Saint Joseph Vaz, the Goan priest who rebuilt Ceylon’s banned church

The beggar who came ashore in northern Ceylon in the 1680s wore rags, and he fell ill almost at once. He was Joseph Vaz, a priest from Goa in his mid-thirties. Catholic tradition says he lay half dead by the roadside for days, like the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan, until some local women nursed him back to health.2 sources2 sources

Then he went begging from door to door with a rosary round his neck. The beads were a signal. Under the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Catholic priests were banned, and many Catholics went to the Protestant church in public and kept their old faith at home. When one family showed interest in the rosary and he was sure of them, he told them who he was.3 sources3 sources

So began a clandestine mission that lasted until Vaz died in Kandy, capital of the island’s last independent kingdom, on 16 January 1711. Ceylon’s Catholics had gone some three decades without a resident priest. When he died they had a vicar general, a team of Goan priests and chapels across the island.4 sources4 sources

The Portuguese had held forts and lands on the coasts of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, since the sixteenth century. In 1638 the Kandyan king Rājasiṃha II allied with the Dutch to drive them out, and the VOC took the forts one by one: Colombo fell in 1656, Jaffna and Mannar in 1658. The Dutch kept the coast; the king of Kandy kept the hills of the interior.3 sources3 sources

The new rulers belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist church, and they feared the island’s Catholics would side with Portugal. Catholic priests were expelled at once, and the Reformed church became the only recognised form of Christianity. In Jaffna the Dutch took over the Catholic churches and set up a school beside each one.3 sources3 sources

A proclamation dated 19 September 1658 forbade anyone, on pain of death, to harbour or hide a Catholic priest. James Emerson Tennent, a British colonial official writing in 1850, judged the threat “too iniquitous to be carried into execution”; priests kept working in defiance of it. Office and land under the Company went only to baptised members of the Reformed church.1 source1 source

Kandy had its own rules. The 1638 treaty said the king “should not allow Roman Catholic monks and priests and other ecclesiastics to domicile themselves in his dominions”. Rājasiṃha II took in Catholic refugees from the Dutch lowlands all the same, and his son Vimaladharmasūriya II, who reigned from 1687 to 1707, apparently ignored the clause.2 sources2 sources

Joseph Vaz was born on 21 April 1651, the third of six children of Cristóvão Vaz and Maria de Miranda. Most modern accounts, including the Archdiocese of Colombo and the New Catholic Encyclopedia, place his birth at Benaulim, his mother’s village in the Goan province of Salcete. His early biographer, the Oratorian Sebastião do Rego, made him a native of Sancoale, his father’s village. He grew up between the two.5 sources5 sources

Both parents were Catholics of the Konkani-speaking Brahmin caste. Brahmins sat at the top of Goa’s caste order, and Christian Brahmins gained more than any other group from the posts the colonial state opened to native Christians, in medicine, the treasury, the Inquisition and the Church.2 sources2 sources

He studied at the Jesuit College of St Paul in Goa and then philosophy and theology with the Dominicans at the College of St Thomas Aquinas. He was made subdeacon and deacon in 1674 and 1675 by Custódio de Pinho, himself a Brahmin bishop from Salcete, and the archbishop of Goa, António Brandão, ordained him priest in 1676.3 sources3 sources

In 1681 the archbishop of Goa sent Vaz to Kanara, the coast around Mangalore in today’s Karnataka, as vicar forane, the priest in charge of a church district. The post was a move in the Padroado quarrel. Rome had named another Goan Brahmin, Thomas de Castro, vicar apostolic of Kanara for Propaganda Fide, and Goa refused to recognise him.2 sources2 sources

Vaz recognised de Castro’s authority instead. Gomide, citing the historian Inês Županov, writes that Goa quickly revoked his appointment and called him back, though other accounts keep him in Kanara for three or four years. There he repaired the church at Mangalore and built three new ones, at Barcelor, Gangolim and Kallianpur, all dedicated to the Virgin.4 sources4 sources

Ceylon was already on his mind. From Kanara, Rego says, Vaz asked Father Nicolau de Gamboa to let him be sold as a slave to the Dutch so that he could enter the island without arousing suspicion. Gamboa refused and ordered him back to Goa.1 source1 source

In October 1682 Pascoal da Costa Jeremias, a priest from Margão, and a few companions, all Brahmin priests from Salcete, had begun living as a community at a hermitage near Batim, with the archbishop’s approval. They later moved to the abandoned church of the Holy Cross of Miracles (Santa Cruz dos Milagres) on the hill of Boa Vista near the city of Goa, where Christ was said to have appeared on a cross.2 sources2 sources

