These Glorious Confessors I Met As They Were Just Entering
The Pass Designed For The Place Of Their Destruction, And Doubly
Preserved Them From Famine And The Sword.
A grateful sense of their
deliverance made them receive me as a guardian angel.
We went
together to Fremona, and being in all a patriarch, a bishop,
eighteen Jesuits, and four hundred Portuguese whom I supplied with
necessaries, though the revenues of our house were lost, and though
the country was disaffected to us, in the worst season of the year.
We were obliged for the relief of the poor and our own subsistence
to sell our ornaments and chalices, which we first broke in pieces,
that the people might not have the pleasure of ridiculing our
mysteries by profaning the vessels made use of in the celebration of
them, for they now would gladly treat with the highest indignities
what they had a year before looked upon with veneration.
Amidst all these perplexities the viceroy did not fail to visit us,
and make us great offers of service in expectation of a large
present. We were in a situation in which it was very difficult to
act properly; we knew too well the ill intentions of the viceroy,
but durst not complain, or give him any reason to imagine that we
knew them. We longed to retreat out of his power, or at least to
send one of our company to the Indies with an account of persecution
we suffered, and could without his leave neither do one nor the
other.
When it was determined that one should be sent to the Indies, I was
at first singled out for the journey, and it was intended that I
should represent at Goa, at Rome, and at Madrid the distresses and
necessities of the mission of Aethiopia; but the fathers reflecting
afterwards that I best understood the Abyssinian language, and was
most acquainted with the customs of the country, altered their
opinions, and, continuing me in Aethiopia either to perish with them
or preserve them, deputed four other Jesuits, who in a short time
set out on their way to the Indies.
About this time I was sent for to the viceroy's camp to confess a
criminal, who, though falsely, was believed a Catholic, to whom,
after a proper exhortation, I was going to pronounce the form of
absolution, when those that waited to execute him told him aloud
that if he expected to save his life by professing himself a
Catholic, he would find himself deceived, and that he had nothing to
do but prepare himself for death. The unhappy criminal had no
sooner heard this than, rising up, he declared his resolution to die
in the religion of his country, and being delivered up to his
prosecutors was immediately dispatched with their lances.
The chief reason of calling me was not that I might hear this
confession: the viceroy had another design of seizing my person,
expecting that either the Jesuits or Portuguese would buy my liberty
with a large ransom, or that he might exchange me for his father,
who was kept prisoner by a revolted prince.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 67 of 79
Words from 35030 to 35557
of 41322
