Ambrose Bierce, the famous author of sardonic short stories, once defined a saint as “a dead sinner revised and edited.” He was probably prompted by the profiles of various saints emerging in the nineteenth century that were circulated by the Church, with good bits polished further and bad bits redacted to maintain the holy aura of the subject. Take Francis Xavier, for instance, whose name graces the portals of fine educational institutions across the world.
He has a reputation for being a consecrated saint who delivers miracles and even has a basilica in his name in Goa, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. And yes, he has a local moniker too – ‘Goencho Saib,’ which means ‘protector of Goa’… Though all this veneer of piety and a cloak of holiness can barely conceal the stench of a thousand rotting corpses that Francis Xavier has laid in his wake and a culture of heinous torture and genocidal extermination that he spearheaded, which later became the standard template followed by most cruel dictators and evil regimes across the world. One could argue that Francis Xavier was indeed a saint – a patron saint to the likes of Aurangzeb, Hitler, and barbarians of his ilk.
The Portuguese rule in India is the least documented among all the colonial powers that set foot in this land. Not many are aware that the Portuguese were the first colonial power to arrive in India and the last to leave. Francis Xavier was among the earliest Jesuits to have arrived here on papal decree. Mind you; the English came to India for trading and mooching off the riches of land; they had never intended to put down their roots permanently here. Unlike the Portuguese, who made their way to India at the express request of the Pope to convert our Sanatan lands into Christian hellholes, they had never intended to leave either, declaring Goa as an integral part of Portugal’s mainland. Right from the day they had set foot in Goa, the Portuguese were keen on developing a local population that was Portuguese in blood and Catholic in religion but one that would be committed by taste to Portuguese settlements and, thus, form a self-perpetuating garrison. This created the race known as Luso-Indians and later as Goans.[1] “‘Within a year or latest two, we shall make this whole island Christian,” Bishop Albuquerque boasted in his letter in 1548.[2]
And did they send their society’s creme de la creme to India for this soul harvest? Well, according to historian Teotonio R. DeSouza, accounts indicate that apart from the posted civil servants, “the great majority of those who were dispatched as ‘discoverers’ were the riff-raff of Portuguese society, picked up from Portuguese jails.”[3] Many of the arrivals formed liaisons with local women and adopted Indian culture. Missionaries often wrote against the “scandalous and undisciplined” behavior of their fellow Christians.[4] and this necessitated the presence of a tough leader like Francis Xavier, who came “to the East representing both the Pope – as a legate, and the king of Portugal as an Inspector of Missions.”[5]
Preacher or Butcher?
Francis Xavier did begin his soul harvesting in earnest right after his arrival, though apparently, “in the matter of conversion, Xavier held exceedingly crude ideas. Xavier is said to have baptized seven hundred thousand natives, whom he left as ignorant as he found them. His motto seems to have been quantity, not quality.”[6] His masterstroke, however, was in his devious strategy of converting “the younger portion of the population.”
In a letter to the Society of Jesus, he describes how children “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 marvelous. They get into feuds with the heathens about it, and whenever their own parents practice 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”. In other words, Xavier taught the children to trash their own heritage in Quilon – right after the Hindu King of Quilon had respectfully received him and benevolently given him a large grant of land and other resources so he could build churches for his religion.
But despite his treachery and ingratitude, Francis Xavier had only a handful of converts to show. His overt racism pushed away a lot of his audience. “(Indians) being black themselves, consider their own color the best, they believe that their gods are black….the great majority of their idols are as black as black can be…and seem to be as dirty as they are ugly and horrible to look at,” Xavier had noted. Besides, he could not hold on to his neo-converts as they quietly returned to their old Hindu ways. For this, he blamed the Brahmins as they led the Hindu resistance to his conversion drive and repeatedly challenged him. “If it were not for the opposition of the Brahmins, we should have them all embracing the religion of Jesus Christ,” he thunders in another letter. His letters repeatedly abuse them as “perverse, wicked, unholy, crafty, cunning liars and cheats” and demeaned the entire Hindu scholarship as “barely a tincture of literature.” Still, he had to admit that the people supported the Brahmins more than him.[7]
And how did the Brahmins react to Xavier’s ranting? They invited him for a debate in the Tiruchendur Murugan Temple on the south coast of Tamil Nadu. He preached, and they listened carefully, even applauded his religious fervor. Then they laughed. They told him that his conception of God was immature and inadequate. God was beyond number and count, neither one nor three-in-one, as he claimed. His idea that God had only one incarnation in history was absurd and served a selfish purpose, denying God to other nations and peoples. It placed unacceptable limitations on an all-powerful, all-pervasive, all-compassionate God.[8] Xavier left the temple courtyard in disgrace, and this incident apparently formed the basis of the entire anti-Brahmin condemnation template that Francis Xavier established and perfected for the rest of the colonizers to employ.
