Saint Francois Xavier-Original Letters and more info

December 22, 2002

Here are some of Saint Francis Xavier's original letters

<May the grace and love of Christ our Lord always help> and favor us !

Amen. . . . Now to speak of what I know you are most anxious to hear

about the state of religion in India. In this region of Travancore,

where I now am, God has drawn very many to the faith of His Son Jesus

Christ. In the space of one month I made Christians of more than ten

thousand. This is the method I followed. As soon as I arrived in any

heathen village where they had sent for me to give them baptism, I

gave orders for all, men, women, and children, to be collected in one

place. Then, beginning with the first elements of the Christian faith,

I taught them there is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and at

the same time, calling on the three divine Persons and one God, I made

them each make three times the sign of the Cross; then, putting on a

surplice, I began to recite in a loud voice and in their own language

the form of the general Confession, the Apostle's Creed, the Ten

Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the <Ave Maria>, and the <Salve

Regina>. Two years ago I translated all these prayers into the

language of the country, and learned them by heart. I recited them

slowly so that all of every age and condition followed me in them.

Then I began to explain shortly the articles of the Creed and the Ten

Commandments in the language of the country. Where the people appeared

to me sufficiently instructed to receive baptism, I ordered them all

to ask God's pardon publicly for the sins of their past life, and to

do this with a loud voice and in the presence of their neighbors still

hostile to the Christian religion, in order to touch the hearts of the

heathen and confirm the faith of the good. All the heathen are filled

with admiration at the holiness of the law of God, and express the

greatest shame at having lived so long in ignorance of the true God.

They willingly hear about the mysteries and rules of the Christian

religion, and treat me, poor sinner as I am, with the greatest

respect. Many, however, put away from them with hardness of heart the

truth which they well know.

When I have done my instruction, I ask one by one all those who desire

baptism if they believe without hesitation each of the articles of the

faith. All immediately, holding their arms in the form of the Cross,

declare with one voice that they believe all entirely. Then at last I

baptize them in due form, and I give to each his name written on a

ticket. After their baptism the new Christians go back to their houses

and bring me their wives and families for baptism. When all are

baptized I order all the temples of their false gods to be destroyed

and all the idols to be broken in pieces. I can give you no idea of

the joy I feel in seeing this done, witnessing the destruction of the

idols by the very people who but lately adored them. In all the towns

and villages I leave the Christian doctrine in writing in the language

of the country, and I prescribe at the same time the manner in which

it is to be taught in the morning and evening schools. When I have

done all this in one place, I pass to another, and so on successively

to the rest. In this way I go all round the country, bringing the

natives into the fold of Jesus Christ, and the joy that I feel in this

is far too great to be expressed in a letter, or even by word of

mouth....

You may judge from this alone, my very dear brothers, what great and

fertile harvests this uncultivated field promises to produce. This

part of the world is so ready, so teeming with shooting corn, as I may

say, that I hope within this very year to make as many as a hundred

thousand Christians....

And now what ought you to do when you see the minds of these people so

well prepared to receive the seed of the Gospel? May God make known to

you His most holy will, and give you at the same time strength and

courage to carry it out; and may He in His Providence send as many as

possible of you into this country!

The least and most lonely of your brothers, Francis

>From Cochin, January 27th, 1545.

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(LIV)

favor us! Amen. . . .

.. . . Nearly two hundred miles beyond Molucca there is a region which

is called Maurica. Here, many years ago, a great number of the

inhabitants became Christians, but having been totally neglected and

left, as it were, orphans by the death of the priests who taught them,

they have returned to their former barbarous and savage state. It is

in every way a land full of perils, and especially to be dreaded by

strangers on account of the great ferocity of the natives and the many

kinds of poison which it is there common to give in what is eaten and

drunk. The fear of this has deterred priests from abroad from going

there to help the islanders.

