For his feast on the tenth day of October — III classis, Mass Os iusti
Ecce nos reliquimus omnia, et secuti sumus te: quid ergo erit nobis? “Behold we have left all things, and have followed thee: what therefore shall we have?” — Matt. 19:27, from the Gospel of the Mass
I. Identitas et Origines
Francis Borgia was born at Gandía, in the Kingdom of Valencia, on the twenty-eighth of October, 1510, the eldest son of Juan de Borja, third Duke of Gandía, and of Juana de Aragón. The two lines that met in his cradle were among the most conspicuous in Christendom, and honesty requires that both be named.
On his father’s side he was the great-grandson of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, whose son Juan had been created the first Duke of Gandía; the duchy itself was the fruit of a pontificate that remains, by common judgment, among the most scandalous in the history of the Holy See. On his mother’s side he was the great-grandson of Ferdinand the Catholic, through Alfonso of Aragon, Archbishop of Zaragoza, the King’s natural son. The child who would become the most celebrated example of renunciation in sixteenth-century Spain was thus descended, through both parents, from churchmen who had not kept their vows. The Church has never asked us to pretend otherwise. Grace does not require a clean genealogy; it frequently prefers to work where the inheritance is heaviest.
His mother died when he was ten, and after a period of unrest in Valencia — the revolt of the Germanías drove the ducal household from Gandía — he was sent to Zaragoza and formed in the house of his uncle, the Archbishop Juan of Aragon. The boyhood anecdotes recorded by his first biographer, Pedro de Ribadeneira, dwell on an early piety and a taste for the things of the altar, and they may be received as traditio pia. What is historically secure is the education of a grandee: letters, music, horsemanship, arms, and the hunt, at which he excelled, and the whole etiquette of a court in which he was destined to shine.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The courtier
In 1528 he entered the household of the Emperor Charles V, and the following year he married Doña Leonor de Castro, a Portuguese lady of the Empress Isabella’s household. Charles created him Marquis of Lombay. The marriage was by every account a happy one and was blessed with eight children. He was the Emperor’s familiar, the Empress’s trusted servant, and a man of evident capacity in affairs. If ever a layman of that age had the world in his hand, it was this one.
The Empress at Granada
The hinge of his life is an episode the tradition has made famous, and it should be told with care. The Empress Isabella died at Toledo on the first of May, 1539. It fell to Francis, as her Master of Horse, to escort her body to the royal chapel at Granada and there, before burial, to swear to its identity. When the coffin was opened, the corruption of the face was such that the woman whom the whole court had admired as the most beautiful in Christendom could hardly be recognised.
The event itself is well attested (Tier 2). The words attributed to him in that hour — that he would never again serve a master who could die — belong to the early hagiographic tradition and are best held as its faithful summary of his resolution rather than as a recorded utterance (Tier 2–3). Their substance, at any rate, is borne out by everything that followed. He did not leave the world that day. But from that day the world no longer had him.
The viceroy
The same year Charles named him Viceroy of Catalonia, and he governed from 1539 to 1543 with a severity against banditry and a probity in justice that won him respect, together with a regime of private prayer, frequent Communion, and penance that was then remarkable in a layman of his rank. On his father’s death in 1543 he succeeded as fourth Duke of Gandía and retired to his estates, where he ruled as a Christian prince ought: building, endowing, reforming, and giving.
The widower and the Society
In these years he came to know the first companions of St. Ignatius, above all Blessed Peter Faber, and through them the Spiritual Exercises. Doña Leonor died on the twenty-seventh of March, 1546. Before the year was out the Duke had resolved to enter the Society of Jesus.
Ignatius received him with the prudence of a man who understood both the value of the prize and the scandal its seizure would cause. Francis was permitted to make his vows privately and, by papal dispensation, to remain in the world for some years in order to settle his children and his estates. During that interval he took the doctorate in theology at the college he had founded at Gandía, which Paul III raised to the rank of a university in 1547. The secret was kept until 1550, when he went to Rome for the Jubilee, and there, among other things, he furnished the means for the founding of the Roman College.
