Word: goa
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...streetcorner preacher than the polished diplomat some historians make him out to be. In Bologna, Italy he had attracted attention "by standing on a vacant bench, waving his big hat, and shouting to loungers and marketing folk to come and listen to the Word of God." In "golden, heartless Goa," the citadel of Portugal's Asiatic colonies, he got crowds for his instructions by walking up & down the streets ringing a large bell. And when he found an audience, he held it. Writes Biographer Brodrick: "Perhaps they laughed at him to start with . . . but soon a hush would fall...
...young man who felt the lure was Fernão Mendes Pinto, son of a down-at-heel nobleman. He resolved to join the army and, once in the East, switch to trading. In 1537, at the age of 28, he sailed for Goa, Portugal's main outpost in India. Before he saw Portugal again, he was to visit all the lands of Asia, to be a merchant, a pirate, a slave, an ambassador and a Jesuit novice...
Ardor & Conscience. By 1554 Pinto was in Goa again, a wealthy man yearning for home after 17 years. But he had seen much and his conscience was troubled. His adventurer's gusto had always been tempered by suffering and a sense of sin. At just that time the body of St. Francis Xavier was brought to Goa. Xavier had died on a lonely island while on his way to China to convert the Chinese. Profoundly moved, Pinto became a novice in Xavier's order, the Society of Jesus, and determined to return and convert the Japanese. It took...
Tangible Reminder. The right arm of St. Francis Xavier, flown from Rome by the Jesuit Order for the occasion, was severed at the elbow in 1614 and brought to Rome as a relic. The saint's body rests on the tiny Portuguese-Indian island of Goa, which had been his mission headquarters. It is exposed for public veneration once every ten years...
...Kandy's temple is one of Buddhism's holiest shrines. It is supposed to house a tooth of the Gautama Buddha, brought to Ceylon for safekeeping in the 4th Century. The Portuguese claim to have burned this relic in the market place at Goa in the 16th Century, and since then successive teeth have been stolen from the temple by other invaders. But pious Buddhists still believe that the enshrined relic, a chunk of ivory 20 times the size of an ordinary tooth, is the original...