Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa

1. Where the Body of St Francis Xavier Lies

The body of St Francis Xavier lies in the Basilica of Bom Jesus at Old Goa, in a silver casket set on a marble and jasper monument in the chapel to the right of the main altar. Old Goa stands on the south bank of the Mandovi river about ten kilometres upstream of Panjim, the modern capital of the Indian state of Goa, and it was the capital of Portuguese India for more than three centuries. The remains arrived in the city in March 1554, fifteen months after the saint died on the island of Shangchuan off the coast of Guangdong, and the body has stayed in Goa ever since, apart from the portions detached over the centuries and sent to other churches.

A pilgrim who walks into the basilica sees a long plain nave, a wall of gilded carving at the east end, and then, on the right, a structure of dark marble rising well above head height with a silver box on top of it. That silver box is the object of the pilgrimage. Goans call the saint inside it Goencho Saib, the Lord of Goa, and the title is used in ordinary Konkani speech by Catholics and by many who are not Catholic. The casket sits high enough that nobody touches it, which is itself the result of history: for most of the first two centuries after the body arrived, pilgrims could and did reach it, and portions of the body went with them.

Two things confuse first-time visitors. The first is the name. Bom Jesus means Good Jesus in Portuguese, and the church is dedicated to the Infant Jesus rather than to Xavier. The saint is the reason people come, and the dedication belongs to the Child whose statue crowns the main altar. The second is the scale of the site. The basilica is one building in a group of churches and convents that were the ecclesiastical centre of Portuguese Asia, and the group as a whole carries the UNESCO inscription, not the basilica alone.

The Churches and Convents of Goa were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986, under the criteria published by the World Heritage Committee. The description of the site here follows that inscription and the published histories of the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman.

2. Who St Francis Xavier Was

Francis Xavier was a Basque nobleman from the Kingdom of Navarre who became one of the first companions of the Society of Jesus and the most travelled missionary of the sixteenth century. He was born Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta on 7 April 1506 at the castle of Xavier, in a family ruined by the Castilian conquest of Navarre during his childhood. He went to Paris in 1525 to study at the College of Sainte-Barbe, intending an academic career, and there he shared a room with a Savoyard named Pierre Favre and a limping Basque veteran named Inigo Lopez de Loyola.

From Paris to the Indies

Xavier resisted Ignatius for years and then gave way. On 15 August 1534 he was one of the seven who took vows at the chapel on Montmartre, the group from which the Society of Jesus grew. He was ordained in Venice in 1537. When King John III of Portugal asked for Jesuits for his new Asian territories and illness removed the man first chosen, Ignatius sent Xavier at a day's notice. He sailed from Lisbon in April 1541, spent a winter in Mozambique, and reached Goa on 6 May 1542.

What followed was ten years of movement. He worked among the Paravar pearl fishing communities of the Fishery Coast in what is now Tamil Nadu, went on to Malacca and the Moluccas, and in 1549 landed at Kagoshima and became the first Christian missionary in Japan. He spent more than two years there, learned how much the Japanese elite respected Chinese learning, and concluded that the mission in Asia turned on China. He died on 3 December 1552 on the island of Shangchuan, waiting for a passage to the mainland that never came, attended by a young Chinese companion named Antonio.

The Saint the Church Made of Him

Paul V beatified him in 1619 and Gregory XV canonised him on 12 March 1622, in the same ceremony as Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer. Pius XI named him patron of the missions in 1927 together with St Therese of Lisieux, a pairing the Church made deliberately: the man who crossed oceans and the woman who never left her Carmel in Normandy, held up as equals in missionary charity. His feast is 3 December.

Xavier's own letters, sent back to Rome and to Portugal and copied widely, are the reason Europe knew anything about the East Indies and Japan in the mid sixteenth century. They are urgent, practical, sometimes exhausted, and full of complaints about the conduct of Portuguese officials. They also record his repeated appeal to Europe for more workers, because the field he had opened was larger than the men available to him. Our guide to St Ignatius of Loyola and the founding of the Jesuits covers the order Xavier belonged to and the man who sent him east. There is no separate profile of Xavier on this site, so his life is set out here at the place where his body rests.

