ALMEIDA, APOLLINARE DE

ALMEIDA, Apollinare de. - Jesuit, born in Lisbon in 1587, entered the novitiate in 1601; titular bishop of Nicaea and coadjutor to the Patriarch of Ethiopia. He set sail from Lisbon in 1628 but did not reach Ethiopia until August 1630. The internecine war among the princes and the schemes of the schismatic monks caused great suffering for the bishop and the missionaries, who were confined to various places in Goggiam and Tigrè and eventually exiled. Almeida, along with six other Jesuits, remained in hiding; when discovered, he and Fathers Giacinto Franceschi and Francesco Rodriguez were exiled to an island in Lake Dambian, where for a year they endured every kind of torment until they were killed, suspended from a tree and cruelly stoned to death (June 1638). The cause for the beatification of the “Martyrs of Ethiopia,” which includes Almeida and several of his companions, was introduced in 1904.