Modern History Sourcebook:
St. Francis Xavier:
Letter on the Missions, to St. Ignatius de Loyola, 1549
May the grace and charity of our Lord Christ always be with us! Amen.
My own and only Father in the Heart of Christ, I think that the many letters from this
place which have lately been sent to Rome will inform you how prosperously the affairs of
religion go on in these parts, through your prayers and the good bounty of God. But there
seem to be certain things which I ought myself to speak about to you; so I will just touch
on a few points relating to these parts of the world which are so distant from Rome. In
the first place, the whole race of the Indians, as far as I have been able to see, is very
barbarous; and it does not like to listen to anything that is not agreeable to its own
manners and customs, which, as I say, are barbarous. It troubles itself very little to
learn anything about divine things and things which concern salvation. Most of the Indians
are of vicious disposition, and are adverse to virtue. Their instability, levity, and
inconstancy of mind are incredible; they have hardly any honesty, so inveterate are their
habits of sin and cheating. We have hard work here, both in keeping the Christians up to
the mark and in converting the heathen. And, as we are your children, it is fair that on
this account you should take great care of us and help us continually by your prayers to
God. You know very well what a hard business it is to teach people who neither have any
knowledge of God nor follow reason, but think it a strange and intolerable thing to be
told to give up their habits of sin, which have now gained all the force of nature by long
possession.
The experience which I have of these countries makes me think that I can affirm with
truth, that there is no prospect of perpetuating our Society out here by means of the
natives themselves, and that the Christian religion will hardly survive us who are now in
the country; so that it is quite necessary that continual supplies of ours should be sent
out from Europe. We have now some of the Society in all parts of India where there are
Christians. Four are in the Moluccas, two at Malacca, six in the Comorin Promontory, two
at Coulan, as many at Bazain, four at Socotra. The distances between these places are
immense; for instance, the Moluccas are more than a thousand leagues from Goa, Malacca
five hundred, Cape Comorin two hundred, Coulan one hundred and twenty, Bazain sixty, and
Socotra three hundred. In each place there is one of the Society who is Superior of the
rest. As these Superiors are men of remarkable prudence and virtue, the others are very
well content.
The Portuguese in these countries are masters only of the sea and of the coast. On the
mainland they have only the towns in which they live. The natives themselves are so
enormously addicted to vice as to be little adapted to receive the Christian religion.
They so dislike it that it is most difficult to get them to hear us if we begin to preach
about it, and they think it like death to be asked to become Christians. So for the
present we devote ourselves to keeping the Christians whom we have. Certainly, if the
Portuguese were more remarkable for their kindness to the new converts, a great number
would become Christians; as it is, the heathen see that the converts are despised and
looked down upon by the Portuguese, and so, as is natural, they are unwilling to become
converts themselves. For all these reasons there is no need for me to labor in these
countries, and as I have learnt from good authorities that there is a country near China
called Japan, the inhabitants of which are all heathen, quite untouched by Mussulmans or
Jews, and very eager to learn what they do not know both in things divine and things
natural, I have determined to go thither as soon as I can....
Source:
From: Henry James Coleridge, ed., The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, 2d
Ed., 2 Vols., (London: Burns & Oates, 1890), Vol. II, pp. 67-75; reprinted in William
H. McNeil and Mitsuko Iriye, eds., Modern Asia and Africa, Readings in World
History Vol. 9, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 11-13.
Scanned by Jerome S. Arkenberg, Cal. State Fullerton. The text has been modernized by
Prof. Arkenberg.
This text is part of the Internet
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