VIEIRA, ANTONIUS. - Jesuit, orator, and missionary, b. in Lisbon on 6 Feb. 1609, d. in Bahia (Brazil) on 18 July 1697.
Taken as a child to Bahia, he entered the Order there on 5 May 1623 and, after being ordained priest in 1635, immediately devoted himself with great success to preaching. Returning to Lisbon in 1641, he was appointed by King John IV as tutor to the Infante Don Pedro, court preacher, and member of the Royal Council. To him are owed the revival of trade with Brazil, the founding of a national bank, and the organization of a Brazilian trading company. The King also employed him on various diplomatic missions to France, Holland, England, and Rome (1646-50). In 1652 he returned to the missions of Maranhão and Pará, where he worked tirelessly for nine years, except for a brief trip to Lisbon to plead for the freedom of the Indians. For this reason, upon the death of John IV (1661), he was forced by the colonists to return to Lisbon, whence he was confined to Oporto, then (1667) tried in Coimbra and sentenced to house arrest by the tribunal of the Inquisition, chiefly on account of his exaggerated writings on the imminent millennium of Portugal’s triumph, which was to follow the resurrection of John IV: *Esperanças de Portugal*, *Quinto Império do Mundo*, and *Clavis prophetarum*, in which he too credulously disseminated the false prophecies of Gonçalo Annes Bandarra. Released in 1668, he went to Rome in 1669, where he preached to the papal court and also opposed the methods of the Portuguese Inquisition. Returning to Lisbon in 1675 with a brief from Clement X exempting him from that Inquisition, he again embarked for Brazil (1681), where he first devoted himself to collecting and publishing his sermons and polemical writings, and then to the office of visitor general.
A skilled diplomat, social reformer, prudent administrator, apostle, and protector of the Indians, V. is also considered, and above all, one of the greatest prose writers and orators of Portuguese literature for his literary gifts, the purity of his language, the impetus and abundance of his facile and copious speech (though he occasionally indulged in the deceptive taste of “Gongorism,” then imported from Spain), the vividness of his imagination, and the pathos that vibrated in both gesture and discourse. This must not obscure the missionary activity he carried out throughout Maranhão and Pará as far as Pernambuco in 22 long river journeys and the 11,000 miles he traveled on foot, nor the conversion to Christianity of fierce and hostile tribes.
His published works, with complete or partial reprints and translations into many languages, include 15 volumes of *Sermones* (Lisbon 1679-99); 3 volumes of *Cartas* (ibid. 1735), besides many other political and polemical writings. New editions under the title *Obras completas* have not yet been completed (27 volumes, Lisbon 1854 ff. [sermons and some works]; 15 volumes, Oporto 1907-1909 [sermons]; 16 volumes, São Paulo 1943-45 [sermons]).