And it was not just the Brahmins who were obstructing his soul harvest; the Muslim authorities in Travancore, too, opposed Xavier with violence. Time and again, his hut was burned down over his head, and once, he saved his life only by hiding among the branches of a large tree.[9]
With Xavier’s conversion mission deemed as a failure, he had no choice but to unleash the worst possible genocide on the subjects in Goa, with his demand for an Inquisition that unleashed a reign of terror for the next 250 years. His letter to the King of Portugal insists that “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 Mohammedan sect, without fear of God or shame of the world. And since there are many who are spread all over the fortresses, there is the need of the Holy Inquisition and of many preachers. Your majesty should provide such necessary things for your loyal and faithful subjects in India.”[10]
The Inquisition Indignity
What Francis Xavier had let loose on Goa should be called the Holocaust, and not the Inquisition, as his minions in the Church sought to exterminate Jews who had escaped persecution in Europe, besides the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Syrian Christians, non-Portuguese Christians and also the Neo-Christians converted by Xavier and his gang of slayers in priestly robes.
And if one looks at all the laws of the Inquisition[11], one can’t help but compare life in 16th century Goa to almost equivalent in Nazi Germany or today’s Pakistan. “The fathers of the Church forbade the Hindus under terrible penalties the use of their own sacred books and prevented them from all exercise of their religion. They destroyed their temples and so harassed and interfered with the people that they abandoned the city in large numbers, refusing to remain any longer in a place where they had no liberty and were liable to imprisonment, torture, and death if they worshipped after their own fashion the gods of their fathers.” wrote Filippo Sassetti, who was in India from 1578 to 1588.[12]
Hindus were prohibited from repairing any damaged temples or constructing new ones. Ceremonies, including public Hindu weddings, were banned. Anyone who owned an image of a Hindu god or goddess was deemed a criminal. Guess what? Hindus were not even allowed to cremate their dead in the Portuguese territory.[13] It is estimated that by the end of the 17th century, the ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Muslims was complete, as there were less than 20,000 non-Christians out of the total Goan population of 2,50,000.[14]
Alan Machado-Prabhu records how the Portuguese conquered Goa and ruled by terror: “In its two and a half centuries of existence at Goa, the Inquisition burned at the stake 57 alive and 64 in effigy. Others sentenced to various cruel punishments totaled 4,046. The converted people who continued secretly to perform Hindu rituals were treated even more harshly. The manner in which the Church enriched itself was just scandalous. Half the property of a person found possessing idols went to the Church. The Church acquired urban and rural properties on an impressive scale. Great public processions on Christian feast days replaced the open performances of Hindu ceremonies. One of the worst criminals was Francis Xavier, later to be made into a saint.”[15]
Patron Saint of Tyrants?
One must never forget that Francis Xavier pioneered anti-Brahminism, which all Christian denominations subsequently mainstreamed in missionary propaganda. When England was debating on sending missionaries to India, Lord Minto, Governor General of India from 1807 to 1812, submitted a note with the “propaganda material used by the missionaries” and referring to one missionary tract in particular, he wrote: “The remainder of this tract seems to aim principally at a general massacre of the Brahmanas.”[16] Indologist Koenraad Elst, too, equates anti-Brahminism with anti-Semitism as the same ethno-religious prejudice that is directed at an accomplished minority group. In his ‘Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar,’ he writes, “In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by [Christian] missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history.”
Also, one would equate the infamous Jiziya tax with the Mughals, not knowing that the Portuguese, too, had their version of Jiziya called the ‘Xendi’ on both their Hindu and Muslim subjects.[17] Xendy meant “hair tuft” – a term for the top-knot hairstyle of practicing Hindus, and the tax was waived only if they sold their soul to the Christian vultures.
Can you see the template of bigotry that Xavier introduced to suppress the Hindus here? He corrupted the impressionable minds of children and created a race of deracinated gentry that went afar from its Sanatan roots; he created the doctrine of anti-Brahminism and mainstreamed the hatred for the keepers of our traditional knowledge systems to such an extent that our conventional wisdom itself was looked down upon; he advocated contempt for Hindu iconography and approved of hostile measures like Jiziya-like taxes while giving an easy pass to his Abrahamic faith. I implore you; if you read this para again, you might discover to your trepidation that these are the same vile techniques that are being used now on the Hindus in the name of secularism by the Left, the Urban Naxals, the Dravidians, and the regime-change foreign NGOs powered by the likes of George Soros. Every foul move against Sanatan finds its precedent in the blueprint of Francis Xavier.
