each of us received at the time of our baptism, but the more than 2,000 years of Church history have shown us that some men and women among us have received a special calling (or “charism”) that compels them to travel far and wide in spreading the Gospel.

Because he is himself a Jesuit, it’s understandable that our Holy Father would call our attention to Francis Xavier as a model missionary disciple.

“Today, we choose as an example St. Francis Xavier, who some say is considered the greatest missionary of modern times,” the pope said. “But it is not possible to say who is the greatest, who is the least, because there are many hidden missionaries who, even today, do much more than St. Francis Xavier. And Xavier is the patron of missions, like St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus.” In truth, each of us is called to be a “hidden missionary” at least in the sense that we must carry the message wherever we go—near or far—and are not necessarily recognized for our evangelizing ministry.

What made Francis Xavier stand out was his restless spirit, which refused to let him settle for the status quo. As the Holy Father notes, there was no shortage of hardships involved in traveling to the far east—India, Japan and almost to China—to introduce the person of Jesus Christ to people and cultures that had never known him.

“Voyages by ship were very harsh and they were perilous at the time,” the Holy Father observes. “Many people died en route due to shipwrecks or disease. Today unfortunately, they die because we let them die in the Mediterranean. Francis Xavier spent more than three and a half years on ships, a third of the entire duration of his mission.” And yet, missionaries like Xavier refused to let any hardships prevent them from exercising their missionary zeal.

Our co-patron of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Anne-Thérèse Guérin (1798-1856) entered religious life in her native France at the age of 25 after caring for her widowed mother and her family for 10 years.

Several years later, she led a group of five sisters on a tumultuous journey from France across the Atlantic Ocean traveling by steamship, railroad, canal boat and stagecoach only to discover that their destination was not a town but just a log cabin in the woods of western Indiana.

Once there, she encountered hostile anti-Catholicism, hunger, privation and near complete destitution resulting from a fire that destroyed the community’s harvest.

In spite of everything, Mother Theodore (as she was known then) persevered. Under her leadership, the Sisters of Providence in the United States flourished, educating thousands of children throughout Indiana and the Midwest.

St. Francis Xavier and Mother Theodore Guérin (St. Theodora) show us how to take seriously the calling we have all received to be Spirit-filled evangelizers. As Pope Francis teaches, “to leave your own country to preach the Gospel is true apostolic zeal.”
 

(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †