The Jesuits, 1534-1921. Thomas J. Campbell
nursing them when they were sick, and gently taking them to task for their ill-spent lives. All day long he was busy with them, and during the night he was scourging himself or praying. By the time the ship reached its destination it was a floating church.
Goa was the capital of Portuguese India. It was not yet the golden Goa of the seventeenth century; but it had churches and chapels and a cathedral, an inchoate college and a bishop and a Franciscan friary. Mingled, however, with the Christian population was a horde of idolaters, Mussulmans, Jews, Arabians, Persians, Hindoos and others, all of them rated as inferior races by the Portuguese who were the hidalgos or fidalgos of Goa, even if they had been cooks and street-sweepers in Lisbon or Oporto. They were now clad in silks and brocades, and wore gold and precious gems in profusion; they delighted in religious displays; but in morality they were more debased than the worst pagans they jostled against in the streets. There were open debauchery, concubinage, polygamy and kindred crimes.
The coming of the papal nuncio was a great event, but he refused all recognition of his official rank. He lived in the hospital, looked after the lepers in their sheds, or the criminals in the jails, taught the children their catechism, and conversed with people of every class and condition. He got the secrets of their conscience; and in five months, Goa, at least in its Christian population, was as decent in its morals as it had formerly been corrupt and depraved. At the end of the peninsula, but beyond Cape Comorin, were the Pearl Fisheries, where lived a degraded caste who had been visited by the Franciscans and baptized some years before; but they had been left in their ignorance and vice, and no one in Goa now ever gave them a thought. Thither Xavier betook himself with his chalice and vestments and breviary, but with no provisions for his support.
On his way he passed Salsette, where Rudolph Aquaviva was martyred in later days; and he saw Canara and Mangalore and Cananon, where there was a mission station. He then went to Calicut and Cranganore and Cape Comorin, where the goddess Dourga was worshipped, and finally arrived at the Fisheries, where he found a people who were wretchedly poor, with nothing to cover them but a turban and a breech-clout, and who lived in huts along the shifting sands near the cocoanut-trees. With their tiny boats and rafts they contrived to get a livelihood from the sea, but they were shunned by the other Hindoos; for baptism had made them outcasts, and they were also the helpless victims of the pirates who were constantly prowling along the coast. Xavier lived in their filthy houses, talked with them through interpreters, gave them what instructions they were capable of receiving, and baptised all who had not yet become Christians. He remained two years with them, and after getting Portuguese ships to patrol the Sea, sent other missionaries to replace him when he had built catechumenates and little churches here and there. Although Xavier appears to have justified these rapid conversions by the precedent of 3000 people becoming Christians after the first sermon of St. Peter, yet Ignatius, while not blaming his methods, wrote him later that the instructions should precede and not follow baptism, and that quality rather than quantity should be the guide in accessions to the Faith.
Xavier returned thence to Goa, but we find him in the last days of September, 1545, abandoning India for a time and going ashore near the Portuguese settlement on the Straits of Malacca. It was a dangerous post, for it swarmed with Mohammedans. There were fierce écumeurs de mer, or sea-combers, on the near-by coasts of Sumatra, and on the island of Bitang the dethroned sultans were waiting for a chance to expel the Portuguese, while all through the interior were fierce and unapproachable savage tribes. Besides all this, the whites who had settled there for trade were a depraved mob; it is recorded that Xavier spent three whole days without food hearing their confessions, and passed entire nights praying for their conversion. In spite of all this accumulation of labor, he contrived to write a catechism and a prayer-book in Malay. In 1546 he went further east, past Java and Flores, and reached the Moluccas after a month and a half. He was on sociable terms everywhere, with soldiers and sailors and commandants of posts as well as cannibals, and made light of every hardship and danger in his efforts to win souls to God. Up and down the islands of the archipelago he travelled, meeting degeneracy of the worst kind at every step. But he established missionary posts, with the wonderful result that ten years later, De Beira, whom he sent there, had forty-seven stations and 300 °Christian families in these islands. Xavier spent two years in the Moluccas to prepare the way, and was back again in Goa in 1548.
