Panaji: Saint Francis Xavier spent the last 11 years of his life in Asia, undertaking one of the most significant evangelisation missions in the history of Christianity. However, even though he spent just seven months in Goa, his enduring presence in the state can’t be missed even 475 years after his death.
A revered figure throughout Goa, nowhere is the feverish dedication to the Spanish saint more tangible than at the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where his mortal remains have been kept since 1624. For the four centuries since, the basilica and Xavier have been inseparable.
“Although, theologically speaking, Se Cathedral is the mother of all the churches, since that is the church of the archbishop, for our common people, our faithful, the basilica is at the centre of people’s faith,” Fr Henry Falcao, convener of the Exposition committee of the Archdiocese, told
TOI.
“The sacred relics of St Francis Xavier are housed in the basilica, so it forms a very major part of the core faith of our people in Goa.”
It was the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits — which Xavier co-founded and belonged to — that commissioned the basilica.
“The basilica was built specifically to provide a permanent home for the saint’s remains,” said Vishvesh P Kandolkar, an architectural historian and associate professor at the Goa College of Architecture. “Expensive imported materials were used in its construction, in an attempt to make the monument extra special, befitting the status of St Francis Xavier.”
For most Goans, the image of the basilica is of reddish-brown laterite, without plaster, making it stand out as a unique structure. That change, though, is a recent one, made prior to the Exposition in 1952.
“It was Portugal’s famous architect and restorer Baltazar Castro who ordered that the whitewashed plaster be removed, leaving the underlying brown laterite stone exposed. It was his way of making the building look older than what it is. It’s a narrative that they were building, that Goa is a different place, historically a very old place. So, for ordinary people who are coming there, when they see a brown basilica, the first thought is ‘fatrachem bandlam’ (built of stones), so it must be very old,” said Kandolkar.
Xavier arrived in Goa, then the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East, in 1542, after 13 difficult months at sea. After four months, he left the state for coastal South India for apostolic work. “He would come back to Goa more than half a dozen times in the ten years of life that were still left to him, but always on business and in a hurry,” wrote Jesuit scholar Fr P Rayanna in ‘St Francis Xavier and His Shrine’, first published in 1964.
Xavier died on Shangchuan Island, off the coast of China, on Dec 3, 1552. When his body was brought to Goa on March 15, 1554, it was carried to St Paul’s College in Old Goa, the first building constructed by the Jesuits in Goa.
By 1613, Xavier’s body was transferred to the Casa Professa or Professed House, adjoining the basilica, and it was only after the news of his canonisation reached Goa in 1624 that his body, in the words of Rayanna, “was carried in a rich silver coffin by the Jesuits, and placed in the church of Bom Jesus in the chapel on the Gospel side, which contains today the altar of the Blessed Sacrament”.
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