The Catholic News Agency’s saccharine portrait of Saint Francis Xavier as India’s “unlikely hero” collapses the moment one reads his own letters. In May 1545 and again in 1546, Xavier begged King John III of Portugal to unleash the Inquisition on Goa, railing against Hindu “idolatry” and the “Judaizing” of New Christians. His pleas were granted. Xavier was not physically present when the Inquisition formally began its work in 1560, three years after his death, but the tribunal was set up at his repeated and vehement insistence. The Holy Office in Goa became notorious as the most fanatical and sadistic of all colonial Inquisitions, lasting nearly two centuries and claiming thousands of victims—predominantly Hindus who refused to abandon their ancestral faith and Jews (both New Christians and those who secretly maintained Jewish practices).

The tortures devised specifically to break Hindu bodies and spirits were demonic torture methods:

1. The “Hindu Rack” (Esticamento dos hindus): Victims were bound spread-eagled while executioners slowly turned windlasses, dislocating every major joint. Brahmins and temple priests were kept on the rack for days, their screams echoing through the palace dungeons.
2. Burning with oil and brimstone: Molten sulphur mixed with boiling oil was dripped onto the soles of the feet, genitals, and breasts of Hindu women accused of secretly performing puja. One surviving record describes a woman whose skin “peeled away like burnt parchment” after refusing to eat beef.
3. The “Tulsi torture”: Possession of a single tulsi leaf was enough for condemnation. Suspects were forced to chew and swallow handfuls of the sacred plant while being flogged; refusal meant the leaves were stuffed down their throats until they asphyxiated.
4. The “Pestle and Mortar”: Hindu priests had their fingers and toes crushed one by one in a giant stone pestle normally used for grinding spices—an ironic mockery of temple rituals.
5. Live immersion in boiling water: Those caught conducting shraddha (ancestral rites) were lowered slowly into cauldrons of scalding water, pulled out half-conscious, then lowered again until they “confessed” or died.
6. The “Goa Stone”: A heavy slab of granite was placed on the victim’s chest while executioners piled on additional rocks. Hindu widows who performed sati (forbidden by the Portuguese) were crushed this way in public as a warning.
7. Sexual humiliation as doctrine: Hindu women of high caste were stripped, paraded naked through the streets, then handed to soldiers or placed in the “Casa das Convertidas” (a state-run brothel for forced conversion through rape).

Children were not spared. Orphans seized from Hindu families were flogged with tamarind switches until they agreed to baptism; those who still whispered mantras had their tongues pierced with hot irons.

Entire villages were subjected to collective punishment: in 1580 the village of Cuncolim saw every adult male tortured on the rack for refusing to pay the “temple demolition tax.” Sixteen refused to convert even after limbs were torn from sockets; they were beheaded and their heads displayed on pikes outside Hindu temples as a message.

This was the direct fruit of the institution Xavier spent years demanding. The man who supposedly “loved the Indian people” wrote letters that read like blueprints for religious genocide. Whitewashing him as a gentle missionary while Hindu bones still lie in the forgotten mass graves of Old Goa is not piety—it is complicity in one of history’s most sustained campaigns of faith-based terror.

And so, every ten years, the final obscenity unfolds.

In the same Old Goa where Hindu mothers once clawed at the palace gates begging for their children’s broken bodies, where the air itself reeked of boiling oil and burning flesh, the descendants of those very victims now dress in their finest clothes and wait in delirious queues for hours—just to touch the glass coffin of the man who demanded their annihilation.

They call it the Exposition of St. Francis Xavier.

They call it a blessing.

While drums roll and petals rain from the sky, the blackened, wax-stuffed corpse of the Inquisition’s chief petitioner is hoisted aloft like a conquering hero. Little girls in white frocks scatter marigolds at his feet. Grandmothers who still bear the oral scars of ancestral terror press their lips to the reliquary and weep with gratitude. School textbooks describe him as “Goencho Saib”—the Lord of Goa—never once mentioning the letters in which he begged for racks, torches, and the extermination of everything their forebears held sacred.

This is not amnesia.

This is decimation of memory itself.

The temples he ordered smashed to dust are gone; the gods he branded demons have been replaced by his own painted image smiling benevolently from every altar. The Konkani tongue he scorned as the language of idolaters now sings Latin hymns to his glory. And beneath the marble floors of Bom Jesus, where his mummy lies in state, the unmarked bones of thousands of Hindus and Jews still whisper in the dark—unseen, unremembered, crushed a second time beneath the dancing feet of a people taught to celebrate their own executioner.

That is the true “miracle” of St. Francis Xavier:

he did not merely kill the body of Hindu Goa.

He murdered its soul—and convinced the corpse to rise and applaud.

— Lily Voss, Opinion Journalist.