ALMEIDA, APOLLINARE DE

ALMEIDA, APOLLINARE de. - Jesuit, b. in Lisbon in 1587, entered the novitiate in 1601; titular bishop of Nicaea and coadjutor of the patriarch of Ethiopia. He sailed from Lisbon in 1628, but arrived in Ethiopia only in Aug. 1630. The civil war among the princes and the intrigues of the schismatic monks caused the bishop and the missionaries much suffering; they were confined in various places in Goggiam and Tigrè, and finally exiled. A., with six other Jesuits, remained in hiding; once discovered, he and Frs. Giacinto Franceschi and Francesco Rodriguez were exiled to an island in Lake Dambian, where for a year they suffered torments of every kind, until they were killed, hanged from a tree, and cruelly stoned (June 1638). The cause for the beatification of the “Martyrs of Ethiopia,” which includes A. and several of his companions, was introduced in 1904.

Agostino Tesio