3. How the Body Came to Goa

The body travelled a long way after death, and the route explains a great deal about the relic that is in Goa today. Xavier died on Shangchuan in December 1552 in a hut on the shore, with almost nobody present. His companions buried him in the ground and packed the coffin with quicklime, a common practice at the time when a body was intended to be disinterred later so that the bones could be carried home.

Shangchuan to Malacca

In February 1553, when a ship was available, the grave was opened to recover the bones. The men who opened it reported that the flesh was still present and undecayed. That report, made by ordinary sailors and by the Jesuit who accompanied them, is the origin of everything that followed. The body was placed aboard and carried to Malacca, where it arrived in March 1553 and was buried again, this time without ceremony, in the church of Our Lady of the Mount.

Malacca to Goa

Later that year the Jesuits in Malacca disinterred it once more and sent it on to Goa by way of Cochin. It reached the Goan waterfront in March 1554 and was received by the whole city: the viceroy, the clergy, the confraternities and a crowd that the contemporary accounts describe as filling the streets between the river and the College of St Paul. It was placed in the college church, which was then the Jesuit house in Goa.

The body stayed at St Paul's for some seventy years. When the Jesuits completed the Bom Jesus, and after Xavier's canonisation in 1622, the relics were moved into the new church in the 1620s and placed near the altar. They were installed on the great monument at the very end of the seventeenth century, when it arrived from Florence, and they have been on it since.

4. What the Sources Say About the Body

The honest statement is that the sixteenth-century witnesses describe a body that had not decayed, and that what lies in the casket now is something a good deal less than that. Both halves of that sentence matter, and shrines that state only the first half do the saint no favours. The Church has never issued a decree declaring the body of Francis Xavier incorrupt, and the Basilica of Bom Jesus describes what it holds as the sacred relics of the saint.

What the Witnesses Reported

The accounts of 1553 and 1554, written by Jesuits and by laymen, agree that the body recovered from quicklime was intact and that it did not smell of corruption. A formal examination was made in Goa in the years after the arrival, and a physician took part in it. Historians who have gone back to those documents note that they are early, that they are numerous, and that they include lay witnesses alongside the Jesuits. They also note that quicklime behaves unpredictably and that the Shangchuan grave was in wet sandy ground, and they leave the question of natural or preternatural cause open.

What Four Centuries Did

The body has been reduced by deliberate removal and by exposure. In 1614 the Jesuit Superior General Claudio Acquaviva ordered the right arm below the elbow to be detached and sent to Rome, where it is venerated in the Church of the Gesu; other portions went to Jesuit houses in Macau, Cochin and Malacca. The Jesuit accounts also record that a Portuguese woman in Goa bit off a toe of the right foot in the first years, which is why the casket now sits out of reach. Beyond that, centuries of exposition in an open church on a humid coast have taken their own toll. Photographs from the twentieth-century expositions show a darkened and shrunken body.

The Church's ordinary discipline here is worth stating plainly. Bodily preservation has never been treated as proof of sanctity. It has sometimes been noted in a canonisation process as a circumstance. A cause turns on martyrdom or on heroic virtue, together with the miracles the Church verifies as worked through the candidate's intercession. Our guide to how the Church investigates miracle claims sets out the standard, and our guide to what the Church means by a saint explains why a relic is venerated in the first place.

The removal of the right arm in 1614 and its enshrinement at the Church of the Gesu in Rome are recorded in the Jesuit archives and repeated in the standard biographies of Xavier. This page states no figure for the number of pilgrims at any exposition, because the published counts vary widely by source.

5. The Silver Casket and the Foggini Monument

The object pilgrims actually see is a silver casket resting on a three-tiered monument of marble and jasper. The two were made about a century apart and in different parts of the world, and together they are the work most visitors come to Old Goa to see.

The Casket

The casket was made in Goa by Goan silversmiths in the seventeenth century, worked in silver over a wooden core. Its sides carry panels in relief showing scenes from the saint's life and death, among them his preaching in the Indies and his last hours on Shangchuan. The workmanship is Indian, and the ornament shows it. A visitor who looks at the foliage and the figures will see the hands of craftsmen trained in the Konkan working a European subject, which is the whole history of Goan Christian art in one object.

