I wanted to point out that we here at Sepia Mutiny, have a long and rich tradition of not simply bringing to you daily gossip and rumors, and of stirring up trouble, but of also bringing you a little South Asian history from time to time. We’d secretly like to stay respectable so that you aren’t ashamed to talk about us around the water cooler, and can use us to impress that cute girl or guy you are into, with your newfound knowledge. Thus I point you to an enlightening story about St. Francis Xavier in Time Magazine’s Asia edition. This month an estimated 2 million people will shuffle past Xavier’s tomb in the state of Goa to pay their respects. That is a pilgrimage that is second only to the Haj in numbers. These bunch of pious peripatetics may cramp the style of those, who like many of our friends, are going to Goa this New Year’s Eve to party.
So what did Xavier first think of the Goan’s?

A great number of them were adventurers of all sorts who left behind them in Europe even the semblance of outward morality [and] who had become utterly corrupted by temptations [and] vices. [They] made no pretense of desisting from their most abominable practices [and] led the most licentious lives.
—Henry James Coleridge,
The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier

Wow. Almost 500 years later that still seems to be an accurate description of some of our friends that are going to Goa. Xavier it seems, was loved by many yet his behavior might definitely be called abhorrent in many ways today. Such is usually the case with religious figures.

…in India, Xavier is infamous as the man who introduced the Inquisition. The visible manifestation of his legacy today is mixed; St. Francis Xavier schools and churches dot his route from southern India to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan, but so do Xavier furniture warehouses, bus companies and even, on a beach in northern Goa, Xavier’s Rum Pub. The one institution he did build himself, St. Paul’s College in Old Goa, is now a forgotten ruin long devoured by jungle.

Yet, as the religious historian Alban Goodier writes in his book Saints for Sinners: “To many of his contemporaries, he was thought a failure … [but] probably there is no saint … no hero in history who has more enthusiastic admirers than St. Francis Xavier.” For whatever the vicissitudes and disappointments, Xavier never gave up. Father Olavo Vello Pereira, who helped organize this year’s exposition, says: “To contemplate Xavier is to look at fire. That zeal and that enthusiasm, it’s mesmerizing.” In Japan, which he was one of the first Westerners ever to visit, Xavier’s amiable manner and learned discourse is credited with helping open up the nation to outsiders. In India, he is revered by Christians, Hindus and Muslims alike as Goencho Sahib, a healer of the sick, a bringer of good fortune and—his legend taking a more modern twist—one who can bless new cars and trucks. In Malaysia, where he was known for a miraculous ability to call out the names of babies he had never met, mothers hold him up as a model father to errant partners.

Umm, I wonder what he meant by, “to contemplate Xavier is to look at fire.” I hope he didn’t actually set fire to anyone.