A saint for the East or the Portuguese expansion into the East?

Originally posted May 21st, 2010

After many years of Jesuit training, I took as a matter of faith that Francis Xavier was the first multi-cultural saint, having spent 11 of his 46 short years in the East. Nothing could be farther from the truth. His mission was closely tied to the Portuguese colonization of India, begun in 1498 by Vasco da Gama. Xavier arrived in Goa on May 6th 1542, along with Portuguese explorers, seamen, soldiers, and merchants—the first or second wave of occupiers. As a Jesuit, he vowed to spread the gospel of Jesus, but he was so fully aligned with European/Portuguese plans to dominate the East that it creates a very messy picture. Pope John Paul the Second, of Blessed Memory, was not around to hound Jesuits who delved into politics, though the army of God five hundred years ago was firmly in the pocket of the colonial, military-industrial, slave-trading complex. The exact opposite of Bob Drinan or Fernando Cardenal Martínez.

The history of any revolution or period of innovation is hard to read. I am skeptical of any authorized version, particularly a story of the human and divine interacting. Though the Roman church and the Jesuits insist that Jesus came to save all humankind regardless of race, or language, or tradition, when I look at the cultural artifacts of Xavier's mission, the architecture and iconography, I see a different story.

Portuguese governance of the territories they occupied in India lasted from 1505 through 1947. After Gandhi, these scattered coastal enclaves, known as Portuguese India, or Goa in popular parlance, began to be taken over by India. The pace accelerated in 1954, when peaceful Satyagrahis' attempts at forcing the Portuguese to leave were brutally suppressed.

This postcard commemorates the Saint issued by Portuguese India in 1946, a year before Indian independence.

The following images are presented as evidence that Xavier was, and is still, a very European saint. The photographs are of Bom Jesu (1695 C.E.) and the Se Cathedral in Old Goa. (Photography by Garry Demarest.)

Xavier’s casket in the Basilica of Bom Jesu.

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The nave of the Basilica of Bom Jesu

Close-up of the main altar in Bom Jesu

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Another altar in Bom Jesu

Se Cathedral, Old Goa.

The nave of Se Cathedral.

Xavier is still part of the life of many Indian Christians, many generations removed from his appearance in Goa more than 450 years ago.

This is an older church in Old Goa that predates the current Basilica of 1695.

Roman Catholicism didn't completely conquer the hearts and minds of the local peoples. It is still India. Christianity can never be more than a competing cult.

The Creation of a European Saint in Baroque Art

Nicolas Poussin (1595-1664)

The Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier

Saint Francis Xavier by Andrea Pozo (1642-1709), lay brother of the Society of Jesus, 1701, Oil on canvas, Kiscelli Museum, Budapest.

Peter Paul Rubens 1617/1618



This monumental painting was displayed alternately with The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola on the high altar of Antwerp's Jesuit Church.



St. Francis Xavier stands preaching to a crowd of people. Some of the miracles he performed as part of his missionary activity in Asia are vividly depicted, both as a testimony to the Counter-Reformation and as preparation for the beatification of St. Francis Xavier in 1619. A man is summoned back from the dead, the blind and lame are healed, and in the temple an idol is falling, broken, to the ground.

Depiction of one of the miracles of Francis Xavier.

André Reinoso, The Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier (1619)
at the Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Lisboa / Museu de São Roque, Lisbon, Portugal

Images from Japanese Art

Traditional screens. Images of the great Portuguese trading ships. Jesuits, or priests, are among the passengers.

And finally some of the sweeter images of Xavier. Although my analysis has portrayed Xavier as a very European figure, that is not to say that his influence was entirely negative. (The tonsure on Xavier might indicate that he has been incorrectly identified with one of the Franciscans who followed the Jesuits in Japan).

Goa, Saint Francis and Me

McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, India
April 7, 2014

Part of this article was written for the publication of "Spiritual Journeys" by a group of former Jesuits.

One Sunday this past February, my partner and I went to the English mass at the Basilica of Bom Jesu in Goa. We were initially directed towards that queue, but after some negotiation, we found our way into a back pew in the main church. During mass, people venerating Saint Francis Xavier wind through the courtyard of the Jesuit residence and pass his shrine, a small Baroque-style altar where what’s left of his body is encased in glass.

I began to feel at home with the familiarity of the Jesuit ceremony and was able to pay more attention. The priest’s sermon was not easy to follow. He struggled to connect Xavier’s religious enthusiasm to martyrdom, comparing the Saint’s remarkable life with the current situation of Christians in India. But Xavier died a natural death and, though some are in fact persecuted, Christians in India are generally very well accepted. In fact, in Goa, they pretty much control everything. I gave up on following the Jesuits’ exhortations and drifted off, studying the congregation, mostly Indians, and indeed, as English speakers, well educated. They were not paying much attention to the sermon either; women looked after crying children, men closed their eyes and nodded, in many ways similar to the Irish American parish of my childhood.

The sermon and the ceremony were also disconnected from what was happening at the side altar, where men, women, and children, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, pushed their way forward towards the barely visible body of the saint. We’d seen almost identical scenes at the many temples, mosques, shrines, gurdwaras we’ve visited across India, people seeking healing, relief from suffering, forgiveness for a personal transgression, blessings for a new marriage, a prayer for a child’s good fortune, or perhaps even a superstitious belief that touching his statue would produce a child. To be honest, it felt disconnected from the Catholic, Jesuit saint I thought I knew, but it was real.