The Monument

The monument beneath it was a gift from Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who wanted a share in the cult of a saint whose Jesuit order was strong in Florence. He commissioned Giovanni Battista Foggini, the leading Florentine sculptor of the day, and the work took about ten years. It reached Goa at the end of the seventeenth century, and the accounts say the Grand Duke asked for a relic in return and received the pillow from beneath the saint's head.

The structure rises in three stages of marble and coloured jasper, narrowing as it goes, with bronze panels set into the faces showing episodes from the saint's life and death. Angels in bronze stand at the corners. The whole is Florentine baroque set down inside a plain Jesuit church built of Goan laterite, and the contrast is the point: the shrine gathered the resources of Catholic Europe and Catholic Asia into one corner of one building.

Isaiah 52:7 is read at the Mass of missionary saints, and it is the verse most often applied to Xavier. St Paul quotes it in Romans 10:15 in the middle of the argument that faith comes from hearing, and that hearing requires someone to be sent. The monument in Bom Jesus is an expensive answer to that verse.

6. Inside the Basilica of Bom Jesus

The Basilica of Bom Jesus was begun in 1594 and consecrated in 1605, built by the Society of Jesus next to their professed house. Its exterior plaster was stripped in the twentieth century by conservators, which is why the building looks dark red and weathered while its whitewashed neighbours do not. The walls are laterite, the local iron-rich stone that cuts soft and hardens in air, and the facade is faced in black granite brought from elsewhere.

The Facade

The front is arranged in three storeys of paired columns rising to a pediment, in the Jesuit manner derived from the Gesu in Rome and adapted by builders working with Indian stone and Indian labour. At the top, cut into the pediment, is the monogram IHS, the abbreviation of the name of Jesus in Greek letters that the Society took as its emblem. The building carries the rank of minor basilica.

The Nave and the Main Altar

Inside, the nave is wide, high, plain and largely undecorated, with a wooden gallery at the west end and a floor of marble and mosaic laid in the twentieth century. The eye goes straight to the main altar, which is gilded from floor to vault. At its centre stands a figure of St Ignatius of Loyola, and above him a figure of the Infant Jesus, to whom the church is dedicated. Above them both is a great gilded IHS. Side altars carry Our Lady of Hope and St Michael. The pulpit on the north wall is carved with figures of the evangelists and doctors of the Church.

The Chapel of the Relics

The tomb chapel opens off the south side of the sanctuary. It was built to receive the Florentine monument and is decorated with painted panels and gilded woodwork. The casket sits at the top of the monument behind a glass screen. Pilgrims kneel at the rail, and Goan families bring children here as a matter of course. On the upper floor of the adjoining building, reached by stairs from the sacristy, is a gallery of modern religious painting and the sacristy itself, which is one of the best rooms in the complex, with a carved wooden chest of drawers running the length of one wall.

Mass is celebrated in the basilica in Konkani and in English, and the church is a working parish church as well as a shrine and a monument. Pilgrims who arrive expecting a museum are often surprised to find a congregation. That is the right way to encounter it. Our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is makes the case that a shrine is a place to pray rather than a place to inspect.

7. The Exposition of the Sacred Relics

The Exposition of the Sacred Relics is the public display of the body of St Francis Xavier, held at intervals of roughly ten years and lasting several weeks. During an exposition the casket is brought down from the Foggini monument and carried in procession across the road to the Se Cathedral, which is far larger and can move a queue through it. Pilgrims file past the open casket, and for many Goan Catholics an exposition is the one occasion in a decade when they see the saint at close range.

How the Practice Began

The relics were shown publicly from the beginning, and for a long time there was no fixed pattern. Expositions were called for jubilees, for centenaries of the death and the canonisation, and for particular occasions in the life of the Goan Church. The roughly decennial rhythm settled in during the twentieth century. Each exposition is announced by the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman with the approval of the Holy See, and the dates are published well in advance. This page states none, because a date printed here would be wrong within a few years.

