Saint Francis Xavier and the Goan Inquisition

“O Tempora, O Mores” -- Not so Fast!

The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, Peter Paul Rubens, 1617/1618 

I have been fascinated by the relatively short career of Francis Xavier since Jesuit Prep School. When I started practicing Zen and learned that he was the first Christian with any religious training to contact a Japanese Zen monk, my admiration grew. Then, reading his letters to Ignatius under the direction of Jesuit Brother Tom Marshall, I was struck both by what seemed to be genuine curiosity, an ability to form friendships, and then, in the blink of an eye, to jump into an extremely myopic, dogmatic mindset, hurling condemnations equal to the most ferocious defender of the faith, espousing positions I find barbaric.

When I first went to India, perhaps the second or third trip, we went to Mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesu, where the mummified body of Xavier is venerated. I wrote about it in my blog: Goa, Saint Francis and Me. My first impression was that this was another take on the Indian custom of veneration of saints. But then I discovered an indigenous movement to send Francis’s body back to Lisbon or Rome. The Konkani Christian Victims of Francis Xavier’s Atrocities group began their campaign in 1961 when the Republic of India seized control of Goa and its territories. Based in Mangalore, the Konkani victims claim to be descendants of the people whose lives were destroyed by the Portuguese Inquisition. Xavier asked the King of Portugal to send Inquisitors to Goa. They arrived eight years after Xavier’s death, but that does not absolve him of the murder of 57 Hindus, Muslims and new Indian Christians burned at the stake, nor the property confiscated by those whose baptism secured their status in the upper class or their Portuguese overlords.

In 1994, the Indian Cardinal Simon Pimenta was asked about the controversy surrounding the veneration of the body of Francis Xavier in Goa. He said: “The beliefs and actions of people of earlier ages cannot be judged by the principles of a later age.” The Cardinal was perhaps a bit confused by his own good deeds and his personal, compassionate response to the Teaching of our Lord. Or, like many otherwise good men improperly trained by Jesuits in the classics, when at a loss for words, he grabbed a line from Cicero and tried to construct a plausible excuse. Or perhaps he had fallen under the spell of hagiographers who inflated the number of Xavier’s already impressive 30,000 converts to 700,000 people across Asia between his arrival in Goa, India in May of 1542 and his death on Shangchuan Island off the coast of China in December of 1552. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: a man of the church he loved was embarrassed by the clear and deeply inhuman acts of one of the most important founding fathers, and he fumbled.

But I will condemn him. Our lovely Cardinal friend fumbled. He had no other choice. Hagiography is a straitjacket. The formula dictates stories of saints carefully crafted to “edify,” even if it requires erasing or editing, exaggeration, or stuffing inconvenient facts into an unnoticed corner where they won’t attract attention. Miracles, of course, are required before the Church recommends a particular person’s holy life as worth imitating. They usually also embody some praiseworthy trait beyond avoiding sin, believing dogma, and submitting to the will of God, as if it were contained in the holy rule of a sanctioned religious institute. That’s all lumped together as heroic virtue. I am concerned here with what was left out.

Hagiography leaves enormous room to fuddle. In the recent case of Josemaría Escrivá, both Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict wanted to elevate Opus Dei because it produced the conservative priests they both favored, but they rushed the job and got sucked in by Opus’s self-aggrandizement and propaganda. This left the infallible Church defending the indefensible: human trafficking, the exploitation of women and teenagers, financial irregularities, and other cult-like behaviors. But dear God, don’t touch the halo over Josemaria’s head.

In the case of Francis Xavier, the Jesuits waited until the footnotes to mention that he asked the Portuguese to send the Inquisition to Goa. The only other prominent Jesuit tainted by the Inquisition was Robert Bellarmine, another saint who actually signed the warrant for Giordano Bruno’s execution, and was an Inquisitor at the trial of Fulgenzio Manfredi, who was also burned at the stake. Bellarmine did convince Galileo to renounce the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the sun, based on the evidence of scripture, which was scientifically wrong but does not concern me as I’m examining his misguided use of the death penalty.

Xavier’s conversion strategy and subsequent enforcement of Christian discipline among his fledgling churches used the deadly force of a conquering army. I was present at a conference where Father X DeSousa, a Goan Jesuit, described his ancestors' conversion by drawing his index finger across his neck. The choice between baptism or execution leaves little room for free will.

Xavier died when he was only 46. He built a massive and inflated record as a missionary while still a relatively young man. I always felt that under the heroism was a full-blown fanatic, a religious soldier of fortune with a magical worldview. He jumped aboard a Portuguese carrack, becoming its chaplain, as it sailed to India in the service of a greedy colonial power. He was no doubt brilliant, initiating a conversation about the numinous world, but then too quickly expropriating every means at hand to gain dominance and force submission.

I am not insinuating, nor do I believe that Pimenta condones or justifies any of the methods or goals of the Inquisition, yet here we are: it is indisputable that Xavier requested that Portuguese inquisitors enforce the straight-and-narrow in doctrine and politics, supporting an imperial, colonializing, slave-trading complex to plunder Goa. His presence gave God’s blessing to their colonial designs.

Adhering to Archbishop Pimenta’s warning about extracting facts from their particular tempora et mores, we’ll have to wait another century for the Age of Enlightenment. It’’s not particularly fair to burden a religious figure of the sixteenth century with attitudes from our own post-colonial experience, but I refuse to condone participating in the fiery executions of the Inquisition as worthy of any saint, not even a swashbuckling Jesuit.

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Notes:

During the Goa Inquisition, which lasted from 1560 to 1812, about 16,000 people were brought to trial. Out of these cases, records show that 57 people were put to death by burning, and 64 were burned in effigy (using a statue because they had already died or fled). Thousands more faced other punishments, such as prison, exile, or the loss of their property. The Portuguese colonial government destroyed most of the records in 1812, so these figures are likely low, conservative estimates.

The First Provincial Council (1567): In Goa, church authorities played a major role in refining legal definitions of slavery. The Council condemned "unjust" slavery (such as capturing people during peacetime) but validated slavery resulting from a "just war" or self-sale during extreme famines.

Xavier personal attitude contributed to (not just condoned) the continuation of enslavement by the Portuguese. Though far fewer Indians were enslaved than West Africans, Indians were captured and sold as chattel. According to Teotonio de Souza, the former head of the Xavier Center of Historical Research, “[Xavier’s] appreciation of Indians, whom he called Negroes, was negative, and he became enthusiastic in his mission to Asia only after discovering the ‘white people’ of Japan and China.”