A Basque 
Francis was born in 1506 in Xavier (Javier), a small village in Navarre in the north of Spain. He was a Basque, the son of local land owners. Their family home was a castle. At the age of 19 he went to study in Paris, where he enjoyed sports and the city's night life. Bright, vibrant with a zest for life, he lacked a clear focus as to where he could best invest his energies.  

Meeting with Ignatius of Loyola
A turning point came when a fellow Basque, Ignatius of Loyola, turned up in Paris. Aged 38, Ignatius was  a rather mature student and Francis ridiculed him as a middle-aged religious enthusiast. But after five years of patient encouragement Ignatius finally broke through Francis' mask of self-sufficiency and encouraged him to ask the question, "What am I doing for Christ?"

Spiritual Exercises and ordination
Ignatius directed Francis through his Spiritual Exercises - 30 days of prayer and reflection on life and its purpose. After this period of reflection on the life of Christ and what was to be his own response to the love of God, Francis joined Ignatius and a group of four others  companions who offered their services to God through work in the Church. In 1537 they assembled at Venice where they were ordained to the priesthood, intending to go to the Holy Land. Unable to travel, they ended up in Rome. Here they worked in hospitals looking after the sick, preaching about the love of God and begging for alms. They vowed to go anywhere the Pope would send them. Francis became secretary to Ignatius who had correspondence with a vast number of people. This cannot have been appealing work for him.

Mission to India
When the Pope established the Society of Jesus in 1540, King John III of Portugal asked the Pope for two Jesuits to go to India. After a delay of some months in Lisbon, Francis set out with an Italian priest and a seminarian. The voyage from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen months and he was seasick for long periods. Arriving in Goa in 1542, Francis found the Portuguese Catholics notoriously cruel to slaves, living in concubinage and neglectful of the poor. He tried to combat this by devoting himself to helping the poor and sick and zealously enouraging people to live a good life, but he found the behaviour of the Portuguese officials and traders one of the more difficult things to bear. Francis wrote: "I am so sick of life that the best thing for me would be to die for the defence of our faith: to see so many sins committed and to be able to do nothing". Yet he continued with enthusiasm.

South India
In 1542 the Portuguese Governor of Goa asked Francis to go to teach the ethnic group called Paravas (Tamil-speaking pearl-fishers) of Cape Comorin at the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula. They were nominal Christians but had received no formal instructions on their new faith because no priest had ever learned their language. Arriving in South India Francis was the only European in this world of scorching heat. He set about learning Tamil and managed to translate the Creed. He experienced the loneliness of working in a foreign culture. He had been promised two Jesuit helpers, but they never arrived. After a year he decided to return to Goa to see what had happened to them. He was so accepted by the people that a number of young Paravas went with him to be trained for Christian ministry.

After seven years on the South India coast, constantly travelling up and down, preaching, teaching, consoling, comforting, begging for the poor, visiting the sick, Francis moved on to Ceylon, the Malaya peninsula and and the Molucca islands, from time to time returning to visit his headquarters in Goa.

To Japan
In 1549 Francis sailed to Japan, arriving at Kagoshima, the most southerly point of Japan. Here he translated an abridged statement of Christian belief into Japanese and made a hundred converts within a year. He went on to other towns, most notably the capital Miako (now Kyoto). He found his external appearance of poverty met with little success, so he decided to dress in fine robes, and presented himself as the emissary of the King of Portugal, giving the ruler the presents the king had sent for the Emperor of Japan. This produced a different result. He was well received and given the use of an empty Buddhist monastery. Here he made about 2,000 converts.

Leaving two Portuguese priests in charge, Francis returned to Goa in 1552 and after a few months set sail for China. He did not have diplomatic support and when he became sick, he was put ashore on to Sanchian Island, gateway to China, with only his faithful convert Anthony to care for him. He died here at the age of 46. His body was taken back to Goa where it is kept in the Basilica of Bom Jesus.

Urgency to baptise
Francis believed that those who were not baptised would not share the delights of heaven. Hence the urgency he felt to baptise as many people as possible. But although he baptised thousands, he always saw each person as a whole - body, mind and spirit and was concerned about material needs as well as spiritual ones. When he became aware of how extensive and populous the continent of Asia, including India, Japan and China, he called for more companions to share the work.

Communications and isolation
He wrote letters to Ignatius telling all he did. His letters show a deep friendship which neither distance nor time apart lessened. Return letters took between two and four years; in his ten years away from Rome, Francis received only 5 messages. He had to rely on his relationship with God to give him the strength to carry on. There were new companions along the way, but much of the time he was alone, isolated in a country where despite being a good linguist, he had little grasp of the local language. His mission to China was taken up again by fellow Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China in 1582.

Canonisation and patron of the missions
Probably the best known of all Jesuits, Francis was canonised along with Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri and Isidore the farmer from Spain in 1622. Pope Pius XI declared him patron of the foreign missions in 1927.