The Indies shall be your Indies
St Joseph Vaz, whose feast we celebrate today, is an unusual Oratorian saint. St Philip was given the prophecy that Rome should be his Indies — his mission territory — and he never again left the Eternal City. His example is the basis for our practice of remaining in one community for life, exemplified by other Oratorian saints and beati like Bl. Antony Grassi. St Joseph, however, bucks the trend: he, like St Philip, felt the call to travel to a distant land in the Indies to convert the people there to the Faith. But he, in fact, went there. His mission was a very successful one (it is not without reason he is called the Apostle of Sri Lanka) but perhaps, on the face of it, not a particularly Oratorian one.
However, among all our saints and beati, St Joseph Vaz is perhaps the most impressive example of a different virtue St Philip held dear: perseverance. The modern world is so filled with distractions and new possibilities that simply sticking at one thing and seeing it through is almost a rarity. Our desire for instant gratification means that we all-too-easily give up when the going gets tough. St Joseph offers us a different example, however. Our intrepid missionary clearly took St Philip’s emphasis on perseverance to heart, pushing through the misgivings of his superiors about undertaking such a dangerous mission, and never thinking of giving up and returning to the safety of home, even amid bouts of disease, hunger and imprisonment. The fruits of his perseverance were obvious: by the time he died, tens of thousands had been baptised or returned to the One Fold of the Redeemer from the Dutch Calvinism which had spread on the island, and he is remembered as Sri Lanka’s Apostle.
In today’s world we are faced with so many horrors — wars, natural disasters, financial catastrophes — that it is all too easy to grow apathetic towards the needs of those around us, and to look only to satisfying ourselves as life’s ultimate goal. St Joseph Vaz, however, gives us a perfect example of how we really ought to live our lives as Christians, serving those who are in need without counting the cost. When he felt the call from God to travel to Sri Lanka and preach the Gospel there, he did not go merely out of a sense of duty towards God, but out of a real love for those he saw languishing without the benefit of the sacraments. Most of us will not receive that same call that St Joseph Vaz heard from God, to travel to distant lands in the Indies and re-found the Church there from almost nothing. But this is not to say that we have no work of evangelisation to do! Our own world is not so unlike the Sri Lanka of the late seventeenth century: so many people have heard the Gospel but set it aside in the face of societal pressures, and increasing numbers have indeed never heard it at all. Even if we cannot replicate the glories of St Joseph’s mission to Sri Lanka, we can at least imitate him in the love he felt for those Sri Lankans who were not members of Christ’s Church, the love which moved him with such compassion that he was willing, if necessary, to lay down his life for their salvation.