St. John de Britto

John de Britto is one of the Jesuit martyrs of India, born in Lisbon in 1647 into a noble family with connections to the Portuguese royal court, and he belongs to the specific tradition of the Madurai mission that Roberto de Nobili had pioneered: the attempt to reach the Hindu upper castes by adopting the dress, diet, and social practices of the sanyasi — the Hindu holy man — rather than identifying Christianity with Portuguese colonial culture.

He arrived in India in 1673 and threw himself into the Madurai method with conviction. He adopted ochre robes, lived on rice and vegetables, learned Tamil, and moved through the caste system as a holy man rather than as a European priest. His effectiveness was real: he made converts across several decades, established Christian communities in areas previously unreached, and was arrested and tortured on two occasions before the final martyrdom. His first arrest and torture in 1686 produced a period of imprisonment followed by expulsion rather than death; the Portuguese ambassador's intervention secured his release, and he returned to Portugal for several years before going back to India in 1690.

The final episode that led to his death was specific. One of the local rajas, Ragunadasuppoa, had a nephew named Tadya Tevar who converted under Britto's ministry and dismissed his concubines in consequence. The dismissed women appealed to the raja, who had Britto arrested. Britto refused to leave India, refused to apostatize, and refused to accept release when it was offered. He was beheaded at Oriyur on February 4, 1693. He was canonized in 1947. His death represents the pattern of the Jesuit martyr most perfectly realized: killed not for what he believed in the abstract but for what his converts were prepared to give up in the concrete.