Francis Xavier

"Following the baptisms, the new Christians return to their homes and come back with their wives and families to be in their turn prepared for baptism. After all had been baptised, I order that the tem…"

"Almost from the time of Xavier's actual presence on the Coast, the work of legend-building began, and it came to be firmly believed that he possessed miraculous powers, which extended even to the rais…"

"The second necessity for the Christians is that your Majesty establish the Holy Inquisition, because there are many who live according to the Jewish law, and according to the Mahomedan sect, without a…"

"Everyone who came in contact with Xavier seems to have agreed that he was a saint. Men might disagree with him; but in all the extensive records there is not a single word that runs contrary to the ge…"

"Xavier lived up to this tradition of the Church on the Coromandel Coast. He discovered that, though baptised in 1534, the Parava fisherman could hardly be called Christians in practice. Some of them s…"

"But it was St. Xavier who made anti-Brahminism the central theme of his missionary thrust. “These are,” he wrote, “the most perverse people in the world...they never tell the truth, but think of nothi…"

"To a considerable extent the shape of Xavier's missionary work was determined by this threefold authority. Personally the most modest of men, his imagination was fired by the progress of Portuguese di…"

"The impatient Xavier, still dissatisfied with the result of his labour wrote to the King of Portugal that the only hope of increasing the number of Christians was by the use of the secular power of th…"