GABRIELE MALAGRIDA. – Jesuit, missionary, b. at Menaggio (Como) on 5 Dec. 1689, d. at the stake in Lisbon on 21 Sept. 1761. For 30 years (1721-54) he worked indefatigably in the missions of Brazil and Maranhão, founding there houses of retreat for women, seminaries for the clergy, and houses of spiritual exercises, and earning among Portuguese and natives a reputation for extraordinary virtue.
In 1754 he returned to Portugal at the invitation of the Queen Mother, who had known and greatly esteemed him during a temporary stay he had made in Lisbon in 1750, to assist her at the hour of her death. A little book, published on the occasion of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which M. proclaimed, as did many other works of the same kind, but too vehemently, the necessity of reforming morals, whose wickedness had drawn down that chastisement, irritated the minister Pombal, who had the book burned by the hangman and the author exiled to Setúbal (1756). Recalled to Lisbon and falsely accused of participation in the Távora conspiracy against King Joseph I, M. was immediately thrown into prison with nine other fellow Jesuits, charged with 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 prophecy, revolutionary doctrines, and false sanctity. The judgment of the Inquisition was based on 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 foolishness, the fact that M. had lost his mind through long and harsh imprisonment. Yet for the crime of high treason and heresy no proof was ever produced. M. was strangled and cast upon the pyre, but he always protested his innocence. Even to the adversaries of the Jesuits that condemnation seemed a legal assassination, and Clement XIII proclaimed M. a martyr. Menaggio erected a monument to him in the parish church (1887).