It’s not for nothing that Francis Xavier’s and Portugal’s reign of terror was met with countless uprisings by the Goans. However, none evoke the same fervor and remembrance in our textbooks as the Indian freedom fighters against the British. The Portuguese evil reign was even countered by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Subsequently, after Xavier’s death and beatification, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, too, sought to liberate Goa and almost succeeded. As he moved for the final conquest of Bardez, the Portuguese Viceroy, Count of Alvor, Dom Francisco de Tavora, fearing defeat, opened Xavier’s casket and placed his scepter in his hands, beseeching him to save them. Unfortunately for Sambhaji, he couldn’t stay long to defeat the Portuguese as the Mughals had invaded his Kingdom. This reprieve was subsequently touted as a miracle of Xavier, and the butcher of Goa conveniently metamorphosed as the ‘Goencho Saib .’[18]
The Humiliation Continues
The moot question is: Why is this Francis Xavier sham allowed to continue six decades after the Portuguese have left? The rotting corpse of this notorious temple-breaker still adorns the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa – the very Church that replaced the Saptakotishwar Shiva Temple of Old Goa, destroyed by the Portuguese in the 1590s. Don’t the Christians of Goa realize that they are the next-generation victims of Abrahamic violence unleashed on their forefathers? Unfortunately, they have been conditioned to believe their tormentors were their saviors. Truth be told, many Christian intellectuals are aware that beneath the facade of Goa’s ‘susegad’ (relaxed) mask lies a terrible history of annihilation of their forefathers. Robert Rosario, activist and leader of the ‘Victims of Francis Xavier’ movement, declares how “preserving Xavier’s corpse in Goa is a matter of shame to the self-respect of this country” and that it must be sent back.[19] There is also an ongoing debate in Goa over who should be considered their patron saint – Francis Xavier or Sage Parashuram, credited in our ancient texts for creating the land of Goa from the sea.[20]
Even fictional best-sellers based on the Goan Indo-Jewish holocaust, like ‘Guardian of the Dawn’ by Richard Zimler, are reviewed as “Christianity at its most murderous”[21] and describe Xavier’s Goa in harsh, uncomplimentary terms: “They’d arrest Christ if he dared show his face in [that] wretched city.”[22]
Most importantly, the denouncement of Francis Xavier is now increasingly coming from the Catholic religious media, whereby the newbie clergy openly denounce Xavier’s acts as “deplorable.”[23] “Death and defilement were committed ostensibly in the name of Christ, yet Xavier and the Portuguese colonists crucified the Imago Dei of the Goan people.” Can there be a bigger indictment of the so-called saint?
However, the movement to call out this fraud needs to grow louder. Somehow, the government of India was never enthused enough to look at the Goan independence movement the same way as they glorified our campaign that took on the British. Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and their political party, the Congress, which ruled India for the better part of five decades after kicking the Portuguese colonists out of Goa in 1961, were practically unmoved by the trials and tribulations of the satyagrahis struggling in Goa.[24] Old-timers in Goa attribute this neglect to two reasons – one, the Congress party was never really involved in the Goan freedom movement, and two, the carnage and ethnic cleansing that the Goans had to endure at the hands of the Portuguese made the freedom fight against the British look like a walk in the park. Besides, post-1961, Goans of the Christian denomination found it handy to emigrate to Portugal, the UK, or the rest of Europe for better prospects.[25] Naturally, preserving the status quo is to their benefit.
While it might take a few more years to banish the festering eyesore of Francis Xavier’s rotten corpse from India, it is heartening to see that the Goan Hindu culture, its Konkani language, and a majority of its temples are nearly rejuvenated back to their ancient glory. Portugal meanwhile ranks 49th amongst major economies, while India has soared to the 4th position. Coincidentally, the current PM of Portugal also happens to be of a proud Goan origin[26] – Antonio Costa.
Meanwhile, we cannot wait for the day when Xavier’s decomposed remains are shipped back to their source of origin – preferably in a trash bag – under the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan!
