Monday, December 03, 2007

Send me anywhere you like -- even to India!

That's the last line from a letter from St. Francis Xavier (along with St. Thomas the Apostle, one of the patrons of India) to St. Ignatius Loyola, which makes up today's Office of Readings.

This year is the 501st anniversary of his birth. We need his zeal for souls even more today.

Last year I wrote up some long reflections on conversion, mission and a zeal for souls.

[The only thing I'd add to that, with respect to the quote from the "younger-Ratzinger" ... is that the missions in Asia haven't been a failure. That may have seemed the case, at least in a Catholic context, in the mid-60s; however the latter part of the 20th-century have seen a flowering and an explosion, even, of Christianity -- in China, in India, in Nepal, and elsewhere. Almost all of it has been of the evangelical, independent variety. It's a reality I find many Catholics are either unaware of, or choose to ignore, or to dismiss reflexively as "fundamentailism."]

Sancte Francisce Xavier, ora pro nobis.

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