John de Brito

John de Brito (Portuguese: João de Brito; known in Tamil as Arul Anandar) was born in Lisbon on 1 March 1647 into a Portuguese noble family. His father, Salvador de Brito Pereira, held high colonial office, including service connected with the government of Rio de Janeiro, and died while John was still a child. His mother, Brites Pereira, oversaw his upbringing. As a boy he was educated in the milieu of the royal court and was a companion of the future King Peter II of Portugal. Hagiographical accounts relate a childhood illness and a vow associated with Saint Francis Xavier that later biographers connected with his missionary vocation. On 17 December 1662, at the age of fifteen, he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Lisbon and thereafter completed the usual Jesuit course of philosophy and theology before ordination to the priesthood.

He asked to be sent to the overseas missions and in 1673 sailed for Portuguese India, landing at Goa. He was assigned to the Madurai Mission in the Tamil country of southern India, a Jesuit field already associated with the inculturating methods of Roberto de Nobili. De Brito adopted the dress and discipline of a Hindu sannyasi, observed a vegetarian regimen, learned Tamil, and took the name Arul Anandar. He worked especially among the Maravar people in the Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) region, founding Christian communities and instructing catechumens. Contemporary Jesuit reports credit him with numerous conversions, including among landholding and warrior groups, and with organizing local churches under the constraints of caste custom and political authority in the seventeenth-century Tamil country.

In the mid-1680s he was imprisoned and expelled from the Marava country. In 1687 he returned to Portugal as procurator of the mission. King Peter II wished to keep him at court, including as a tutor to the royal children, but de Brito insisted on going back to India and sailed again about 1690. Resuming work in Ramnad, he baptized a Marava chieftain who, under Christian marriage discipline, dismissed all but one of his wives. One of the repudiated women was related to the Setupati of Ramnad, Raghunatha Kilavan, and the conversion therefore became a political affront. De Brito was arrested, interrogated, and condemned by the local ruler.

On 4 February 1693 he was taken to Oriyur (also spelled Orur) on the coast and beheaded. Local Christians recovered his body and buried it at the place of execution, which later developed into a shrine and pilgrimage site in what is now Tamil Nadu. Devotion to the Jesuit martyr spread in India and in Portugal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1853 and canonized by Pope Pius XII on 22 June 1947. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 4 February. He is remembered as a missionary of the Madurai Mission, as an exponent of Jesuit inculturation in South India, and as a martyr whose death arose from the collision of Christian marriage law with local dynastic and caste politics.