The Life of St. Francis Xavier: Evangelist, Explorer, Mystic. E-book. Formato PDF - 9780259668756

The Lives of St. Francis Xavier fall into three main classes - the erudite, the popular, and the pious. An addition to the first or third of these groups would have been beyond the capacity of the present writer, even had they not already had abundant attention from the devout and the scholarly. But since the original Letters and documents have been printed no popular Life of the Saint has appeared in England. The present work is an attempt to fill that blank.

In studying the life of Xavier we turn first of all to his Letters. Until a few years ago these were only accessible in Ms. or in very poor Latin versions, or in translations based on these Latin versions. But between 1899 and 1914 the Society of Jesus in Madrid published all the existing Letters and writings in their original forms, together with numerous other relative letters and documents, and the two oldest and most valuable Lives, Teixeira's and Valignano's, until then only available in Ms. This great collection, covering about 2, 000 pages, is called the Monumenta Xaveriana, and is a part of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu.

A list of subsidiary sources will be found in the Bibliography on p.345.

In an age that for all but the very wise and the very foolish is an age of moral and mental bewilderment, it is possible to understand why so many men and women are scanning the faces of the saints for help and comfort and light. There every disease of faith finds, by universal consent, some gift of restoration and healing. For in all these sicknesses there is present a blindness to the moral beauty and grandeur of man, and the contemplation of the lives of the saints, and the inevitable sense of communion with them which follows, restore again to the lonely mind and heart the far-off morning hours when it was no startling thing to catch a glimpse of some passing angels face. And more than that, this contemplative communion recalls us to the very Holy of Holies itself: "For both He that sanctified and they that are sanctified are all of one."