not supermen, nor were they born perfect. They are like us, like each one of us. They are people who, before reaching the glory of heaven, lived normal lives with joys and sorrows, struggles and hopes. What changed their lives? When they recognized God’s love, they followed it with all their heart without reserve or hypocrisy. They spent their lives serving others, they endured suffering and adversity without hatred and responded to evil with good, spreading joy and peace.
This is the life of a Saint. Saints are people who for love of God did not put conditions on him in their life; they were not hypocrites; they spent their lives at the service of others. They suffered much adversity but without hate.
(Angelus address, Solemnity of All Saints, November 1, 2013)
The saints lead all of us to God through their example of holiness. We may not always believe in God very strongly, but the love of his saints feels hard to ignore. If we believe in the reality of their love for God and neighbor, visible in the virtues of their lives, it gets easier for us to believe in God’s love as the cause of theirs. As St. Ignatius says, when we don’t feel any desire to get closer to God, we can at least express a desire for the desire.
Even as a Jesuit, there are times in my prayer when communication dries up and I have trouble visualizing God. At these moments, the Father seems to be away in the sky somewhere, sustaining creation. The Spirit appears to be in my heart, inspiring my religious experiences in a way hidden to me. And Jesus, whom outside of prayer I mostly know from the Bible, where his appearance is not described, and from images painted centuries after his death, is “always” with me somehow in a way that often seems vague.
Even when God feels distant or absent, though, I am able to talk with his friends. The saints lived in time and space, like Jesus, but they left clearer human traces in this world than he did. We have their bodies and relics, their personal effects and baptismal records, copies of their high school report cards and writings, and the testimonies of their friends. They lived ordinary lives like I am doing, without rising from the grave or ascending to heaven, and that makes them feel a little closer to my own human reality.
Many of God’s friends live among us. They are the saints-to-be in my life who remind me of his presence and love. They are the people close to me in daily life, doing their best to get by in this world. Manifesting God’s hands and heart and voice on earth, they make the faith come alive.
All of the saints pray for me, including the long black line of Jesuit saints beginning with Ignatius as well as the saints whose names form part of my own name: Ignatius, John the Evangelist, Joseph, Michael the Archangel, and Mary (Our Lady of the Assumption). All of these witnesses to faith, living and dead, have helped me entrust the messiness of my life to God in prayer. Just as we have different friends for different areas of our lives, there is a different saint for each virtue I desire and for each issue I struggle to bring before God.
The First Jesuit Saints
St. Ignatius had his own small circle of friends who inspired him and were inspired by him. As he studied for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Paris following his conversion, Ignatius guided his two young college roommates to greater spiritual freedom by directing them in the Spiritual Exercises. Both of these men, Peter Faber (also known as Pierre Favre) and Francis Xavier, eventually joined him on the list of canonized saints.
St. Peter Faber (1506–1546), a pious Frenchman from rural Savoy who was studying for the priesthood when he met St. Ignatius, was the first recruit for what became the Society of Jesus. Scrupulous and deeply spiritual, he learned to trust in God’s merciful love for him through prayer, becoming the first acknowledged master of the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius, recalling his own scrupulosity, led Faber into a deep awareness of God’s love for him as a sinner.
Pope Francis canonized Faber, a personal role model in his life, as a saint in 2014. The pope knew that a peaceful and free surrender to God’s will in discernment marked Faber as much as it did Ignatius. In this brief prayer, Faber expresses a trusting desire for God to lead his life:
Show, O Lord, Thy ways to me,
and teach me Thy paths.
Direct me in Thy truth, and teach me;
for Thou art God my Savior.
For St. Peter Faber, knowing Jesus as his savior was reason enough to trust him, no matter how many unexpected sufferings life brought him. Indeed, when he took ill and died at forty while preparing to attend the Council of Trent in 1546, he passed away in deep tranquility.
St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552), a hedonistic young nobleman from the opposite political fence of Spain from St. Ignatius, was a harder sell than Faber because he was so stubbornly self-seeking. In many ways, Xavier was a throwback to Ignatius’s younger days, and it was precisely this strong will that gave Loyola such high hopes for him.
Ignatius liked Xavier so much that he wouldn’t leave him alone, hassling him daily with the singsong refrain: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Finally, during a nocturnal outing, Xavier was scared straight by catching sight of a syphilitic acquaintance dying in the streets. He came to his senses and began to follow the spiritual guidance of Ignatius with enthusiasm, making the Exercises and pledging to do great things.
True to his word, Xavier became the order’s first great missionary when Ignatius chose him to replace a Jesuit who couldn’t travel to the missions in India. When St. Ignatius asked him to go, Xavier famously responded without hesitation: “Here I am, send me.” And St. Francis Xavier left for India knowing he would never again see home, St. Ignatius, or any of his loved ones.
More a man of action than of words, Xavier traveled all over Asia, exploring peoples and places largely unknown to Europeans at the time. He soon ended up in Japan, where Portuguese traders had only recently made contact, pushed farther inland than any European had done up to that point, and established the first Christian missions in a number of fishing villages.
Hearing in Japan of the great Chinese people, Xavier spent the rest of his short life trying to get into that country. But while awaiting a boat to the mainland in 1552, he took ill and died off the southern coast of China on the island of Sancian.
As Xavier’s body retraced his missionary steps backward, being carried in public funeral processions at each stop, the crowds hailed him as a saint, and in India one devout Catholic woman bit off his toe to keep as a relic. The Jesuits, of course, made her give it back.
Like St. Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew, summoned by the angel to flee into Egypt with the Holy Family, St. Francis Xavier placed himself entirely in God’s hands, walking the fields of Asia with a profound sense of trust in God’s protection. There was nobody to translate for him, feed him, or help him understand the cultures he met. He had only his faith in God to drive him.
Recognized later as the greatest missionary since St. Paul, and honored by Christians of all backgrounds, Xavier achieved incredible results because he surrendered to God with a deep intensity known only to the saints. In Asia, he spent every ounce of his energy teaching Catholicism to children and simple persons, reporting so many baptisms at one point that he didn’t even have time to recite his breviary. Isolated by cultural differences and by an unreliable mail system from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, he sewed the few letters he received from St. Ignatius into his cassock, keeping them over his heart to feel their friendship more deeply.
St. Francis Xavier’s radical trust in God appears especially striking in the Act of Contrition he wrote for himself:
My God, I love you above all things,
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