During his absence, a number of missionaries, making in all six priests and nine coadjutor brothers, had been sent from Portugal. With them were a dozen Dominicans. Among the Jesuits were Fernandes and Cosmo de Torres, who, later on, were to be along with Xavier the founders of the great mission of Japan. There came also Antonio Gomes, a distinguished student of Coimbra, a master of arts, a doctor of canon law, and a notable orator. But, except as an orator, he was not to have the success in Goa that he had won in Lisbon. Likewise in the party was Gaspard Baertz, a Fleming, who had had a varied career, as a master of arts at Louvain, a soldier in the army of Charles V, a hermit at Montserrat, a Jesuit in Coimbra, and now a missionary in India. It was Baertz's capacity for work that prompted Xavier's famous petition: "Da mihi fortes Belgas" (Give me sturdy Belgians). Criminali, the first of the Society to be martyred in the East, had arrived previously, as had Lancilotti, a consumptive, who seemed to be particularly active in writing letters to Rome complaining of Xavier's frequent absences from Goa.
Gomes was appointed rector of the nondescript college, which belonged to the Bishop of Goa, and which had been partly managed by Lancilotti up to that time. The new superior immediately proceeded to turn everything upside down, and his hard, authoritative methods of government immediately caused discontent. According to Lancilotti, he was utterly unused to the ways of the Society in dealing not only with the members of the community but with the native students. His idea was to make the college another Coimbra – a great educational institution with branches at Cochin, Bacaim and elsewhere. However, the plan was not altogether his conception. Something of that kind had been projected for India in connection with a great educational movement which was agitating Portugal at that time. In writing to Lisbon and Rome about this matter, Xavier incidentally reveals his ideas on the question of a native priesthood. He required for it several previous generations of respectable Christian parents. The division of castes in India also created a difficulty, for the reason that a priest taken from one caste was never allowed intercourse with those who belonged to another; and, finally, he pointed out that for a Portuguese to confess to a native was unthinkable.
Meanwhile, although domestic matters were not as satisfactory as they might have been, Xavier was planning his departure for Japan. He first visited several posts and settled the difficulties that presented themselves. Gomes was his chief source of worry, and there is no doubt that he would have been removed from his post as rector on account of the dissatisfaction he had caused, had it not been for his wonderful popularity in the city as a preacher. Just then a change might have caused an outbreak among the people and a rupture with the bishop. Xavier contented himself, therefore, with restricting the activities of Gomes to temporal matters; and assigned to Cypriano the care of the spiritual interests of the community. He could have done nothing more, even if he had remained at Goa.
These repeated absences of Francis Xavier from Goa have often been urged against him as revealing a serious defect in his character; a yielding to what was called "Basque restlessness," which prompted those who had that strain in their blood to be continually on the road in quest of new scenes and romantic adventures. The real reason seems to have been his despair of doing anything in Goa, with its jumble of Moslems and pagans and corrupt Portuguese, and its string of military posts where every little political commandant was perpetually interfering with missionary efforts. It could never be the centre of a great missionary movement. "I want to be," he said, "where there are no Moslems or Jews. Give me out and out pagans, people who are anxious to know something new about nature and God, and I am determined to find them." He had heard something about Japan, as verifying these conditions; and, though he had travelled much already and was aware of the complaints about himself, he resolved to go further still; so, taking with him de Torres and Fernandes, besides a Japanese convert, Xaca, and two servants, he set his face towards the Land of the Rising Sun. He was then forty-three years of age.
He was at Malacca from May 31 to June 24, 1549, and found that the missions he had established there were doing remarkably well, as were the others in the Moluccas. The latter, however, he did not visit. He started for Japan in a miserable Chinese junk, three other associates