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Castillo de Javier / Javier Castle - Navarra, Spain |
Xavier ranked very low in the hierarchy of Spanish castles, a mere unblooded corporal among magnificent battle-scarred generals and field marshals. But in renown the little sentinel of Navarre has outstripped all the hoary giants of the Spanish hills. Very few people except Spaniards or inveterate travelers in Spain will have heard of the cloud-capped Penafiel or tremendous Coca, but everybody has heard of Xavier. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say the name has has become a household word the world over, a magic evocative name, conjuring up visions of galleons, catamarans and brown junks tossing on tropical seas, of hot Indian plains and stifling Malayan jungles, of explosive, sun-drenched Indonesian islands of a China and Japan as unmapped and mysterious as the dark side of the moon. A child born within the gloomy battlements of Xavier on April 7, the Tuesday of Holy Week in the year 1506, was to make all the difference. He was christened Francis, a name before unused in his family of habitual Michaels, Jeromes, Matins, Peters and Johns, perhaps because of his arrival in Holy Week reminded his devout mother of the saint who had borne the wounds of Christ in his living flesh.
An excerpt from the book entitled, "Saint Francis Xavier" by Fr. James Brodrick, S.J.
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