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Biography

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Inácio de Azevedo was born in 1526 in Porto, in northern Portugal, into a family of the Portuguese nobility. Contemporary and later Jesuit sources present him as a man of distinguished birth who chose the religious life in the recently founded Society of Jesus. He entered the Jesuits in the late 1540s, during the first generation of the order’s expansion in Portugal, and was ordained a priest. His early years in the Society were spent in the Portuguese province, which was then a major center of Jesuit education and of recruitment for overseas missions in the Portuguese empire.

Within the Portuguese assistancy he rose to positions of trust. Standard accounts of his life describe him as rector of the Jesuit college in Lisbon and as provincial superior of Portugal before he was given a still wider charge. In the 1560s the Superior General of the Society, Francis Borgia, appointed Azevedo visitor of the Jesuit missions in Brazil. The visitation was intended to inspect, reform, and strengthen the Society’s work among Portuguese settlers and indigenous peoples in the colony. Azevedo traveled to Brazil, carried out that inspection, and returned to Europe convinced that the missions needed a large reinforcement of men.

He then undertook to recruit missionaries in Portugal and elsewhere in the Society. In 1570 a substantial party of Jesuits was assembled for Brazil. Azevedo himself sailed with thirty-nine companions aboard the ship Santiago, while other Jesuits traveled on companion vessels. In July 1570, in the Atlantic near the Canary Islands, the Santiago was intercepted by a French Huguenot corsair commanded by Jacques de Sores, a privateer already notorious for attacks on Iberian Catholic shipping and settlements. The captors identified the passengers as Jesuit missionaries bound for Portuguese America. On 15 July 1570 Azevedo and the thirty-nine Jesuits with him were put to death. Traditional narratives state that Azevedo was killed while holding an image of the Virgin Mary and that the bodies of the martyrs were thrown into the sea. The group has since been known as the Forty Martyrs of Brazil, or the martyrs of the Brazil mission.

The cult of Azevedo and his companions developed within the Society of Jesus and in Portuguese and Brazilian Catholic memory as an example of missionary zeal and of death for the faith amid the religious wars of the sixteenth century. Pope Pius IX beatified Inácio de Azevedo and his thirty-nine companions on 11 May 1854. They have not been canonized. Their liturgical commemoration is kept on 15 July in Jesuit calendars and in some local churches. Historical knowledge of Azevedo’s inner life and of many administrative details of his career remains limited to what can be drawn from Jesuit catalogues, visitation records, and the martyrdom accounts compiled after 1570; those sources agree on his Porto origin, his Jesuit vocation, his role as visitor and recruiter for Brazil, and the circumstances of the massacre at sea.

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