I have considered in what great necessity they are, with no one to

instruct them or give them the sacraments, and I have come to think

that I ought to provide for their salvation even at the risk of my

life. I have resolved to go thither as soon as possible, and to offer

my life to the risk. Truly I have put all my trust in God, and I wish

as much as is in me to obey the precept of our Lord Jesus Christ: "He

that will save his life shall lose it; and he that shall lose his life

for My sake shall find it."[4] Words easy in thought but not easy in

practice. When the hour comes when life must be lost that you may find

it in God, when danger of death is on you, and you see plainly that to

obey God you must sacrifice life, then, I know not how, it comes to

pass that what before seemed a very clear precept is involved in

incredible darkness.... It is in such circumstances that we see

clearly how great after all our weakness is, how frail and unstable is

our human nature here.

Many friends of mine have prayed me earnestly not to go amongst so

barbarous a people. Afterwards, when they saw they gained nothing by

prayers or tears, they brought me each what he thought the best

possible antidote against poison of all sorts; but I have

unrelentingly sent them all back, lest after burdening myself with

medicines, I should have another burden which before I was without,

that of fear. I had put all my hope in the protection of Divine

Providence, and I thought I ought to be on my guard, lest relying on

human aid I should lose something of my trust in God. So I thanked

them all and earnestly entreated them to pray God for me, for that no

more certain remedy could possibly be found....

>From Amboyna (May, 1546)

(H. T. Coleridge, <Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier>, 1872.)

May the grace and charity of Christ our Lord always help and favor us!

Amen.

It is now the third year since I left Portugal. I am writing to you

for the third time, having as yet received only one letter from you,

dated February 1542. God is my witness what joy it caused me. I only

received it two months ago, later than is usual for letters to reach

India, because the vessel which brought it had passed the winter at

Mozambique.

I and Francis Mancias are now living amongst the Christians of

Comorin. They are very numerous, and increase largely every day. When

I first came I asked them, if they knew anything about our Lord Jesus

Christ? but when I came to the points of faith in detail and asked

them what they thought of them, and what more they believed now than

when they were Infidels, they only replied that they were Christians,

but that as they are ignorant of Portuguese, they know nothing of the

precepts and mysteries of our holy religion. We could not understand

one another, as I spoke Castilian and they Malabar; so I picked out

the most intelligent and well-read of them, and then sought out with

the greatest diligence men who knew both languages. We held meetings

for several days, and by our joint efforts and with infinite

difficulty we translated the Catechism into the Malabar tongue. This I

learnt by heart, and then I began to go through all the villages of

the coast, calling around me by the sound of a bell as many as I

could, children and men. I asembled them twice a day and taught them

the Christian doctrine: and thus, in the space of a month, the

children had it well by heart. And all the time I kept telling them to

go on teaching in their turn whatever they had learnt to their

parents, family, and neighbors.

Every Sunday I collected them all, men and women, boys and girls, in

the church. They came with great readiness and with a great desire for

instruction. Then, in the hearing of all, I began by calling on the

name of the most holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and I

recited aloud the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Creed in the

language of the country: they all followed me in the same words, and

delighted in it wonderfully. Then I repeated the Creed by myself,

dwelling upon each article singly. Then I asked them as to each

article, whether they believed it unhesitatingly; and all, with a loud

voice and their hands crossed over their breasts, professed aloud that

they truly believed it. I take care to make them repeat the Creed

oftener than the other prayers; and I tell them that those who believe

all that is contained therein are called Christians. After explaining

the Creed I go on to the Commandments, teaching them that the

Christian law is contained in those ten precepts, and that every one

who observes them all faithfully is a good and true Christian and is

certain of eternal salvation, and that, on the other hand, whoever

neglects a single one of them is a bad Christian, and will be cast

into hell unless he is truly penitent for his sin. Converts and

heathen alike are astonished at all this, which shows them the

holiness of the Christian law, its perfect consistency with itself,

and its agreement with reason.

As to the numbers who become Christians, you may understand them from

this, that it often happens to me to be hardly able to use my hands

from the fatigue of baptizing: often in a single day I have baptized

whole villages. Sometimes I have lost my voice and strength altogether

with repeating again and again the Credo and the other forms. The

fruit that is reaped by the baptism of infants, as well as by the

instruction of children and others, is quite incredible. These

children, I trust heartily, by the grace of God, will be much better

than their fathers. They show an ardent love for the Divine law, and

an extraordinary zeal for learning our holy religion and imparting it

to others. Their hatred for idolatry is marvellous. They get into

feuds with the heathen about it, and whenever their own parents

practise it, they reproach them and come off to tell me at once.

