According to St Francis Xavier, the continuous neglect of imperfections destroys and undoes perfection. Find out why.
Newsroom (11/12/2022 18:40, Gaudium Press) December 3, the Catholic Church celebrates the memory of St. Francis Xavier, a missionary saint who was nicknamed “St. Paul of the East” for his evangelizing work among the Orientals.
Before his conversion, Francis was a vain and ambitious person. This only changed when he personally met St. Ignatius of Loyola, who repeatedly told him: “Francis, what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul?
After being entirely converted to Christ, St. Francis Xavier was sent on a mission to the East by St. Ignatius, and he accomplished a great work of evangelization in India and Japan. Although his great apostolic zeal indicated China as a new place to evangelize, St. Francis Xavier died on his way to that Asian country.
His journeys to proclaim the Gospel were so many that if we were to put them all in a straight line, it would be possible to make three complete circles around the earth. Because of his friendship and closeness to St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier became the co-founder of the Society of Jesus, a religious order also known as the Jesuits.
We have selected some phrases of this missionary Saint who, alongside Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, is considered the Universal Patron of the Missions. Check them out:
01-“He is completely mistaken who sets aside God, the author, the origin of all good, to fix his hopes on men!…”
02-“My inability is great, but God is all-powerful; I place in Him alone, all my confidence.“
03: “I am not moved, my God, to want the heaven you promised me one day; nor am I moved by the hell I so feared to stop offending you for it.
04-“”In the world there is only one good and one evil. The only good is to be saved; to be condemned, the only evil.
05-“Let no one foster the illusion of thinking he can distinguish himself in great things, if he cannot distinguish himself beforehand in simple things.
06-“If the joys that a student seeks in what he learns, he seeks them by making his neighbor feel what he needs to know and serve God, how much more consoled and better prepared he would be to give an account of himself when Christ comes and asks him: ‘Give me an account of your management.
07-“The absence of the cross is the absence of life”.
08-“As for me, I take vengeance on those about whom I have to complain by rendering them all the services I can.”
09-“The continuous neglect of imperfections destroys and undoes perfection”.
10-“Since it was by His holy mercy that He communicated these desires to us, to lose confidence now in His mercy and in His power in the face of the dangers we may run in His service is a danger incomparably greater than the evils that all the enemies of God can cause us.” (EPC)