Storia do Mogor 359.4.2

359.4.2

If after the oath I have taken to speak the truth, and after the protest now made of rather diminishing than exaggerating events, any man still blames the Capuchins (as I know of a certainty some do, who are the cause of my issuing this manifesto), he would need to be worse than a Turk, a Hindu, or an idolater. Indeed, it is not possible, gentlemen, for a Turk to learn what I am about to recount without having some little compassion for us and doing us justice. Here I give, gentlemen, word for word, how the affair occurred, so far as I am able to recollect. Beholding the miserable condition to which the Reverend Father Esprit of Tours had been reduced by being declared excommunicated, and the injury done to our mission by the removal of a friar who can use the Portuguese, Malabãrī, and Arab languages perfectly, and has, in addition, been twenty-five years a missionary without causing any scandal or doing the slightest thing unworthy of his ministry, we resolved that we would go to the Lord Bishop of San Thomé, praying him with all possible insistence that he would be good enough to remove the excommunication fulminated by his Most Illustrious Lordship against the person of the Reverend Father Esprit, and taking with us a written petition in case he should decline to listen to our spoken arguments.