What Happens During One

An exposition opens with a solemn Mass and the procession of the casket. The cathedral is arranged with a long approach and a barrier, and the queue moves continuously through the day. Masses are celebrated in Konkani, English, Marathi and other languages through the weeks of the exposition, and confessions are heard in numbers that require priests brought in from across the state. It closes with another Mass and the return of the casket to the basilica.

Going Between Expositions

Most pilgrims will visit in an ordinary year, and that is a perfectly good visit. The casket is in place above the monument and is venerated from the floor of the chapel. The feast of St Francis Xavier on 3 December is preceded by a novena at Old Goa that draws large crowds from across Goa and beyond, and the feast day itself is the most Goan thing on the calendar, with the whole road from the river lined with stalls. Anyone who wants quiet at the tomb should avoid the last week of November and the first days of December.

8. The Se Cathedral and the Cross of Miracles

The Se Cathedral stands across the road from Bom Jesus and is the mother church of the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman, a very large church and the building where the expositions are held, because it can move a long queue through its nave. It is dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria because Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa on her feast, 25 November 1510, and the dedication has stood ever since.

The Building

Work began in 1562 and the church was substantially finished by 1619, with the consecration following in 1640. The exterior is austere, in a plain Tuscan manner, and the interior is Corinthian, with a barrel vault, a long nave and side chapels. The main altar is gilded and carries panels of the life and martyrdom of St Catherine. There were two bell towers. The southern one fell in 1776 and was never rebuilt, which gives the cathedral its lopsided front.

The Golden Bell

The surviving tower holds the Golden Bell, the great bell of Old Goa, cast in the seventeenth century and named for its tone rather than its metal. It rang for the offices of the cathedral, and it also rang for the autos-da-fe of the Goa Inquisition, which were held in the square outside. Both facts belong in any account of it.

The Cross of Miracles

In a chapel on the south side stands the Cross of Miracles, a plain wooden cross brought here from a hillside at Old Goa where, according to the Goan tradition, an apparition of Christ was seen upon it in the sixteenth century and healings followed. The cross has been venerated in the cathedral for centuries and is enclosed in a wooden altar case. The Church has never made this the subject of a formal declaration, and the devotion continues on the ordinary footing of a local cult, which is where most such devotions sit. The cathedral also holds a chapel of the Blessed Sacrament and a font traditionally said to have been used by Francis Xavier.

9. The Other Churches of Old Goa

Old Goa is a field of great churches standing in open ground, and a pilgrim who sees only Bom Jesus has seen perhaps a fifth of the site. Everything below is within a walk of the basilica.

The Church of St Francis of Assisi

Immediately beside the cathedral, this church belonged to the Franciscans, who were in Goa before the Jesuits. The present building dates from 1661 and incorporates the doorway of the earlier church of 1521, a Manueline arch that is one of the oldest pieces of Portuguese work in India. Inside are painted panels of the life of St Francis, a floor of carved gravestones, and a gilded main altar. The convent attached to it now houses the Goa museum of the Archaeological Survey of India, with sculpture, portraits of the viceroys and pre-Portuguese Hindu carving from the surrounding countryside.

The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary

On the ridge above the river stands the oldest church still standing at Old Goa, built in the 1540s in a heavy Manueline style with round towers that make it look like a small fortress. Albuquerque is said to have watched the battle for the city from this hill. Francis Xavier is said to have preached here in his first years in India. Inside is the tomb of Dona Catarina a Piro, the wife of the governor Garcia de Sa, with a carved slab that is among the finest sixteenth-century monuments in Asia.

The Church of St Cajetan

Built by Theatine priests between 1655 and 1661, this church was modelled on St Peter's in Rome, with a dome, a Corinthian facade and a Greek cross plan. It is the most Italian building in Goa. Beside it stands the Viceroy's Arch and, close by, the fragment of the gate of the palace of the Adil Shahs, the Muslim rulers Albuquerque displaced.