Whenever I hear of any act of idolatrous worship, I go to the place

with a large band of these children, who very soon load the devil with

a greater amount of insult and abuse than he has lately received of

honor and worship from their parents, relations, and acquaintances.

The children run at the idols, upset them, dash them down, break them

to pieces, spit on them, trample on them, kick them about, and in

short heap on them every possible outrage.

I had been living for nearly four months in a Christian village,

occupied in translating the Catechism. A great number of natives came

from all parts to entreat me to take the trouble to go to their houses

and call on God by the bedsides of their sick relatives. Such numbers

also of sick made their own way to us, that I had enough to do to read

a Gospel over each of them. At the same time we kept on with our daily

work, instructing the children, baptizing converts, translating the

Catechism, answering difficulties, and burying the dead. For my part I

desired to satisfy all, both the sick who came to me themselves, and

those who came to beg on the part of others, lest if I did not, their

confidence in, and zeal for, our holy religion should relax, and I

thought it wrong not to do what I could in answer to their prayers.

But the thing grew to such a pitch that it was impossible for me

myself to satisfy all, and at the same time to avoid their quarrelling

among themselves, every one striving to be the first to get me to his

own house; so I hit on a way of serving all at once. As I could not go

myself, I sent round children whom I could trust in my place. They

went to the sick persons, assembled their families and neighbours,

recited the Creed with them, and encouraged the sufferers to conceive

a certain and well-founded confidence of their restoration. Then after

all this, they recited the prayers of the Church. To make my tale

short, God was moved by the faith and piety of these children and of

the others, and restored to a great number of sick persons health both

of body and soul. How good He was to them! He made the very disease of

their bodies the occasion of calling them to salvation, and drew them

to the Christian faith almost by force!

I have also charged these children to teach the rudiments of Christian

doctrine to the ignorant in private houses, in the streets, and the

crossways. As soon as I see that this has been well started in one

village, I go on to another and give the same instructions and the

same commission to the children, and so I go through in order the

whole number of their villages. When I have done this and am going

away, I leave in each place a copy of the Christian doctrine, and tell

all those who know how to write to copy it out, and all the others are

to learn it by heart and to recite it from memory every day. Every

feast day I bid them meet in one place and sing all together the

elements of the faith. For this purpose I have appointed in each of

the thirty Christian villages men of intelligence and character who

are to preside over these meetings, and the Governor, Don Martin

Alfonso, who is so full of love for our Society and of zeal for

religion, has been good enough at our request to allot a yearly

revenue of 4000 gold farlams for the salary of these catechists. He

has an immense friendship for ours, and desires with all his heart

that some of them should be sent hither, for which he is always asking

in his letters to the King.

There is now in these parts a very large number of persons who have

only one reason for not becoming Christian, and that is that there is

no one to make them Christians. It often comes into my mind to go

round all the Universities of Europe, and especially that of Paris,

crying out everywhere like a madman, and saying to all the learned men

there whose learning is so much greater than their charity, "Ah! what

a multitude of souls is through your fault shut out of heaven and

falling into hell!"

Would to God that these men who labor so much in gaining knowledge

would give as much thought to the account they must one day give to

God of the use they have made of their learning and of the talents

entrusted to them! . . .