Vaz joined them on his return, in 1684 or 1685, and was soon elected superior. Under him the group took the Oratory of St Philip Neri as its model. Its members were all Goan Brahmins, and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate call it the first fully native religious community of the Latin rite in Asia. The established orders, Vatican News notes, recruited Europeans, not Indians.4 sources4 sources

Its backers turned that origin into an argument. Francisco Simões, the Jesuit rector of the college at Rachol, supported the statutes because the priests were “helped by colour, language, customs and temperament like those of the people they will deal with” (translated from Portuguese). The archbishop raised the community to a congregation in 1698, the Portuguese crown took it under its protection in 1703, and a papal bull confirmed it in 1707.1 source1 source

Vaz left Goa in 1686 with one companion, a lay brother according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Dates for his landing run from spring 1686 (New Catholic Encyclopedia) and late 1686 (Vatican News) to April 1687 (the Oblates); the Archdiocese of Colombo gives 1687. Goan tradition has him coming ashore at Mannar as a coolie.5 sources5 sources

The Catholics he found had not been wholly abandoned. Carmelite friars slipped in now and then to baptise, and in 1680, Gomide notes, the Dutch found seven Catholic schools and churches in Jaffna where about 600 people met for Mass. But since 1658, when by the Oblates’ count some 120 missionaries left, no priest had been free to live among them.3 sources3 sources

Vaz settled at Sillalai, a village where Catholics were many and resolute. He said Mass at night, administered the sacraments in secret and trained catechists to keep the faith going when he moved on.3 sources3 sources

The VOC noticed. On Christmas night 1689, the Oblates’ account says, the commander of Jaffna learned a priest was at work. Some 300 Christians were jailed. Vaz got away. That year the Company’s high commissioner for India and Ceylon, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, lord of Mydrecht, had the peninsula’s Catholic churches pulled down.2 sources2 sources

For the Company the problem was bigger than one priest. Hendrick Zwaardecroon, commander of Jaffna, also wrote that the Company had kept up 35 churches in Jaffna for 38 years, yet in 1693 nearly all of them were found “stocked with heathen books” beside the catechisms. Dutch ministers called many converts Christians in name only. In a colony taken from Portugal, a wandering priest also looked like a Portuguese agent.3 sources3 sources

Vaz moved south to the coastal town of Puttalam, then under the king of Kandy and outside Dutch control, and worked there for about a year. Then he set out for Kandy, hoping to make the royal capital a safe base.2 sources2 sources

He reached Kandy in about 1692 and was arrested as a Portuguese spy. Simon Casie Chitty, a Ceylonese civil servant who in 1848 abridged Rego’s life of Vaz into English, blamed a French Protestant at court, de la Nerolle, for denouncing him to King Vimaladharmasūriya II. Vaz spent nearly two years in prison.5 sources5 sources

The prison was not sealed. Kandy’s Catholics could reach him. Vatican News says reports of his conduct made the king curious to meet him.3 sources3 sources

He was freed in 1693 by the Oblates’ date. Tennent says that in 1694 the king let him rebuild the Catholic churches in the Bogambara quarter of Kandy that an earlier king had ordered destroyed. Vaz built a simple church there dedicated to Our Lady.2 sources2 sources

From the palace, tolerating a Christian holy man was no conversion. Kandyan kings had long sheltered several faiths. The Buddhist chronicle known as the Cūḷavaṃsa describes Vimaladharmasūriya II’s many Buddhist works at length, and a Catholic report of 1701 confirms them. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere concludes that today’s Catholics of the old Kandyan kingdom and much of the lowlands “owe considerably” to this royal toleration.1 source1 source

Catholic accounts place a turning point in 1696. During a long drought, they say, Buddhist ceremonies failed to bring rain, the king asked Vaz to pray to his God, Vaz set up an altar in a public square, and the rain came down. Rego tells the story, and the historian Ramesha Jayaneththi, quoted by Scroll, traces it to Catholic sources in the Ajuda library in Lisbon.4 sources4 sources

The smallpox epidemic of 1697 is the episode both popes chose to cite. When the disease swept Kandy, Vaz nursed the sick, and Vatican News says he proposed rules of hygiene to limit contagion. Pope Francis said in 2015 that the king valued this work so much that Vaz was given greater freedom to minister.3 sources3 sources

