Well, we're not sure how our Canadian friends are doing on this fine mid-March day, but we trust your snow is deep and crisp and even. But enough about the weather. Today in Lent Madness action it's Wenceslaus vs. Francis Xavier.
Yesterday, Verena of Zurzach routed Ursula 81% to 19% to advance to the Saintly Sixteen.
But the hot news on this Thursday is the kick off to the daily SHOWDOWN OF THE DAY videos on Lent Madness TV. Click the link to watch and then subscribe to the YouTube channel, which also houses previous editions of Monday Madness. But the earliest ones were on Vimeo. Check out this classic 2012 edition from Tim and Scott -- this may be first one ever!
Vote now!
Wenceslaus
Good King Wenceslaus, who goes out on the snowy evening of December 26th. Wenceslaus was not a king, nor did he likely venture out on the Feast of Stephen in deep snow. He was, however, a deeply faithful Christian whose life embodied a godly ruler.
Wenceslaus was born in Bohemia in about 907. His grandparents had been converted to Christianity by Cyril and Methodius, and his father continued the family tradition. Many eastern European kingdoms still saw tensions between Christianity and the ancient pagan faiths. Wenceslaus’s mother Drahomira was a staunch devotee of pagan faith.
When Wenceslaus was thirteen, his father died. His Christian grandmother Ludmilla became his regent, but his mother murdered Ludmilla and took control of the government. She instituted harsh penalties against Christians in Bohemia and tried to convert her son to the pagan ways. When Wenceslaus came of age, he banished his mother and took control of the kingdom himself.
Wenceslaus was a devout Christian. He brought in German priests, who established more churches and brought the historically isolated Bohemia into relationship with the wider European world.
One legend holds that as his army faced a challenger, Wenceslaus sent an offer of peace. His opponent viewed the peace offering as a sign of weakness and prepared to attack. Wenceslaus offered to fight his opponent one on one to avoid massive casualties. As the two men walked toward each other, his opponent saw two angels guarding Wenceslaus and wisely chose Wenceslaus’s offer of peace.
Threatened by this ever-increasing modernization and Christianization of Bohemia, Wenceslaus’s brother Boleslav murdered Wenceslaus by running him through with a lance as he entered the church to attend Mass. Almost immediately, Wenceslaus was venerated as a martyr. Reports of miracles occurring at his tomb led Boleslav to relocate his bones to St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague.
Wenceslaus was promoted to kingship posthumously by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I. Within decades of his death, hagiographies of Wenceslaus became popular. A famous statue of Wenceslaus on horseback graces Wenceslas Square in Prague. Legend holds that, if the Czech Republic is in danger, the good king’s statue
will come to life, summon the knights sleeping under Mt. Blanik, and save the land.
Collect for Wenceslaus
O God, who taught the Martyr Saint Wenceslaus to place the heavenly Kingdom before an earthly one, grant through his prayers that, denying ourselves, we may hold fast to you with all our heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Francis Xavier
The Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner famously said that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Using this metric, it would seem highly unlikely that a man who was prone to profound seasickness and with great difficulty learning foreign languages would be called by God to be one of the most well-traveled and effective missionaries of Christianity, not only in the sixteenth century, but of all time. Perhaps against all odds, Francis Xavier was all of these.
Francis Xavier was born to an aristocratic Spanish-Basque family in Navarre; it was this status that made possible his studies at the Sorbonne. While there, he became a companion of Ignatius of Loyola, and, together with him and five others, in August 1534 made lifelong vows of poverty and service to wherever the Pope should send them—they were the first members of the Society of Jesus. Seven years later—after the Portuguese ambassador to Pope Paul III requested that the Jesuits be sent to evangelize the east—Xavier left Rome with only two days’ notice, went on to Lisbon, and from there left on his thirty-fifth birthday to begin a strenuous thirteen-month journey to Goa in southwest India, arriving in May 1542. Goa would become his base of operation for his later missionary journeys.
In Goa, he undertook a campaign of reform among the Portuguese there, who had become notorious for their cruelty, open concubinage, and neglect of the poor. He lived willingly among the poor, sleeping on the ground and eating mainly rice. His missionary efforts gained great traction among people of low caste, but none at all among the Brahmins holding power and privilege.