We have in these parts a class of men among the pagans who are called

Brahmins. They keep up the worship of the gods, the superstitious

rites of religion, frequenting the temples and taking care of the

idols. They are as perverse and wicked a set as can anywhere be found,

and I always apply to them the words of holy David, "from an unholy

race and a wicked and crafty man deliver me, O Lord." They are liars

and cheats to the very backbone. Their whole study is, how to deceive

most cunningly the simplicity and ignorance of the people. They give

out publicly that the gods command certain offerings to be made to

their temples, which offerings are simply the things that the Brahmins

themselves wish for, for their own maintenance and that of their

wives, children, and servants. Thus they make the poor folk believe

that the images of their gods eat and drink, dine and sup like men,

and some devout persons are found who really offer to the idol twice a

day, before dinner and supper, a certain sum of money. The Brahmins

eat sumptuous meals to the sound of drums, and make the ignorant

believe that the gods are banqueting. When they are in need of any

supplies, and even before, they give out to the people that the gods

are angry because the things they have asked for have not been sent,

and that if the people do not take care, the gods will punish them by

slaughter, disease, and the assaults of the devils. And the poor

ignorant creatures, with the fear of the gods before them, obey them

implicitly. These Brahmins have barely a tincture of literature, but

they make up for their poverty in learning by cunning and malice.

Those who belong to these parts are very indignant with me for

exposing their tricks. Whenever they talk to me with no one by to hear

them they acknowledge that they have no other patrimony but the idols,

by their lies about which they procure their support from the people.

They say that I, poor creature as I am, know more than all of them put

together.

They often send me a civil message and presents, and make a great

complaint when I send them all back again. Their object is to bribe me

to connive at their evil deeds. So they declare that they are

convinced that there is only one God, and that they will pray to Him

for me. And I, to return the favor, answer whatever occurs to me, and

then lay bare, as far as I can, to the ignorant people whose blind

superstitions have made them their slaves, their imposture and tricks,

and this has induced many to leave the worship of the false gods, and

eagerly become Christians. If it were not for the opposition of the

Brahmins, we should have them all embracing the religion of Jesus

Christ.

The heathen inhabitants of the country are commonly ignorant of

letters, but by no means ignorant of wickedness. All the time I have

been here in this country I have only converted one Brahmin, a

virtuous young man, who has now undertaken to teach the Catechism to

children. As I go through the Christian villages, I often pass by the

temples of the Brahmins, which they call pagodas. One day lately, I

happened to enter a pagoda where there were about two hundred of them,

and most of them came to meet me. We had a long conversation, after

which I asked them what their gods enjoined them in order to obtain

the life of the blessed. There was a long discussion amongst them as

to who should answer me. At last, by common consent, the commission

was given to one of them, of greater age and experience than the rest,

an old man, of more than eighty years. He asked me in return, what

commands the God of the Christians laid on them. I saw the old man's

perversity, and I refused to speak a word till he had first answered

my question. So he was obliged to expose his ignorance, and replied

that their gods required two duties of those who desired to go to them

hereafter, one of which was to abstain from killing cows, because

under that form the gods were adored; the other was to show kindness

to the Brahmins, who were the worshippers of the gods. This answer

moved my indignation, for I could not but grieve intensely at the

thought of the devils being worshipped instead of God by these blind

heathen, and I asked them to listen to me in turn. Then I, in a loud

voice, repeated the Apostles' Creed and the Ten Commandments. After

this I gave in their own language a short explanation, and told them

what Paradise is, and what Hell is, and also who they are who go to

Heaven to join the company of the blessed, and who are to be sent to

the eternal punishments of hell. Upon hearing these things they all

rose up and vied with one another in embracing me, and in confessing

that the God of the Christians is the true God, as His laws are so

agreeable to reason. Then they asked me if the souls of men like those

of other animals perished together with the body. God put into my

mouth arguments of such a sort, and so suited to their ways of

thinking, that to their great joy I was able to prove to them the

immortality of the soul. I find, by the way, that the arguments which

are to convince these ignorant people must by no means be subtle, such

as those which are found in the books of learned schoolmen, but must

be such as their minds can understand. They asked me again how the

soul of a dying person goes out of the body, how it was, whether it

was as happens to us in dreams, when we seem to be conversing with our

friends and acquaintance? (Ah, how often this happens to me, dearest

brothers, when I am dreaming of you!) Was this because the soul then

leaves the body? And again, whether God was black or white? For as

there is so great a variety of color among men, and the Indians being

black themselves, consider their own color the best, they believe that

their gods are black. On this account the great majority of their

idols are as black as black can be, and moreover are generally so

rubbed over with oil as to smell detestably, and seem to be as dirty

as they are ugly and horrible to look at. To all these questions I was

able to reply so as to satisfy them entirely. But when I came to the

point at last, and urged them to embrace the religion which they felt

to be true, they made that same objection which we hear from many

Christians when urged to change their life---that they would set men

talking about them if they altered their ways and their religion, and

besides, they said that they should be afraid that, if they did so,

they would have nothing to live on and support themselves by.