(The article was published on Hindudvesha.org on September 10, 2023 and has been reproduced here)
Citations
[1] Paliwal, KV. 2020. “The Epitome of Christian Missionary Violence.” Goa Inquisition – The Epitome of Christian Missionary Violence. https://www.goainquisition.info/2020/05/the-portuguese-and-goan-inquisition.html
[2] Carvaka Podcast. 2022. “Goa Files.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cj0PAAgiGU
[3] DE SOUZA, TEOTONIO R. 1998. “Portuguese in Goa.” Untitled. https://recil.ensinolusofona.pt/jspui/bitstream/10437/509/1/PortuGoa.pdf
[4] Delio, Mendonca D. 2022. “Conversions and Citizenry.” Google Books. https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Conversions_and_Citizenry/Mh3kKf0VSfQC?hl=en&gbpv=1
[5] Panikkar, K. M. 2022. “Asian and Western Dominance.” Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.652/mode/2up
[6] Navrang. 2018. “Goa Inquisition – how Hindus were tortured and terrorized by the Portuguse Christian Missionaries.” Navrang India. http://www.navrangindia.in/2018/03/goa-inquisition-how-hindus-were.html
[7] Mumukshu, Savitri. 2022. https://twitter.com/MumukshuSavitri/status/1551456224914198528
[8] Young, Richard. 2022. “Hindu-Christian Dialogue.” Google Books. https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Hindu_Christian_Dialogue_Perspectives_an/6eHgNyNimoAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Francis+Xavier+in+the+Perspective+of+the+%C5%9Aaivite+Brahmins+of+Tiruchendur+Temple&pg=PA64&printsec=frontcover
[9] EWTN. 1998. “Lives of Saints.” EWTN. https://web.archive.org/web/20150907230956/http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/XAVIER2.htm
[10] KUMAR, AJITH. 2019. “FRANCIS XAVIER AND GOA INQUISITION.” https://indusscrolls.com/francis-xavier-and-goa-inquisition
[11] Mumukshu, Savitri. 2021. https://twitter.com/MumukshuSavitri/status/1466855669345112064
[12] Lubienietzky, Christoffel. 1998. “Filippo Sassetti.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Sassetti
[13] Carvaka Podcast. 2022. “Goa Files.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cj0PAAgiGU
[14] Sharma, Anjali. 2015. “Goa Inquisition.” The New Indian Express. https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/2015/sep/03/goa-inquisition-809153.html
[15] Kumar Ajith. 2019. “Francis Xavier and Goa Inquisition,” Indus Scrolls. https://indusscrolls.com/francis-xavier-and-goa-inquisition
[16] David, M. D. 2022. “Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity.” Google Books. https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Western_Colonialism_in_Asia_and_Christia/G8HYAAAAMAAJ?hl=en
[17] Wikipedia. 1998. “Xenddi.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenddi
[18] The Times of India 2015. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/how-st-francis-xavier-became-goencho-saib/articleshow/45746178.cms
[19] IndiaFacts 2014. https://indiafacts.org/victims-of-francis-xavier-oppose-the-public-display-of-his-corpse-demand-return-to-france/
[20] DH. 2022. “My saint is better: Heated debate over Parshuram, Francis Xavier’s legacy in Goa.” Deccan Herald. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/my-saint-is-better-heated-debate-over-parshuram-francis-xaviers-legacy-in-goa-1105306.html
[21] Blume, Judy. 2010. “GUARDIAN OF THE DAWN.” Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/richard-zimler/guardian-of-the-dawn/
[22] Sahgal, Tara. 2005. “Terror’s testament.” India Today. https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/society-and-the-arts/books/story/20050926-book-review-guardian-of-the-dawn-by-richard-zimler-786881-2005-09-25
[23] Kappadakunnel, Matt. 2021. “Coming to terms with Francis Xavier, a saint whose romanticised legend is far from reality.” The Tablet. https://www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/1/1933/coming-to-terms-with-francis-xavier-a-saint-whose-romanticised-legend-is-far-from-reality
[24] Wikipedia. 1998. “Goa liberation movement.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_liberation_movement
[25] Shetye, Murari. 2023. “Brexit: Fewer Goans giving up passports for Portugal entry | Goa News – Times of India.” The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/brexit-fewer-goans-giving-up-passports-for-portugal-entry/articleshow/99649386.cms?from=mdr
[26] Laska, Rezaul H. 2017. “’Proud of my roots in Goa’: Portugal PM Antonio Costa’s Q&A with HT.” Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/proud-of-my-roots-in-goa-indian-origin-portugal-pm-antonio-costa-s-q-a-with-ht/story-kQVsK5BH10l1fSTaeU4zmK.html
