CHAPTER IV
Religious Faith Three Centuries ago—Zeal of the Portuguese Conquerors—Antonio Galvano—Missionary Seminaries at Ternate and Goa—Order of the Jesuits—Francis Xavier—His Mission to India—His Mission to Japan—His Companion, Cosme de Torres—The Philippine Islands—A. D. 1542-1550.
Three centuries ago the religious faith of Europe was much more energetic and active than at present. With all imaginative minds, even those of the highest order, the popular belief had at that time all the force of undoubted reality. Michael Angelo and Raphael embodied it in marble and colors; and it is difficult to say which impulse was the stronger with the Portuguese and Spanish adventurers of that age,—the fierce thirst for gold and glory, which they felt as we feel it now, or passionate desire for the propagation of their religious faith, such indeed as is still talked about, and feebly exhibited in action, but in which the great bulk of the community, especially the more cultivated part of it, takes at present either no interest, or a very slight one.
The Portuguese adventurers in the East, wherever they went, were accompanied by friars, mostly Franciscans, and the building of magnificent churches was one of the first things attended to.
Of all these adventurers, few, if indeed a single one, have left so respectable a character as Antonio Galvano, already mentioned, governor of the Moluccas from 1536 to 1540, which islands, from a state of violent hostility to the Portuguese, and rebellion against them, he brought back to quiet and willing submission. Not less distinguished for piety than for valor and disinterestedness, Galvano made every effort to diffuse among the natives of the Oriental archipelago a knowledge of the Catholic faith; and with that view he established at Ternate, seat of the Portuguese government of the Moluccas, a seminary for the education of boys of superior abilities, to be collected from various nations, who, upon arriving at maturity, might preach the gospel, each in his own country,—an institution which the Council of Trent not long after warmly approved.
By the efforts of Galvano and others a similar seminary, sometimes called “Paul’s,” and sometimes “Of the Holy Faith,” had been erected at Goa, lately made the seat of an Indian bishopric; and it was at this seminary, endowed and enriched by the spoils of many heathen temples, that the Japanese Anjirō was placed by Xavier for his education. The name which he adopted at his baptism, Paul of the Holy Faith, was, as it thus appears, taken from the seminary at which he had been educated.
But the efforts hitherto made in India on behalf of the Catholic faith, if earnest, had been desultory. The establishment of the order of Jesuits in 1540 laid the foundation for a systematic attack upon the religious systems of the East, and an attempt at a spiritual revolution there, neither less vigorous nor less pertinacious than that which, for the forty years preceding, had been carried on by the new-comers from the West against political, commercial, and social institutions of those countries.
The leader in this enterprise was Francis Aspilcota, surnamed Xavier, one of the seven associates of whom the infant Society of Jesus, destined soon to become so powerful and so famous, originally consisted. He was born in 1506, in Navarre, at the foot of the Pyrenees, the youngest son of a noble and numerous family, of whom the younger members, and he among the rest, bore the surname of Xavier. Not inclining to the profession of arms embraced by the rest of the family, after preliminary studies at home he went to Paris, and was first a student at the College of St. Barbe, and afterwards, at the age of twenty-two, professor of philosophy in that of Beauvais. It was in this latter station that he first became acquainted with Ignatius Loyola, who, fifteen years older than Xavier, had come to Paris to pursue, as preparatory to a course of theology, those rudimentary studies which had not been thought necessary for the military destination of his earlier days. This remarkable Spaniard, whose military career had been cut short by a wound which made him a cripple, had already been for years a religious devotee; and having been from his youth thoroughly impregnated with the current ideas of romantic chivalry, he was already turning in his mind the formation of a new monastic order, which should carry into religion the spirit of the romances. Xavier, with whom he lived at Paris on intimate terms,—they slept, indeed, in the same bed,—was one of Loyola’s first disciples; and on the day of the Assumption, August 16, 1534, they two, with five others, of whom three or four were still students, in a subterranean chapel of the church of the abbey of Montmartre, united at a celebration of mass by Le Fèvre, who was already a priest, and in the consecration of themselves by a solemn vow to religious duties. This rudimentary order included, along with Loyola and Xavier, three other Spaniards, Lainez, Salmaron, and Boabdilla, Rodriguez, a Portuguese, and Le Fèvre, a Savoyard,—all afterwards distinguished. A mission to Jerusalem, which Loyola had already visited, was at that time their leading idea.
St. Francis Xavier One of the Earliest Missionaries to Japan