Pope Francis: What's in a Papal Name?

Francis Xavier, a Spaniard, was one of the 16th-century founders of Pope Francis's Jesuit order. He was also responsible for much of the order's early missionary activity in Asia. He arrived in Goa, then a Portuguese colony, in 1542, and devoted the next several years to preaching and charity work in parts of India where the Church's early enthusiasm had fallen off after the initial wave of European entry. His travels later took him to Malacca, in what is now Malaysia, and he became one of the first Christian missionaries to reach Japan. A story, which the Catholic Encyclopedia maintains may be apocryphal, holds that he landed briefly on Mindanao, an island in present-day Philippines. He died on Shangchuan Island, off the cost of China's southern Guangdong Province, while preparing a missionary visit to China. His tomb is in Goa.