I have found just one Brahmin and no more in all this coast who is a

man of learning: he is said to have studied in a very famous Academy.

Knowing this, I took measures to converse with him alone. He then told

me at last, as a great secret, that the students of this Academy are

at the outset made by their masters to take an oath not to reveal

their mysteries, but that, out of friendship for me, he would disclose

them to me. One of these mysteries was that there only exists one God,

the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, whom men are bound to

worship, for the idols are simply images of devils. The Brahmins have

certain books of sacred literature which contain, as they say, the

laws of God. The masters teach in a learned tongue, as we do in Latin.

He also explained to me these divine precepts one by one; but it would

be a long business to write out his commentary, and indeed not worth

the trouble. Their sages keep as a feast our Sunday. On this day they

repeat at different hours this one player: "I adore Thee, O God; and I

implore Thy help for ever." They are bound by oath to repeat this

prayer frequently, and in a low voice. My friend added, that the law

of nature permitted them to have more wives than one, and their sacred

books predicted that the time would come when all men should embrace

the same religion. After all this he asked me in my turn to explain

the principal mysteries of the Christian religion, promising to keep

them secret. I replied, that I would not tell him a word about them

unless he promised beforehand to publish abroad what I should tell him

of the religion of Jesus Christ. He made the promise, and then I

carefully explained to him those words of Jesus Christ in which our

religion is summed up: "He who believes and is baptized shall be

saved." This text, with my commentary on it, which embraced the whole

of the Apostles' Creed, he wrote down carefully, as well as the

Commandments, on account of their close connection with the Creed.

He told me also that one night he had dreamt that he had been made a

Christian to his immense delight, and that he had become my brother

and companion. He ended by begging me to make him a Christian

secretly. But as he made certain conditions opposed to right and

justice, I put off his baptism. I don't doubt but that by God's mercy

he will one day be a Christian. I charged him to teach the ignorant

and unlearned that there is only one God, Creator of heaven and earth;

but he pleaded the obligation of his oath, and said he could not do

so, especially as he was much afraid that if he did it he should

become possessed by an evil spirit....

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Source:

Henry James Coleridge, ed., The Life and Letters of St. Francis

Xavier, 2d Ed., 2 Vols., (London: Burns & Oates, 1890), Vol. I, pp.

151-163; reprinted in William H. McNeil and Mitsuko Iriye, eds.,

Modern Asia and Africa, Readings in World History Vol. 9, (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 4-11.

Modern History Sourcebook:

St. Francis Xavier:

Letter on the Missions, to St. Ignatius de Loyola, 1549

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May the grace and charity of our Lord Christ always be with us! Amen.

My own and only Father in the Heart of Christ, I think that the many

letters from this place which have lately been sent to Rome will

inform you how prosperously the affairs of religion go on in these

parts, through your prayers and the good bounty of God. But there seem

to be certain things which I ought myself to speak about to you; so I

will just touch on a few points relating to these parts of the world

which are so distant from Rome. In the first place, the whole race of

the Indians, as far as I have been able to see, is very barbarous; and

it does not like to listen to anything that is not agreeable to its

own manners and customs, which, as I say, are barbarous. It troubles

itself very little to learn anything about divine things and things

which concern salvation. Most of the Indians are of vicious

disposition, and are adverse to virtue. Their instability, levity, and

inconstancy of mind are incredible; they have hardly any honesty, so

inveterate are their habits of sin and cheating. We have hard work

here, both in keeping the Christians up to the mark and in converting

the heathen. And, as we are your children, it is fair that on this

account you should take great care of us and help us continually by

your prayers to God. You know very well what a hard business it is to

teach people who neither have any knowledge of God nor follow reason,

but think it a strange and intolerable thing to be told to give up

their habits of sin, which have now gained all the force of nature by

long possession.

