Basilica of Bom Jesus

Why Go

The end of a journey he did not finish

Francis Xavier spent ten years leaving. He sailed from Lisbon in 1541, reached Goa in 1542, and from then on kept moving east: the fishery coast, Malacca, the Moluccas, Japan in 1549, and finally a small island off the Chinese coast where he waited for permission to enter the mainland and did not get it. He died there in December 1552, still short of where he was going. Everything he began in Asia has a place attached to it somewhere else. This is the one place that holds him. His body was brought back along the route he had traveled outward, and it is here, in the city he had used as a base, that the movement stops.

How his body came to Goa

Xavier died on Shangchuan Island on December 3, 1552, and was buried there. In 1553 his body was taken up and carried to Malacca, where it lay for some months in the hilltop church of St. Paul. In 1554 it was brought on to Goa and received at the College of St. Paul, the Jesuit college in the city. It stayed at the college for seventy years. The Basilica of Bom Jesus was not yet standing when the body arrived; the church was begun in 1594 and consecrated in May 1605. Gregory XV canonized Xavier in 1622, and on February 19, 1624 the relics were carried in procession to the new Jesuit church, where they have remained. Two objects were added later and are often collapsed into one. The silver casket that contains the body was completed in 1637, made by Goan silversmiths at the initiative of the Jesuit Marcello Mastrilli, with panels showing scenes from Xavier's life. The marble and jasper mausoleum that carries the casket came from Florence: Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, gave it, Giovanni Battista Foggini carved it, and it was put in place in 1698, sixty-one years after the casket and seventy-four after the body arrived in the church.

The plan is a simple cross: one long nave, a transept, a main altar, two chapels, a sacristy, and a choir loft. The interior is about eighty feet long, and the scale registers as smaller than the reputation suggests. The main altar is dominated by a figure of the Infant Jesus beneath the symbol of the Trinity, with Saint Ignatius Loyola above; that dedication is where the name Bom Jesus comes from, and it is worth noticing that the church is not named for the saint buried in it. The facade is the part most often misread. It is carved Bassein basalt set against laterite, and the laterite was originally covered in lime plaster and whitewashed. A Portuguese restorer, Baltazar Castro, stripped the plaster in the 1950s to expose the bare stone. Conservators have argued since that the decision was ideological rather than architectural and that it left a porous stone exposed to monsoon rain. What a visitor sees today is a restoration choice from within living memory, not a sixteenth-century intention.