Inspired by St. Francis Xavier

Homily at the Feast of St. Francis Xavier, Patron of Missions, December 3, 2002

By Fr. John Carten, S.F.M.
March 2003

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First of all I want to welcome all of you as we come together to celebrate the Feast of St. Francis Xavier who died on December 3, 1552, on the island of Sancian off the coast of Canton, China.

Fr. John Carten receives the offertory from parishioners in Japan. Fr. Carten first went to Japan in 1972 and has served most of his priesthood there. Last year he returned to Canada and is now a member of Scarboro Missions General Council.

St. Francis Xavier is one of the patrons of missions, so today we as Scarboro missioners celebrate our feast day. Present with us are Jesuit Fr. Jack O’Brien and members of Our Lady’s Missionaries who, along with countless others also claim Xavier as one of their patrons.

In effect, as we celebrate our feast day here at Scarboro, we welcome all of you to celebrate our common feast, giving thanks together for the call to be missioners and for Xavier’s great example to us.

As you all know, Xavier was full of incredible zeal to reach out to new peoples, to proclaim the Good News. And he did so with great enthusiasm. In a brief span of 10 years, from 1542 to 1552, Xavier traveled from Portugal to India to Goa and the Molucca Islands near New Guinea, then on to Japan and back to Goa, and finally he set out for China, dying just in sight of his goal.

This zeal to set off for new places to proclaim God’s word inspired our own founder, John Mary Fraser, to go to China. And it continues to inspire missioners today to move beyond the familiar and reach out to the ‘other,’ so that we will discover and celebrate the incredible mystery of God’s presence in all peoples.

We in Scarboro can think of many in our own community who have willingly set out for new frontiers in just these past few months: Fr. Charlie Gervais to Ecuador, Fr. Dave Warren to Guyana, Fr. Pat Kelly to Thailand, Fr. Ray O’Toole to Hong Kong, and lay missioner Susan Keays to Thailand. Ray and Beverley Vantomme have returned to Malawi.

The same spirit inspires priest candidate Ignacio Pinedo to renew his oath of commitment today during our gathering.

Today’s Gospel account mentions that Jesus sent out 70 to the towns and villages that he himself was going to visit and that, “the seventy returned with joy” and told Jesus of all that had occurred. In spite of the struggles, they were amazed at how God had acted in and through them.

Francis Xavier writing to Ignatius Loyola from Malacca, a city in Malaysia, in 1545 wrote the following, “The dangers to which I am exposed and the tasks I undertake for God are inexhaustible springs of spiritual joy…and I do not remember ever to have tasted such inward delight…”

All Scarboro missioners could recount many stories of the times we saw God active in and through the people with whom we have been privileged to walk.

Recently, several of us listened to Merv and Sonia, a Scarboro lay mission couple who have just returned from three years in Malawi. Sonia talked excitedly about an AIDS awareness program that she helped develop in the diocese where she was working. “You should have seen the wonderful volunteers we had working with us,” she said. “I loved it. And when I was leaving, they gave me a live goat to take back to Canada. Imagine, they have so little to eat, yet they gave me a goat.”

The joy Scarboro missioners experience in meeting people of other cultures is nothing less than an encounter with the face of God.

Between August 15, 1549, and 1551, Xavier spent two and a half years in Japan. In a letter of 1549, he wrote, “We shall never find among heathens another race equal to the Japanese. They are a people of very good manners, good in general, and not malicious; they are men of honor to a marvel, and prize honor above all else in the world. They are a people of very good will, very sociable and very desirous of knowledge.”

While we might shudder at the use of the word “heathens,” Xavier experienced a process of conversion, of coming to recognize the goodness and the presence of God in other peoples. We, too, share this experience where we ourselves have gone. We set out in ignorance to proclaim the word of God to others, only to discover that God is already present there, even when the people themselves do not recognize God’s presence.

Like Xavier, I also discovered the goodness of God among the Japanese. Their incredible honesty, the beauty and richness of their culture, their deep respect for nature, their deep respect for their ancestors, their perseverance in the face of suffering.

Jesus on hearing of the joy of the disciples, praises God in saying, “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.”

I think Jesus was referring to two things, to the way God worked through the disciples far beyond their expectations, and to the many ways that they discovered the presence of God among the people.

Like Jesus, we can easily sing the praises of God for the ways that we have seen the Spirit at work both in us and in the people we have been privileged to live among. We, too, can celebrate how God worked far beyond our own expectations.

In the first reading on today’s Feast of Francis Xavier, Isaiah speaks of the challenge that the Israelites of his day were facing as they felt the onslaught of the Assyrian armies. Yet in the midst of all the turmoil, he was able to say, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

Mission communities are facing incredible challenges. We are losing our priest members due to illness and are unable to attract many new priest candidates. We are faced with the challenge to change, to be able to make the Good News attractive to people today.

Cause for hope and celebration

There is a new Church slowly coming to birth and a new Scarboro Missions as well. This past summer we celebrated the fact that in spite of all the difficulties, we are being blessed with the gift of new lay missioners, male and female, single and married. We are blessed to have priest candidate Ignacio Pinedo renewing his oath today on our feast day.

As a Scarboro community, we are challenged to become a family of missioners passing on this zeal for mission to others. In spite of the destruction that Isaiah saw around him, he was able to speak with great hope and confidence that what was truly of God would continue. In spite of Xavier’s great difficulties he, too, had incredible confidence in God. Today, Scarboro missioners are challenged to be confident and hope-filled people as well.

Before going to Japan, Xavier met a Japanese man by the name of Anjiro and wrote, “I asked him whether, if I went back with him to his country, the Japanese would become Christians, and he said that…Above all, they would want to observe if I lived in conformity with what I said and believed.”

The same challenge faces us today. Not to talk about following Jesus, but to follow him; not to speak about the values of the reign of God that Jesus spoke about, but to live by the values that Jesus proclaimed as signs of discipleship.

As Ignacio Pinedo renews his oath and commitment to mission today, let us take the opportunity to renew our commitment as well. Let us give thanks for the blessings we have received and ask the Lord to fill us with the same kind of zeal for mission and confidence in God that inspired Francis Xavier and our own John Mary Fraser.

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