Accounts of Foreign Missionaries
Francis Xavier wrote a letter from Cochin to kingJohn III of Portugal on 26th january1549, in which he declared A bishop of Armenia (Mesopotamia by the name of jacob Abuna has been serving God and Your Highness in these regions for forty·five years. He is a very old, virtuous,and saintly man, and, at the same time, one who has been neglected by Your Highness and by almost all of those who are in India. God is granting him his reward, since he desires to assist him by himself, without employing us as a means to console his servants. He is being helped here solely by the priests of St. Francis Y. H. should write a very affectionate letter to him, and one of its paragraphs should include an order recommending him to the governors, to the veadores da fazenda, and to the captains of Cochin so that he may receive the honour and respect which he deserves when he comes to them with a request on behalf oft the Christians of St. Thomas Your Highness should write to him and earnestly entreat him to undertake the charge of recommending you to God, since YH. has a greater need of being supported by the prayers of the bishop than the bishop has need of the temporal assistance of Y.H. He has endured much in his work with the Christians of St Thomas.
In that same year Francis Xavier also wrote to his jesuit colleague and Provincial of Portugal, Fr.Simon Rodrigues giving him the following description: »Fifteen thousand paces from Cochin there is a fortress owned by the king with the name of Ctanganore. It has a beautiful college, built by Frey Wcente, a companion of the bishop, in which there are easily a hundred students, sons of native Christians, who are named after St. Thomas. There are sixty villages of these Thomas Christians around this fortress, and the students for the college as I have said, are obtained from them There are two churches in Cranganore,one of St Thomas, which is highly revered by the Thomas Christians.
This attitude of St. Francis Xavier and the Franciscans before him does not reflect any of the animosity and intolerance that kept creeping in with the spread of the Tridentine spirit of the Counter-Reformation which tended to foster a uniformity of belief and practice. It is possible to follow young Portuguese historians like joéo Paulo Oliveira e Cosca"s line of atgument, yet they seem to neutralize the Portuguese cultural nationalism in their colonial expansion and the treatment of the natives. However, documents brought out from the Portuguese national archives recently help to confirm a greater openness or pragmatism in the first half of the 16th century).
Read more about this topic: Nestorian And Syro-Malabar
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