VIEIRA, ANTONIUS. — Jesuit, orator, and missionary, born in Lisbon on 6 February 1609, died in Bahia (Brazil) on 18 July 1697.
Taken as a child to Bahia, he entered the Order there on 5 May 1623 and, ordained a priest in 1635, immediately devoted himself to preaching with great success. Returning to Lisbon in 1641, he was appointed by King Giovanni IV tutor to the infante Don Pedro, court preacher, and member of the Royal Council. He was responsible for the revival of trade with Brazil, the foundation 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 9 years, except for a brief journey to Lisbon to plead for the freedom of the Indians. For this reason, upon the death of Giovanni IV (1661), he was compelled by the colonists to return to Lisbon, from which he was confined to Oporto, then (1667) tried at Coimbra and sentenced to compulsory residence by the tribunal of the Inquisition, chiefly on account of his exaggerated writings concerning the imminent millennium of Portugal’s triumph, which was to follow the resurrection of Giovanni IV: Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império da Mundo e Cláxis prophetarum, in which he disseminated, with excessive credulity, the false prophecies of Gonçalo Annes Bandarra. Released (1668), he went to Rome in 1669, where he preached at the papal court, also campaigning against the methods of the Portuguese Inquisition. Returning to Lisbon in 1673 with a brief from Clement X exempting him from that Inquisition, he embarked once more for Brazil (1681), where he first devoted himself to revising and publishing his sermons and polemical writings, and then took up the office of general visitor.
A skilled diplomat, social reformer, prudent administrator, apostle and protector of the Indians, V. is also, and above all, regarded as one of the finest prose writers and orators in Portuguese literature, on account of his literary gifts, the purity of his language, the force of his facile and abundant speech (although he indulged the fallacious taste for «gongorism», then imported from Spain), the vividness of his imagination, and the pathos that vibrated in gesture and discourse. This must not cause us to forget the missionary activity he carried out throughout Maranhão and Pará as far as Pernambuco, during 22 long river journeys and the 11,000 miles he travelled on foot, and the conversion to Christianity of fierce and hostile tribes.
His published works, with complete or partial reprints and translations into many languages, include 15 vols. of Sormones (Lisbon 1679–99); 3 vols. of Cartas (ibid. 1735), in addition to many other political and polemical writings. New editions, under the title Obras completas, have not yet been completed (27 vols., Lisbon 1854 ff. [sermons and some works]; 15 vols., Oporto 1907–1909 [sermons]; 16 vols., S. Paulo 1943–45 [sermons]).