ABSTRACT
St. Francis Xavier's corpse was not supposed to rot; he was an incorruptible, singled out by God for his purity, piety, and dedication to spreading the Gospel to the four corners of the world as a Jesuit missionary, and as such, his body was not subject to decomposition in death. However, when the provincial of the Society of Jesus in Goa, India, examined Xavier's body in 1686, he found the saint's limbs shrunken, his skin hardened and ravaged by moths, his face dark and deformed. 1 Letters from Goa at this time reveal the Jesuits’ acute anxiety that their enemies would find out about Xavier's decomposition and accuse them of promoting devotion to a body that was nothing but “covered bones.” 2 The solution to this problem was to lock the corpse away in a magnificent tomb located in the Basilica of Bom Jesus (Figure 6.3.1). The saint's silver sarcophagus, created in the 1630s by Goan silversmiths, was decorated with silver panels that could be removed to exhibit the body. In the late seventeenth century, as anxieties about the state of Xavier's body grew, these panels were locked into place with a key. The rector of the Basilica pleaded with the Jesuit superior general in Rome, asking to be allowed to throw the keys into the sea, so that no one could see the decaying body of St. Francis Xavier. 3