Over the course of the next decade, Francis Xavier would journey across South Asia and the Far East, including in India, Sri Lanka, Malacca, the Moluccan Islands, and Japan. In 1549, he landed in Japan, where he studied the Japanese language, learning enough to craft a short statement of Christian belief. By the time his journey in Japan concluded, around two thousand people had become Christian—although the church he helped establish would endure great persecutions years later from the ruling authorities, including the martyrdom of twenty-six Christians in 1597. The vigorous Christian presence in Nagasaki today is
attributable in large part to his efforts. His invariable seasickness notwithstanding, Xavier set out for China and modern-day Guangzhou in 1552; along the way he fell ill and died before his missionary journey could continue.
The conversion of some seven hundred thousand people to Christianity is commonly held to have resulted from ten years of Francis Xavier’s missionary effort. Wherever he undertook his ministry, he left organized Christian communities behind him, many of which survive to this day.
Collect for Frances Xavier
God of all nations; Raise up in this and every land, evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that like your servant Francis Xavier we may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
73 comments on “Wenceslaus vs. Francis Xavier”
This was hard today. I voted for Wenceslaus, but I loved Xavier's story as well. I'm okay if Xavier wins.
With a last name of Krejci (my husband's Czech family), how could I do other than vote for Wenceslaus? I was surprised to see, however, that his name was not recognized as the mis-translation it is said to be. My memory is that it was actually Vaclav, but I may be mistaken about that--at 94, my memory weakens.
No surprise here. The Jebbies are still the top is the food chain.
Francis Xavier sounds wonderful. I loved that he lived with the poor & the "low caste" people in India. But, in honor of my Bohemian great-grandfather, I had to go with Wenceslaus, although I'm afraid he'll lose this match.
I hope Wenceslaus will be able to be in Lent Madness another year. This was a very hard one for me to chose.
Even though my nieces and nephew and their families always come to me for boxing day, and we do joke and sing about Good King Wenceslaus, I did have to cast my vote Saint Francis Xavier.
While I am not surprised about Francis being in the lead, I also feel like he has received so much recognition already given how many Catholic boys are named Francis Xavier... at least in New England when and where I was growing up. So my vote went to Wenceslaus.
Today's frustration : at last the vote button illuminated for St. Francis Xavier!
But,wait! The Captcha was hard to see; sometimes only six pictures, rather than nine,were visible. Next,there was no accept button. There was no accept button for the auditory version of Captcha. I vote each day. Sometimes it's only in my mind. This is a different kind of Madness this year.
As Francis Xavier Ryan's granddaughter the choice,was clear
I really wanted to vote for both. Having known nothing of Wenceslaus except the Christmas carol, I am blown away by his story. But some of my deepest religious experiences took place at the Mission de San Francisco Javier on the Tohono O'odham reservation outside Tucson, AZ, where I also learned his story and how much our faith owes to him.
A late-night love note to my Canadian brothers and sisters:
As the namesake of an early European visitor (yet another Genoese, this time employed by the King of England rather than Spain), I have always felt a special kinship for you, your country and your ideals. I have visited your land by sea, by land, and by air, and have travelled most of the Trans-Canada (including on our honeymoon). I love and cherish it, from the Okanagan Valley to the Bras d'Or Lake.
Since the 18th century, you have had to contend with occasional flare-ups of jingoism and territorial ambition from us, your southern neighbor. At first, this was due to the efforts of our European masters. Later, our colonies tried to seize land as part of their war of independence, and the British returned the favor. During our Civil War, your country sheltered both those fleeing our nation's enslavers, and the terrorists who burned and ransomed St. Alban's, VT.
We are now at a similar low point in the arc of our shared history. Both you (and many of us) are suffering from the current administration's wholesale reversal of the US policy goals of the last 80 years. I fear we may pay the price that other great nations have inevitably paid when they abandoned their principles, but I still have hope. Although we as a nation don't appear to care much about our neighbors, many of us do, and give thanks for our common bonds.
Keep us in your prayers, and we will keep you in ours.
This is what happens when the SEC lives in Beverly Hills and southern Florida. To all the polite Canadians, as a coastal Californian, please forgive our ignorance of weather above 36° north. The only knowledge we have of snow is from Christmas carol lyrics.
It's a toss up for me as my family' smelleds from Bohemia on my dad's side and Basque on my mum's. Both saints really had fortitude and resilience in the face of significant challenges. I respect them greatly!
Tonight I feel like a need for more angels in Eastern Europe to protect the people from Russian aggression; and I pray that Ukraine will survive and Russian people will take down their dictator. Go Wenceslaus! Get those sleeping armies and bring them to battle to defend their neighbors in Ukraine and neighboring NATO countries. My dad's family barely survived the Holocaust so I have lots of feelings about encroaching fascism and land grabs. WWIi feels like yesterday for my family.