The Tower of St Augustine

On the hill of Monte Santo stands a single tower, forty-six metres of laterite, all that is left of the Augustinian church completed in 1602. The Portuguese suppression of the religious orders in 1835 emptied the convent, the building was abandoned, and the vault collapsed in 1842. Excavations at the site recovered relics believed to be those of Queen Ketevan of Georgia, a Christian queen martyred in Persia in 1624 whose remains Augustinian friars brought to Goa. The ruin is open ground, and it is the most affecting place at Old Goa precisely because there is so little left of it.

The Convent of St Monica and the Museum of Christian Art

Beside the Augustinian ruin stands the Convent of St Monica, built between 1606 and 1627 and the first nunnery in Portuguese Asia. Its chapel holds the Miraculous Cross, a crucifix that Goan tradition says opened its eyes and bled in 1636. The convent now houses the Museum of Christian Art, a collection of Indo-Portuguese religious art: ivories carved by Goan hands, vestments, processional silver and household oratories made for families who prayed at home. A pilgrim with an hour to spare should spend it here.

The Chapel of St Catherine

A small chapel near the Se Cathedral marks the spot where Albuquerque is said to have entered the city in 1510. It was raised to the rank of cathedral in the 1530s before the great Se was built. It is easy to walk past and worth two minutes.

10. Why Old Goa Emptied

Old Goa emptied because of disease, and the churches survived because nobody needed the land they stood on. In the sixteenth century the city was one of the great ports of the Indian Ocean, the seat of a viceroy, an archbishop and a mint, and Portuguese writers called it Goa Dourada, Golden Goa. By the middle of the eighteenth century it was largely deserted.

The Causes

Repeated epidemics through the seventeenth century, described in the sources as cholera and as fevers that were probably malaria, killed inhabitants in large numbers and drove those who could leave downriver. The Mandovi silted, larger ships found the approach difficult, and the Dutch and English pressure on Portuguese trade cut the traffic that had made the city rich. The viceroys moved their residence downstream by stages. Panjim was formally made the capital in 1843.

What Was Lost and What Stands

The domestic city went first. Houses were pulled down for their materials, and by the nineteenth century travellers described a plain of ruins with churches rising out of it. Convents followed when the Portuguese state suppressed the religious orders in 1835 and the friars left. What survived is what the Church kept in use or what was too large to demolish economically: the cathedral, the Bom Jesus, St Francis of Assisi, St Cajetan, Our Lady of the Rosary, the tower of St Augustine, the convent of St Monica.

The result is a strange and instructive landscape. The pilgrim walks between enormous churches across grass, with almost no old streets and no old houses, and the emptiness makes the buildings look bigger than they are. It also makes the point that a city built on trade lasted three hundred years and the shrine has lasted longer.

11. The Goa Inquisition and an Honest Account

The Goa Inquisition operated in this city from 1560 to 1812, and a page about Old Goa that leaves it out is not telling the truth about the place. It was a tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition, established under royal authority, and it sat in the former palace of the Adil Shahs, a building later demolished. Its autos-da-fe were held in the square between the Se Cathedral and the Church of St Francis of Assisi.

What It Did

The Inquisition had jurisdiction over baptised Christians, which in Goa meant converts and their descendants. Its principal targets were New Christians, families converted from Judaism who had come east from Portugal, and Goan converts from Hinduism suspected of continuing their earlier practices at home. Penalties ranged from penance and confiscation to imprisonment and, in a minority of cases, execution by the secular arm. Its procedures included secret accusation and imprisonment without disclosure of the charge. It was suspended in 1774, restored in 1778, and finally abolished in 1812.

Francis Xavier and the Tribunal

Xavier wrote to King John III of Portugal in 1545 asking that an inquisition be sent to Goa. The tribunal was established in 1560, eight years after his death, and he had no part in its work. Catholic writers sometimes pass over the letter and critics sometimes present it as though he founded the institution. Both moves distort the record. The accurate statement is that he asked for it, that he did not live to see it, and that what it became is a matter for the Church's own examination of its past.

How the Church Speaks About This Now

In March 2000 St John Paul II led a public liturgy asking pardon for sins committed by members of the Church in the service of truth, naming the use of violence and coercion in matters of faith. That act is the Church's own standard for how this history is handled, and it is the standard used on this site. Our guide to the Inquisition, what it was and what it was not covers the institution in general, and this section covers only its Goan branch and its bearing on the place a pilgrim is standing in.