The experience which I have of these countries makes me think that I

can affirm with truth, that there is no prospect of perpetuating our

Society out here by means of the natives themselves, and that the

Christian religion will hardly survive us who are now in the country;

so that it is quite necessary that continual supplies of ours should

be sent out from Europe. We have now some of the Society in all parts

of India where there are Christians. Four are in the Moluccas, two at

Malacca, six in the Comorin Promontory, two at Coulan, as many at

Bazain, four at Socotra. The distances between these places are

immense; for instance, the Moluccas are more than a thousand leagues

from Goa, Malacca five hundred, Cape Comorin two hundred, Coulan one

hundred and twenty, Bazain sixty, and Socotra three hundred. In each

place there is one of the Society who is Superior of the rest. As

these Superiors are men of remarkable prudence and virtue, the others

are very well content.

The Portuguese in these countries are masters only of the sea and of

the coast. On the mainland they have only the towns in which they

live. The natives themselves are so enormously addicted to vice as to

be little adapted to receive the Christian religion. They so dislike

it that it is most difficult to get them to hear us if we begin to

preach about it, and they think it like death to be asked to become

Christians. So for the present we devote ourselves to keeping the

Christians whom we have. Certainly, if the Portuguese were more

remarkable for their kindness to the new converts, a great number

would become Christians; as it is, the heathen see that the converts

are despised and looked down upon by the Portuguese, and so, as is

natural, they are unwilling to become converts themselves. For all

these reasons there is no need for me to labor in these countries, and

as I have learnt from good authorities that there is a country near

China called Japan, the inhabitants of which are all heathen, quite

untouched by Mussulmans or Jews, and very eager to learn what they do

not know both in things divine and things natural, I have determined

to go thither as soon as I can....

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Source:

Henry James Coleridge, ed., The Life and Letters of St. Francis

Xavier, 2d Ed., 2 Vols., (London: Burns & Oates, 1890), Vol. II, pp.

67-75; reprinted in William H. McNeil and Mitsuko Iriye, eds., Modern

Asia and Africa, Readings in World History Vol. 9, (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1971), pp. 11-13.

*******

Also check out the following article

Vishwas Varghese

Why The Pope Should Apologize To India (Available on www.hvk.org and

www.atributetohinduism.com .

The VHP's protest march against the Pope's visit in India this week,

has drawn quite a lot of attention and flak as a misguided attempt to

"create disorder by fascist". The Indian media has been having a field

day with mongering rumors that seek to undermine and defame the

Hindutva oriented organizations. One has to look beyond all the

politically motivated hype and hoopla and look analytically at what is

the logic behind the demand for the Pope's apology. The rationale

behind this demand is cited to be the Christian Inquisition which took

place in Goa, for the purpose of forcefully converting the Hindus to

Christianity. Let us take a look at some historical facts to see if

the Hindutva minded organizations are truly justified in asking the

pope as the representative of the Catholic church to apologize and

atone for such crimes against Hindus in the past.

Alan Machado-Prabhu has recently written a book about the history of

Goa starting from ancient times, titled Sarasvati's Children: A

History of the Mangalorean Christians. The book describes in detail

the origins of Goa's inhabitants. According to Machado's account and

that of several established historians, some time around 1000 B.C. an

immense number of Vedic people who originally lived on the banks of

the river Sarasvati migrated to this coast. Their emigration was

forced by the drying up of the Sarasvati River which was the basis for

much of the so called Indus Valley civilization. This civilization has

now been termed the Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization in view of its

indelible dependence on the Sarasvati and Sindhu rivers. Moreover the

work of such accomplished scholars as N.S. Rajaram, David Frawley, N.

Jha, S.R. Rao, etc. has proven that the Sarasvati Sindhu civilization

was a Vedic one. As a consequence the people who were forced to seek

fresh fields and pastures in view of the drying up of Sarasvati, were

none other than Hindus. Large numbers of them followed the ancient

Dakshinapatha, the southern route and came all the way to Gomantak and

to what is now called Goa. Gomantak had no indigenous population and

therefore made an ideal place to settle down for these scholars.