I turned my attention back to the altar and suddenly felt deep compassion, even kinship with the Indian Jesuit. He was obviously a competent, educated, thoughtful, even a devout, spiritual man who was sincerely trying to connect our messy lives with another dimension. With any luck, I might have turned out like him, but in that same moment, I also realized why I’d left the Society.

After I graduated from Dartmouth in 1966, over the objections of my parents, I entered the Jesuits and stayed for more than a decade. When the time came for me to be ordained, I took a leave of absence and extended it for 2 years before I asked to be relieved of religious vows. During that exclaustration, I realized that I had to confront, and deal with coming out as a gay man, my addictive personality, and, at the time, I thought that the most effective path was psychological work rather than prayer or meditation.

I had, of course, done the spiritual exercises of Father Ignatius many times. The experience was rich. When I was trying to decide whether to leave or stick it out, I undertook them again, as well as trying to recreate some of that experience through a study of the enneagram, and beginning Buddhist meditation practice. Then, for more than three decades, I either wore the designation “ex-Jesuit” as a badge of honor or disavowed any value in my religious training except on the rare occasion when I ran into someone from that era.

Twenty-five years ago, a chance meeting with a Zen priest who was starting a hospice for people with AIDS turned my attention back to meditation practice. It also allowed me to carefully trace the roots of suffering through a spiritual practice that is agnostic with regard to any particular religious system of beliefs.

Today, my experience in the Society of Jesus grows dim, like a series of events in a very distant land, but what remains is a sense of intimacy that feels indelible and timeless. Most of the struggles of my youth, coming out in an unaccepting culture, finding a spiritual expression that suited me, have faded into the background. I no longer seek the kind of answers that I demanded years ago.

I regard spirituality as reflecting on the questions that life presents squarely, and I value seeing things through to the end, even things that did not turn out well. Most of the ordinary language of spiritual conversation feels inadequate. If I describe my particular path as a series of transitions, I feel I’m being melodramatic. Speaking of a path or a journey sounds like I just bought some nifty running shoes to train for a marathon at my unlikely age.

That morning in Goa, I didn’t feel distant or unconnected, but rather like I’d just grown up and realized that even if my life amounted to only a brief second, in that time I could leave things better than I found them, that I was not alone, and that the universe is vast and awe-inspiring.

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The Experience of the Spiritual Exercises is indelible.

I entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, on August 15th, 1966, at Shadowbrook in Lenox, Massachusetts. After a few months to acclimate to the schedule of getting up at 5:25 and bed at 9:30, the first-year novices were guided through the Spiritual Exercises. For a full month, the whole community was totally focused on the discipline of the Exercises, as strict as the discipline of any Zen hall--total silence, 7 hours of contemplation every day, an unwavering methodical sequence of meditations, invocations, and most importantly, in retrospect, the Examen.

The bell that alerted us to prayer, or mass, or spiritual reading, or the daily conferences with the Master of novices, was not a beautiful, clear temple bell. Rather, it had the urgency of the alarm that gets firemen out of bed in the middle of the night. We were not to be monks dedicated to a life of prayer within exclusionary monastic walls. We were being trained to pray hard and work hard for the Kingdom of God.

After we took religious vows, every year we dedicated 8 days to the exercises. These were the heady days that followed Vatican II, so the strict retreat format, the fire and brimstone of the 1st week, for example, had fallen into disfavor.

Now, more than 50 years later, it is hard to believe that the Exercises had such a visceral effect, creating an opening for an experience of the Transcendent in the way that they did. I remember as a teenager reading Joyce’s description of the preacher's sermon on Hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My Novice Master, Fr. T. J. C. O'Callaghan, may have lacked the dramatic flair of Joyce’s retreat master, but he followed the same script to create a picture of the fiery world of the unforgivable. That, combined with a retreat environment created by the 80 men who shared the life of the novitiate, the silence, the liturgies, the homilies, the food, and the penances, our lives were geared to the meditations of 4 weeks of the Exercises.

I remained in the Society until 1976. But 5 years before I left, I began to realize that the traditional rigidity of religious life was not going to be a happy fit for me. Leaving the Jesuits was a difficult choice. I had been very happy studying theology and exploring religious practice. I wanted to show the same respect for my choice to abandon the Society as I did for my choice to take religious vows. And so I undertook the Exercises again in a form called the 19th annotation. In place of 30 days of seclusion and intense prayer, I dedicated an hour every day for almost a year and, with a director, followed the order of prayer and meditation that Ignatius set within the four weeks. I was already practicing both zazen and Vipassana meditation by then, and though I didn’t consciously try to blend the two practices, that is in fact exactly what I was doing.

I cannot cut myself off from the life-giving roots in the Exercises. For most successful Jesuits, the Exercises have been grafted into their bones. I was not immune—it can even happen in 10 years. I have discovered several links between meditation practice and Ignatian discipline. I have written about two aspects, the Examen and the Discernment of Spirits. If you want to read further, follow the links on the Page “Writings about Father Ignatius.”