Chinese island home to shrine of St. Francis Xavier 

Shangchuan Island is a small and beautiful collection of rocks jutting out of the jade-coloured China Sea. Located 15 miles off the Kwangtung coast, it boasts a shrine worth visiting when you find yourself in Macau or Hong Kong.

Shangchuan is one of the most sacred shrines in all of Christendom.

Although it is little known, one of the greatest missionaries since St. Paul drew his last breath and died on its rocky cliffs. He was St. Francis Xavier.

The Vatican included Shangchuan as part of its newly created Kongmoon prefecture in 1924, when it was put under the control of American missionary priests and nuns of the newly formed Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, or Maryknoll.  Founded in 1911, Maryknoll sent its first four missionaries into China in 1918.

It was St. Francis Xavier who first outlined in his mind and heart the wonder of the eternal chase to make converts in mission lands of the Far East.  Many have read the saga of Xavier’s thirst and quest for souls, which led him to China. Xavier is the patron of missionaries.

He is the Apostle to the Indies.   

Not many saints or heroes in history have more fervent admirers than St. Francis Xavier.  He is the Apostle to the Indies.  With fire and the sword of his faith, this noble Spaniard sailed from Portugal to the Far East.  He carried with him and proclaimed the fantastic notion he would bring the East to the feet of Christ.

Fellow Jesuit St. Ignatius of Loyola, instructed Xavier to "set the East on fire." It was not an easy feat.  Xavier ventured out and established his base at Goa, a pagan city with every vice and excess known to man.  For ten years Xavier cut his saintly swath through the heart of a pagan Asia.

From Goa he moved down the southern bend of India to Cochin and Colombo.  He set out eastward across the Indian Ocean to Malacca and the Maluku Islands.  Then, back through the Java Sea, he sailed to Celebes.

St. Francis Xavier celebrated the sacraments and instructed adults and youth.  He gathered the children by ringing a bell in the streets.  He catechized them, teaching them the articles of the faith, the Creed.  He visited sick beds and prison cells.

There were some days when Xavier would baptize so many converts he could not raise his right arm from fatigue. Pressing further East to the edge of the known world, in 1549 he sailed to the island of Japan where he taught and preached with great boldness. He had such success that long after his own death, forty thousand men, women and children in one district alone shed their blood rather than renounce their faith.

In 1551 Xavier returned to India when a new goal loomed before his horizon—China.  The Middle Kingdom was the hub and heart of the Orient.  Xavier knew if he could establish the cross of Christ in its aridity, the shadow of the cross would embrace all of Asia.

Xavier the missionary drew up his plans.  He would enter China from the south and work his way overland to the north.  He began with his arrival at Shangchuan, a stepping stone to the mainland as well as an important centre for Chinese and Portuguese traders.

China at that time was closed to foreigners. Despite the tales he heard of the terrible fate that had overtaken Portuguese merchants who had attempted in vain to enter it, he desired to set out.  Xavier bargained with a Chinese ship owner for passage to Canton. The man accepted the bargain payment, but disappeared with the money.

Toward the end of November, 1552, Xavier, still waiting, fell ill with a fever.

Toward the end of November, 1552, Xavier, still waiting, fell ill with a fever.  On the morning of Dec. 3, as dawn spread its first faint light across the island, Xavier’s lone Chinese friend noted a change in the face of the dying man. He lit a blessed candle and placed it in the powerless hand of the missionary.

Xavier’s breathing grew slow and laboured as he was consumed with exhaustion.  With a long last draw on his fading energy, he raised his mission crucifix toward the Chinese mainland which he so longed to evangelize.  With the cry of In Te, Domine, speravi, non confundar in aeternum (In Thee, O Lord, I have hoped, let me never be put to confusion), his spotless soul took flight and entered its eternal rest.

That same day his body was buried by his Chinese friend, with the help of two Africans and a Portuguese man.  They poured two sacks of quicklime on the body to speed the consumption of the flesh, but when it was disinterred two and a half months later, it was found to be miraculously incorrupt. From Shangchuan, the saint’s mortal remains were taken to Goa where they rest today, enclosed in a glass coffin.

Despite its sacred heritage, Shangchuan has remained a hard and obstinate mission field for those who followed in Xavier’s steps.  Today the island boasts about 16,000 inhabitants.  Despite intimidation and limitations on religious freedom from the Communist authorities, the local flock has survived.

For years after the saint’s death, the Portuguese gained a foothold at Macau and transferred their trading operations there, leaving Shangchuan abandoned but for its small native population.  In 1639, during a public pilgrimage from Macau, a stone slab was placed on the spot where the saint died.  Later, a memorial chapel was built around the stone.

Shangchuan, a few years later, became the target of a persecution lasting almost a hundred years.  No serious evangelization was begun again until 1853 when the Paris Foreign Mission Society took over the South China Missions and placed a resident missionary on the island.

The memory of Xavier’s death on the island is cherished by local Catholics, who worship inside a Gothic church built over his place of death by the French missionaries.  This shrine is well worth a visit.

J.P. Sonnen is a tour operator and history docent with Vancouver-based Orbis Catholicus Travel.