Five Favorites (Vol 7) Quotes From St. Francis Xavier

On December 3, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Francis Xavier, patron saint of missionaries. St. Francis Xavier was a Jesuit missionary best known for the thousands of people he brought to conversion and Baptism in India and Japan. In a letter he wrote from the missionary fields in India, he described the amount of people he Baptized in vivid language: “As to the numbers who become Christians, you may understand them from this, that it often happens to me to be hardly able to use my hands from the fatigue of baptizing: often in a single day I have baptized whole villages. Sometimes I have lost my voice and strength altogether with repeating again and again the Credo and the other forms.”Here’s an interesting fact about St. Francis Xavier that I found in Saints for Young Readers for Every Day, Vol. 2: July-December : Pope Gregory XV canonized St. Francis Xavier in 1622 along with Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer.  WOW!  What a lineup!  I can only imagine the graces that must have flowed at that Canonization. Thank you Lord for your saints! The book also describes St. Francis Xavier’s heroism and determination to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ using these powerful “tools”: his gentle polite ways and his prayers. Double WOW!  There are lots of times I think that I don’t have the right “tools” to spread the Gospel even in my small corner of the world. That fact is, we cannot underestimate the effectiveness our faith, virtue and prayers can have in any evangelization effort – even those that occur around our kitchen table! We too can be a powerful missionary like St. Francis Xavier if we, like him, abandon ourselves completely to the Lord with faithful,