It is in these years that Ignatius wrote him the celebrated letter of 1548 (Tier 1; preserved in the Monumenta Ignatiana) counselling him to moderate his fasts and disciplines: the body, Ignatius told him, was to be kept as an instrument for the service of God and souls, and the blood he was shedding in his penances would be better spent in prayer and in the work for which God would ask an account. The letter is a small treatise on discretion, and the Duke obeyed it.
The renunciation
In 1551 he formally renounced the duchy in favour of his eldest son Carlos, received Holy Orders, and was ordained priest. His first public Mass drew a crowd from across the Basque country; his preaching thereafter drew larger ones, for Spain had never seen a duke do what he had done. He asked to be employed in the lowest offices, signed himself in his letters Francisco pecador — Francis, sinner — and spent, by Ribadeneira’s account, a portion of every day in meditation on his own nothingness. The Collect of his feast singles out exactly this: he was made a glorious imitator of Christ in terreni honoris contemptu, in the contempt of earthly honour. It was not a pose. Emperors and popes tried repeatedly to give him a cardinal’s hat, and he refused it with a steadiness that the Society itself came to regard as part of its foundation.
Humility tested
The humility was tested, and not only by successes. In 1559 the Index of the Inquisitor-General Fernando de Valdés condemned a volume printed under his name, Obras del Cristiano, which in fact bundled his own short spiritual treatises with writings by other hands. The climate of the Spanish Inquisition in those years was suspicious of the new spiritual movements and of the Society in particular, and Francis found himself under a cloud in his own country. He withdrew to Portugal and then, at the summons of Pius IV, to Rome in 1561. Whether that departure was prudence or flight has been debated since; the honest answer is that it was both, and that he bore the injury without public complaint and without ceasing to serve the Church that had permitted it.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
Commissary in Spain
From 1554 Ignatius made him Commissary General of the Society in Spain and Portugal, and under his government the Spanish province multiplied its colleges with astonishing speed. In these years he was also a counsellor of souls to some of the greatest of his age. St. Teresa of Ávila consulted him, and records in her Life (ch. 24) the reassurance he gave her concerning her prayer at a time when others were frightening her. He was a friend of St. Peter of Alcántara. He attended the Emperor Charles at his retirement at Yuste and was named an executor of his will.
Third General of the Society
On the death of Diego Laínez, the Second General Congregation elected him, on the second of July, 1565, the third Superior General of the Society of Jesus. He governed for seven years, and in that time he gave the young Society much of its permanent shape.
He completed and housed the Roman College; founded the novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, where St. Stanislaus Kostka would soon die; and with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese saw the foundation stone of the Gesù laid in 1568. He prescribed for the Society a daily hour of prayer, a measure that bound the contemplative inheritance of the Exercises to the active apostolate of the colleges. He revised and published the Society’s rules and fostered the method of study that would mature into the Ratio Studiorum.
The missions
Above all, he sent men out. Under his generalate the Society entered Spanish Florida (1566), Peru (1568), and New Spain (1572), and the missions in Brazil and the East were strengthened. The cost was paid in blood: Father Pedro Martínez was killed on the coast of Florida in 1566; Blessed Ignatius de Azevedo and thirty-nine companions were put to death by Huguenot corsairs at sea in 1570 on their way to Brazil; Father Juan Bautista de Segura and his companions were killed in 1571 at the Ajacán mission in Virginia. The man who had renounced a duchy now spent his sons.
Rome, the plague, and the last journey
When plague and famine struck Rome in 1566, he organised the Society’s relief of the city. In 1571 St. Pius V asked him to accompany Cardinal Michele Bonelli on the legation to Spain, Portugal, and France in support of the Holy League against the Turk. He was already broken in health; he went, and the journey finished him. He returned to Rome, borne by the Duke of Ferrara’s help over the last stages, to die among his brethren.
IV. Mors et Cultus
He died at Rome in the night between the thirtieth of September and the first of October, 1572, in his sixty-second year. Asked whether he wished to see any of his kin, he is said to have answered that his relatives were in heaven, and that he had no other. The dies natalis falling on the feast of St. Remigius, his commemoration in the Roman Calendar was fixed at the tenth of October.
