MALAGRIDA, GABRIELE. — Jesuit, missionary, born at Menaggio (Como) on 5 December 1689, died at the stake in Lisbon on 21 September 1761. He worked tirelessly for 30 years (1721–54) in the missions of Brazil and Maranhão, founding there also retreat houses for women, seminaries for the clergy, and houses for spiritual exercises, and earning among the Portuguese and the indigenous peoples a reputation for extraordinary virtue.
In 1754 he returned to Portugal at the invitation of the Queen Mother, who had met him and greatly appreciated him during a temporary stay he had made in Lisbon in 1750, so that he might assist her at the hour of death. A booklet published on the occasion of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in which M., like many other little works of the same kind but with excessive vehemence, proclaimed the need to reform morals, whose wickedness had brought about that punishment, irritated the minister Pombal, who had the booklet burned by the executioner’s hand and the author exiled to Setubal (1756). Recalled to Lisbon and falsely accused of having taken part in the Tavora conspiracy against King Joseph I, M. was immediately thrown into prison with nine other fellow Jesuits, as guilty of high treason (1759). Two years later, he was denounced to the tribunal of the Inquisition and condemned to the stake for heresy, false prophecies, revolutionary doctrines, and false sanctity. The judgment of the Inquisition was based on two works that 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 in reality, with their absurdities and foolishness, they merely betrayed the fact that M. had lost his reason as a result of his long and harsh imprisonment. Yet no evidence was ever produced for the crimes of high treason and heresy. M. was strangled and thrown onto the stake, but he constantly protested his innocence. Even to the Jesuits’ opponents that sentence appeared to be a legal murder, and Clement XIII proclaimed M. a martyr. Menaggio erected a monument to him in the parish church (1887).