My China trip

In 2011, our Mount St. Mary's College MBA cohort did a travel study to China.  The tour ended in Hong Kong and on the last day of the trip nothing was planned and we had a free day.   I chose to visit nearby Macau, specifically I wished to visit the old Portuguese colonial section of the island.  Strolling through the the historic colonial area I came across a small, weathered, blue and white chapel that easily could have been built by the Portuguese during the colonial era.  Inside I discovered a small statue (probably five feet in height) of St. Francis Xavier.  The wall behind the saint was painted so that it looked like a blazing ball of fire.  Xavier was posed in a manner that made him seem to be walking with his right arm outstretched before him holding a crucifix.  The entire scene was simple yet effective and it made an impression on me.  Later, I thought how odd it was to find a chapel dedicated to Francis Xavier out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the South China Sea.  I wondered how that chapel came to be and why it had been dedicated to the great saint. On the plane flight back to Los Angeles I resolved to research Xavier.  That was the beginning of what is now my master's thesis in Humanities, also from Mount St. Mary's College.

I was already somewhat familiar with Xavier.  For example, I knew that he was one of the original seven founding members of the Society of Jesus. (Jesuit is the common name for a member of the Society of Jesus.)  I vaguely knew that he was the room mate of Ignatius Loyola while at the University of Paris.  However, I never have paid much attention to that fact.  My research though, once started, led to one question after another.  As it turned out, I discovered, Xavier is considered one of the Catholic Church's greatest saints; and the greatest missionary since St. Paul.

Much has been written on Xavier: numerous articles and books exist; some books are the size of treatises.  Xavier's missionary activity took him from India to Malaysia to to Japan before finally dying on a small island off the coast of China.  Most scholars agree that Xavier's mission to Japan was his greatest accomplishment.  He and two other Spanish Jesuits were the first Christian missionaries to visit the island.  And while a few Portuguese merchants and traders had visited a  several Japan's port cities, the Jesuits were the first to penetrate the interior of the country traveling hundreds of miles in an attempt to convert the Japanese emperor to Christianity.

As I've already mentioned, all this is well known and documented.  However, one aspect of the Jesuit's mission seems to me to have been neglected and that is the important role that the young Jesuit Brother Juan Fernandez played in the success of the mission.

What my master's thesis and this blog are attempts to do is to examine, analyze, and discuss Brother Juan's role and his many contributions, not only the mission but later after Xavier returned to Indian, to the nascent Japanese Christian community.  This is important because not only was the young brother an eyewitness to history, but he participated to a major extent and thus he himself is a historical figure.  My own research has shown that much of Xavier's success depended on Brother Juan and the role he played.  Finally, Xavier as the papal nuncio to India had numerous other duties to attend to and ultimately he left Japan never to return, while Brother Juan never left dying there having exhausted his life in service to the small Japanese Christian community.

This blog will in the end show that Brother Juan, while only lightly regarded by historians, lived a life of heroic proportions in Japan dying beloved by his early Japanese Christians.