12. Goa Beyond Old Goa

Goa holds a working Catholic culture rather than a set of monuments, and several sites outside Old Goa belong on a serious pilgrimage.

Panjim and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception

The white church above the main square of Panjim was founded as a chapel in the sixteenth century for sailors coming ashore and rebuilt in 1619. Its great zigzag staircase was added later and gives the building its familiar profile. It holds a bell taken from the ruined Augustinian church at Old Goa. The parish is busy, the feast falls on 8 December, and the church stands at the top of the Fontainhas quarter, where the domestic architecture of Portuguese Goa survives in a way it does not at Old Goa.

Sancoale and St Joseph Vaz

Joseph Vaz was born in 1651 at Benaulim in Salcete, into a Goan Brahmin Catholic family whose home was at Sancoale, where he was baptised. He became an Oratorian priest and went in disguise into Dutch-ruled Ceylon in 1687, where the Catholic Church had been driven underground. He spent the rest of his life rebuilding it and died at Kandy in 1711. Pope Francis canonised him at Colombo on 14 January 2015. The ruined facade of the church at Sancoale and the house of his family are venerated, and his cult ties Goa to Sri Lanka.

Rachol, Chandor and the Village Churches

The seminary at Rachol, founded in the late sixteenth century inside a fort, is where much of the Konkani Christian literature of the period was written and printed, and its church holds a famous gilded altar. The villages of Salcete and Bardez are full of large eighteenth-century parish churches with whitewashed facades, and the feasts of these parishes, with their bands and their processions, are where Goan Catholic life actually happens. A pilgrim who spends a Sunday in a village parish will understand Goa better than one who spends a day among the ruins.

Where This Fits in India

Goa is one node in a much older Christian geography. The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala trace their origins to the apostle and long predate the Portuguese, and the encounter between them and the Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century was difficult. Our guide to Christian pilgrimage sites across India sets Old Goa beside Velankanni, San Thome at Mylapore and the Kerala shrines, and our guide to the Syro-Malabar Church explains the ancient Church that was already there. For the wider region Xavier travelled, see our guide to pilgrimage sites in East Asia and the Pacific, and for the Rome end of his story, where his right arm is venerated at the Gesu, our guide to pilgrimage sites in Rome.

13. Making Old Goa a Pilgrimage

Old Goa is easy to visit badly. It sits close to a beach economy, it appears on day-trip itineraries between a spice plantation and a river cruise, and a visitor can be in and out of the basilica in a few minutes. A few decisions turn the same visit into a pilgrimage.

Go to Mass There

The single change that makes the difference is attending Mass in the basilica or the cathedral rather than walking through between services. The shrine exists for the Eucharist, and the body of the saint is in the church because the church is where the Mass is offered. Sitting through a Konkani liturgy without understanding the words is itself a small ascesis and a good one.

Pray for the Missions

Xavier is the patron of the missions, and the natural prayer at his tomb is for the people who do that work now, most of them Asian and African priests, religious and catechists in places where the Church is small and poor. Bring names. A pilgrimage with specific intentions is a different act from a pilgrimage with vague ones.

Read His Letters

Twenty minutes with the letters before going changes what the casket means. They are short, blunt and available in English, and they record a man who was frequently discouraged and kept going. Standing in front of the monument afterwards is standing in front of someone you have heard speak.

Give the Whole Site a Day

Bom Jesus, the Se Cathedral, St Francis of Assisi, the museum, the ridge with Our Lady of the Rosary, the Augustinian tower and the Museum of Christian Art make a full day on foot in heat. Take it slowly. The site rewards the pace of a pilgrim and punishes the pace of a tour.

Confession and the Poor

Confession is available at the shrine, and the classic shape of a pilgrimage includes it. So does almsgiving. Goa has plenty of institutions running schools, homes and clinics on very little, and a pilgrim who leaves something behind at one of them has completed the pattern. Our guide to Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide sets out the same pattern at other shrines.