The new location was a highly successful one because of the fertile

quality of the land. The majority of the emigrants were highly

educated and well versed in the advanced scientific, artistic and

literary traditions of Vedic civilization and therefore began to be

called the Brahmins of the north (Gaud). Eventually they began to be

referred to as the Gaud Sarasvat Brahmins. They were famous all over

India and abroad for their immense scholarship and learning. Over the

centuries Goa was comparatively undisturbed under the rule of the

Mauryas, the Kadambas and the Chalukya dynasty. But around 1327 AD Goa

was conquered by Mohammed Bin Tughlak and thousands of Hindus were

massacred in cold blood. A number of murderous Muslim rulers such as

Bahamani king Mohammed Shah, Yusuf Adil Shah, etc. held the state in

the grip of terror until the Portugese Christians who came to foreign

lands led by Vasco De Gama in the hope of converting millions of

"Heathens" managed to overcome them. By the mid 1500s, the Portugese

had established a strong hold on Indian ports and the terror of the

Inquisition sanctioned by the Catholic Church was established and

institutionalized in Goa. The main objective of the Inquisitors was to

ensure that all natives be converted to Christianity whether by the

sword, bribery or blackmail.

Around 1540 the Inquisition was at its peak, thousands of Hindus were

dispossessed, massacred and mutilated if they refused to convert. Half

the property of a person found in possession of idols went to the

Church. According to Machado, "The Church acquired urban and rural

properties on an impressive scale". An incredible amount of loot and

plunder of the immense riches possessed by the Hindus was shipped off

to the Church. Hindus were forbidden from performing any of their

festivals openly. Hindu were amassed and deliberately forced to

participate in grotesque public performances for the Christian feast

days during the very same days that they used to celebrate Hindu

festivals. To this day these macabre enactments still survive in Goa

today as the Milagres feast dance, the Carnavalo and the Festa de

Leques.

In 1542 the most barbaric of these oppressors in the form of Jesuit

priest "Saint" Francis Xavier arrived on the scene. The incredible

hatred and venom that this man nursed against the Hindus is obvious

from his own writings and records. In 1543 , Xavier sent a Letter from

India, to the Society of Jesus at Rome which outlined his perspective

of the Indian people. The extremely racist and intolerant views of

Christian proselytizers like Xavier pour out of every word in this

letter:

"We have in these parts a class of men among the pagans who are called

Brahmins. They keep up the worship of the gods, the superstitious

rites of religion, frequenting the temples and taking care of the

idols. They are as perverse and wicked a set as can anywhere be found,

and I always apply to them the words of holy David, "from an unholy

race and a wicked and crafty man deliver me, O Lord." They are liars

and cheats to the very backbone. These are the ignorant people whose

blind superstitions have made the others their slaves, their imposture

and tricks, and this has induced many to leave the worship of the

false gods, and eagerly become Christians. If it were not for the

opposition of the Brahmins, we should have them all embracing the

religion of Jesus Christ.

As there is so great a variety of color among men, and the Indians

being black themselves, consider their own color the best, they

believe that their gods are black. On this account the great majority

of their idols are as black as black can be, and moreover are

generally so rubbed over with oil as to smell detestably, and seem to

be as dirty as they are ugly and horrible to look at."

Xavier would become an increasingly frustrated and embittered man as

he discovered the obstinate stubbornness with which the Hindus refused

to be forced to convert to Christianity. His frustration is evident in

a Letter on the Missions sent in 1949 to St. Ignatius de Loyola, of

the Catholic Church. In it as usual he displays his ample hatred for

the "idolaters" as he calls the Hindus, but his most vitriolic

animosity is reserved for the Brahmins who were the primary defenders

of Hinduism. By this time Xavier has apparently become aware of the

fact that it is the Brahmins who are the final line of defense in

keeping the Hindu followers together. His inability to suppress them

leads to his sweeping generalization that the entire race of Indians

is "barbaric" in this letter:

"May the grace and charity of our Lord Christ always be with us! Amen.