RHODES, ALEXANDRE. - Jesuit, missionary; b. at Avignon, 15 March 1591; d. at Isfahān (Persia), 5 Nov. 1660.
Admitted to the Order in 1612 for missionary work, he left for India in 1619, laboring until 1623 at Goa and in the Moluccas, where with Fr. C. Fereira he administered more than 2,000 baptisms. In 1623 he landed at Macao in China, intending to proceed to Japan; but finding entry barred by persecution, he turned to Cochin-China. His thorough knowledge of the Annamite language led to his being assigned in 1627 to the mission in Tonkin, where in three years of assiduous labor he converted 5,000 pagans. Expelled in 1630, he taught theology at Macao while working among Chinese pagans and neophytes, baptizing more than 1,000. In 1640 he again attempted to enter Cochin-China; after being expelled three times, he returned each time until he was captured, condemned to death, and then exiled. He then went to Europe, where he promoted the dispatch of apostolic vicars to Central Asia. Speaking at the Collège de Clermont in Paris to young priests of the “Société des bons amis,” directed by Fr. Bagot, he inspired the foundation of the Paris Seminary for Foreign Missions, which later supplied the Church with so many heroic missionaries and martyrs (cf. J. A. Otto, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 72-73). In 1655 he set out again for the mission in Persia, where his linguistic skill and the work of himself and his companions won the esteem of Shāh ‘Abbās the Great, who granted permission to erect a church and a house for missionaries at Isfahān. Rhodes had hoped to proceed also into Georgia and Tartary, to establish various points of support for further penetration into all the East. At Isfahān he was venerated as a saint, and his funeral, attended by the Shāh and the court, was a triumph.
The principal merit of Rhodes, apart from having founded the Church in Tonkin, was that he was recognized as the pioneer of the modern missionary hierarchy; and this success was due to his prudent adaptation to local customs, the ordination of natives, his winning over of the educated classes to Christianity, and the founding of schools for catechists, organized as a kind of religious society that became the seedbed of the native clergy.
He wrote: Relazioni dei felici successi della fede... nel regno di Tunchino, Rome 1650; in Latin: Tunchinensis historiae libri duo, Lyons 1652; Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum-latinum, ibid. 1651. Also: Relazione della morte di Andrea Catechista, primo dei cristiani nel regno di Cocinchina ucciso per la fede, Rome 1652; Diverses voyages et mission du p. A. de R. en la Chine et autres royaumes de l'Orient, avec son retour en Europe par la Perse et l'Arménie, Paris 1653.