CHIRINO, PEDRO. - Spanish Jesuit, missionary in the Philippines, b. at Osuna (Seville) in 1557, received into the Society in 1580, arrived at Manila on June 20, 1590. After spending some years in the evangelization of the natives, he was appointed (1600) rector of the college of Manila, but two years later he was sent to Madrid and Rome as procurator of the Philippine Province. Having returned to Manila in 1606, he remained in that same city as preacher, professor of canon law and Sacred Scripture, and writer; he died there on Sept. 16, 1635.
Following the common practice of the procurators of distant missions, he published in Rome a Relación de las Islas Filipinas y de lo que en ellas an trabajado los Padres de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome 1604, reprinted at Barcelona 1890; English translation in the collection of E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson, The Philippine Islands, XII, Cleveland 1904, pp. 169-221 and XIII, pp. 29-217). A more extensive reworking of the report of 1604 remained in manuscript (at the library of the Lazarists of Peking), perhaps so as not to make double use of his major work: Primera parte de la Historia de la Provincia de Filipinas (1581-1606). But this too remained unpublished; it served, however, as the basis for the book by Fr. Francesco Colin: Labor evangelica de los Padres de la Compañía de Jesús en las Islas Filipinas (Madrid 1663). In the annotated reprint of the Labor evangelica (3 vols., Barcelona 1900-1902), which he edited, Fr. Pablo Pastells inserted in notes extensive extracts from C.'s original text. The latter had also composed a Dictionarium Sina-hispanicum for the use of missionaries assigned to the care of Chinese immigrants in the Philippines (manuscript in the Angelica Library, Rome).