Church authority followed. In a letter of 10 February 1696, the Padroado bishop of Cochin, who claimed jurisdiction over Ceylon, named Vaz his vicar general for the island. Oratorians followed from Goa in 1696, 1697 or about 1699, depending on the source: Joseph de Menezes, Pedro Ferrão and Joseph Carvalho first, then Pedro Saldanha, Jacome Gonçalves and others. Vaz divided the island into districts and gave each priest one.4 sources4 sources

He travelled constantly, often barefoot, from Kandy into Dutch territory, as far as Colombo, Jaffna and Batticaloa. Priests still could not live openly in Dutch lands, so they stayed in frontier villages and slipped into the coast in disguise, by night. In 1705 he enlarged the small shrine of Our Lady of Madhu, in the northern forest.4 sources4 sources

In 1703 the papal legate in India, Mgr de Tournon, proposed making Vaz bishop or vicar apostolic of Ceylon. Vaz talked him out of it.2 sources2 sources

By 1710 Vaz was worn out and could no longer leave Kandy. He died there on 16 January 1711, aged 59, and was buried in the church he had built. Casie Chitty’s 1848 sketch gives the date as 17 January, against the 16th in Church sources.4 sources4 sources

Vimaladharmasūriya II had died in 1707. His son Narēndrasinha, king until 1739, seems to have known Vaz since childhood and regarded him with some veneration. Joseph de Menezes succeeded Vaz as vicar general, but the next phase of the mission was dominated by Jacome Gonçalves, another Konkani Brahmin, who wrote fluently in Sinhala and Tamil and was openly hostile to Buddhism. Obeyesekere argues that Kandyan hostility to Catholics grew only in this second phase.2 sources2 sources

In 1743 King Śrī Vijaya Rājasiṃha banned Catholic worship in his kingdom and had the main church at Kandy razed. The church Vaz was buried in has since been destroyed and his remains lost, the New Catholic Encyclopedia notes.2 sources2 sources

On the coast the Company tightened its laws. A 1715 proclamation banned Catholic meetings. Two years later, Casie Chitty reckoned, the mission counted about 70,000 converts since Vaz’s arrival, with 15 large and more than 400 small churches. Later edicts taxed Catholic marriages, from 1758, and in 1776 declared them void. When Dutch rule ended in 1796, Catholicism was banned but tolerated, and Catholics outnumbered Protestants.3 sources3 sources

Almost everything known about Vaz passed through Oratorian hands. Sebastião do Rego, a Goan Oratorian who is not known to have served in Ceylon, wrote a life of Vaz from the congregation’s letters and archives, the Vida do Veneravel Padre Joseph Vaz of 1745, and finished a chronicle of the Goa Oratory in 1746.1 source1 source

The historian Ana Paula Sena Gomide shows how Rego shaped his subject on the model of a saint’s life: a father’s dream before the birth, a bright star at the hour he was born, an elephant that swerved away, healings and the rain at Kandy. He also quoted missionaries who had known Vaz.1 source1 source

Saldanha added that he had noticed “nothing extraordinary” in Vaz beyond what he had described, “which is not little”, and that “the Father’s life is a miracle” (translated from Portuguese). Vaz’s own letters, kept in the Ajuda library in Lisbon and published by M. da Costa Nunes in 1966, give historians a check on the biographies.1 source1 source

The Archdiocese of Colombo dates the first moves towards beatification to 1713. A formal cause opened in about 1737, but Benedict XIV cancelled it in 1742 over missing formalities. In 1894 Mgr Zaleski, the papal delegate to the East Indies, wrote that Vaz had “unfortunately been almost entirely forgotten”.4 sources4 sources

The cause was revived in the twentieth century. The Vatican approved a miracle attributed to his intercession on 6 July 1993, and John Paul II beatified him at Galle Face Green, the seafront park in Colombo, on 21 January 1995, calling him “the second founder of the Church” in Sri Lanka.3 sources3 sources

On 17 September 2014 Pope Francis waived the usual requirement of a second miracle. On 14 January 2015, on the same green, he canonised Vaz as Sri Lanka’s first saint.2 sources2 sources

In Goa, Vaz is the patron of the archdiocese. Sri Lanka has about 1.6 million Catholics, Sinhala and Tamil, and his feast in Kandy each January also draws pilgrims from Goa: 125 came in January 2026.2 sources2 sources

For Portugal the story sits at an odd angle. Vaz worked under the Padroado, and the Dutch hunted his flock partly as suspected friends of Portugal. Yet his mission grew where Portuguese power had ended, run by Goan priests whom the Portuguese had long kept in second place. The Padroado in India ended by agreement with the Holy See on 25 October 1953.4 sources4 sources