Délio de Mendonça SJ

Amazing stories about the life of a holy man began to be passed around soon after an ‘incorrupt body’ was brought back to Goa on the Indian subcontinent amidst great rejoicing in 1554. Accounts of an adventurous and heroic life had already captivated those who had heard about him, but especially those sailors who exhumed his body from its grave on the island of Sanchuang, a Portuguese trading station off the Chinese coast, where he had finished his earthly journey on the 2nd of December in the year 1552.  The enthusiasm and admiration of those sailors, and their resolve to give their hero a more worthy burial, would play a major role in the ‘immortalisation’ of Francis Xavier.  This passion has not only survived in India, but has increased and expanded to involve a wide segment in the spectrum of religious culture.

With the first phase of popular veneration of Xavier becoming ever more widespread, the Jesuit custodians of ‘the incorrupt body’ were constrained to relocate the saint’s remains to a more prestigious locale.   On 2nd of December 1617 the body was transferred, with fitting ceremonial, to a golden sepulchre as befitting the relic of a saint, and a chronicler recorded that ‘God favoured many people who in their infirmities prayed through his intercession.’ Some Jesuits even exercised their zealous adulation by excising signatures from Xavier’s extant letters, or purloining his personal writings from letter collections, acts that were vigorously condemned by Jesuit authority.

The many miracles occurring in the historical City of Goa at Old Goa and attributed to the intercession of Francis Xavier, were supplemented by a growing culture of Vows and Novenas, which grew spontaneously among the faithful after his body was moved (in 1620) from the old ‘College of St. Paul’ to the newly-built ‘Church of Bom Jesus’ (where the relics are preserved to this day) in the same City. Claims for the healing of physical infirmities were frequently heralded far and wide, and by 1624 (when celebrations to mark the 1622 canonization of Xavier were held in Goa), there was unrestrained jubilation from the secular dignitaries  as well.