MALAGRIDA, GABRIELE. - Jesuit, missionary, b. at Menaggio (Como) on 5 Dec. 1689, d. at the stake in Lisbon on 21 Sept. 1761. He labored indefatigably for 30 years (1721-54) in the missions of Brazil and Maranhão, also founding there retreat houses for women, seminaries for the clergy and houses of spiritual exercises, and acquiring among the Portuguese and the natives a reputation for extraordinary virtue.
In 1754 he returned to Portugal at the invitation of the Queen Mother, who had come to know him and greatly esteemed him during a temporary stay he made in Lisbon in 1750, so that he might assist her in the hour of death. A booklet, published on the occasion of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which M. proclaimed, as indeed did many other short works of the same kind, but too vehemently, the necessity of reforming morals, whose wickedness had drawn down that punishment, irritated the minister Pombal, who had the booklet burned by the hand of the executioner and the author exiled to Setúbal (1756). Recalled to Lisbon and falsely accused of having taken part in the Távora conspiracy against King Joseph I, M. was forthwith thrown into prison with 9 other confreres of his, as guilty of high treason (1759). Two years later, he was denounced to the tribunal of the Inquisition and condemned to the stake, for the crimes of heresy, false prophecies, revolutionary doctrines and false sanctity. The judgment of the Inquisition was based upon two works, which M. had composed during his imprisonment, on the life of St. Anne and on the Antichrist and which he vigorously defended as, at least in part, revelations, but which in reality betray only, with their absurdities and follies, the fact that M. had lost his intellect because of the long and harsh imprisonment. However, for the crime of high treason and heresy the proof was never produced. M. was strangled and thrown onto the stake, but he always protested his innocence. Even to the opponents of the Jesuits that condemnation seemed a legal murder and Clement XIII proclaimed M. a martyr. Menaggio erected a monument to him in the parish church (1887).