He was beatified by Urban VIII in 1624 and canonized by Clement X in 1671. His feast was later extended to the universal Church and stands in the 1962 Missale Romanum on the tenth of October as a feast of the third class, with the Mass Os iusti of the Common of Abbots and a proper Collect.
In 1617 his remains were translated to Madrid at the instance of his grandson, the Duke of Lerma, and enshrined in the Jesuit house there. They suffered grievously in the burning of the Madrid churches in May 1931; what survives is venerated in the Jesuit church in that city. He is honoured as patron of Gandía, and in Portugal he has long been invoked against earthquakes.
In the calendar reformed after 1969 his feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar and is kept in the proper calendar of the Society of Jesus.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The principal sources for his life and teaching are his own correspondence and spiritual diary, edited in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (Sanctus Franciscus Borgia, 5 vols.), and the Vida of Pedro de Ribadeneira (1592), who knew him personally.
His surviving spiritual writings are brief and practical: exercises for the Christian’s day, a “mirror” of the Christian’s works, and treatises on the knowledge of self. Three convictions run through them.
First, self-knowledge as the floor of the spiritual life. He returned constantly to the consideration of his own sins and nothingness, not as a morbid exercise but as the ground that keeps a soul from building on sand. In this he stands squarely in the Augustinian tradition: noverim me, noverim te.
Second, prayer before activity. The daily hour of prayer he imposed on the Society is his teaching in institutional form. A Society of teachers and missionaries that ceased to pray would, he judged, cease to be anything worth sending.
Third, the renunciation that frees. The Gospel of his Mass gives Peter’s question and Our Lord’s answer: those who have left house, brethren, father, mother, wife, children, or lands for His Name’s sake “shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting” (Matt. 19:29). Francis left every one of those things, and the hundredfold he received was a Society of sons on four continents.
VI. Oratio
Domine Iesu Christe, veræ humilitatis et exemplar et præmium: quæsumus; ut, sicut beatum Franciscum in terreni honoris contemptu imitatorem tui gloriosum effecisti, ita nos eiusdem imitationis et gloriæ tribuas esse consortes: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
“O Lord Jesus Christ, who art both the pattern and the reward of true humility: we beseech Thee that, as Thou didst make blessed Francis Thy glorious imitator in the contempt of earthly honour, so Thou wouldst grant us to be partakers of the same imitation and of the same glory: who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
The Collect is addressed not to the Father but to the Son — a mark of the later, devotional strata of the Proper. It asks for two things and joins them: the imitation and the glory. The order is not negotiable.
VII. Aspiratio
Ecce nos reliquimus omnia, et secuti sumus te. “Behold, we have left all things, and have followed Thee.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
The Lives of the Saints path continues naturally with the founders and first generals of the Society — Ignatius, Faber, Laínez — and with the royal and noble renunciants whose lives make the same argument: Clotilde, Cloud, Elizabeth of Hungary, Casimir.
The Church History path treats the world that formed and wounded him: the Borgia pontificate and its long shadow, the Spanish Inquisition of Valdés and the Index of 1559, and the explosive missionary expansion of the Catholic Reform.
The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up his two great disciplines — the daily hour of mental prayer and the examen of self-knowledge — as they come down from the Spiritual Exercises.
Practice
Examine. What honour am I still serving that can die? Not in the abstract, but by name: a title, a reputation, a standing among particular people, an image of myself I am protecting. St. Francis looked into a coffin and saw what all such masters come to.
Do. Give one concrete hour this week to prayer that you would otherwise have given to your own advancement. If you keep no fixed time of mental prayer, begin one, however short, and keep it daily as the Society he governed was bound to do.
Pray. The Collect of the day, given above; or, when the occasion of pride presents itself, his own signature turned into a prayer: Francisco pecador — “I am a sinner; have mercy on me.”
Devote. The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery, the Carrying of the Cross, considering Our Lord stripped of all earthly honour on the road to Calvary; or the Fifth Joyful Mystery, the Finding in the Temple, where the Son puts His Father’s business before every human tie.
Sancte Francisce Borgia, ora pro nobis.