According to my experience, the only effective way to spread religion in India is for the King to proclaim by means of an edict to all his officials … - Francis Xavier

One of Xavier's colleagues in this mission of christianising the Hindus was Miguel Vaz, the Vicar General of India appointed by Rome. In consultation with Xavier he wrote a long letter to the King of Portugal in November 1545. The letter outlined a forty­one point plan for spreading the “light of Christianity.” Point No. 3 reads as follows: “Since idolatry is so great an offence against God, as is manifest to all, it is just that your Majesty should not permit it within your territories and an order should be promulgated in Goa to the effect that in the whole island there should not be any temple public or secret; contravention thereof should entail grave penalties; that no official should make idols in any form, neither of stone, nor of wood, nor of copper, nor of any other metal; ... and that persons who are in charge of St. Paul's should have the power to search the houses of the Brahmins and other Hindus, in case there exists a presumption or suspicion of the existence of idols there.” On March 8, 1547 the King ordered his Viceroy at Goa that all Hindu temples should be destroyed forthwith.

We have is in these parts a class of men among the pagans who are called Brahmins. They keep up the worship of the gods, the superstitious rites of religion, frequenting the temples and taking care of the idols. They are as perverse and wicked a set as can anywhere be found, and I always apply to them the words of the holy David, “From an unholy race and a wicked and crafty man deliver me, O Lord.” They are liars and cheats to the very backbone. Their whole study is how to deceive most cunningly the simplicity and ignorance of the people…All the time I have been here in this country I have only converted one Brahmin…

Everyone who came in contact with Xavier seems to have agreed that he was a saint. Men might disagree with him; but in all the extensive records there is not a single word that runs contrary to the general verdict as to his saintliness. There are many references to the long hours that he spent in prayer and in rapt contemplation of his Lord. He disclaimed anything in the way of miraculous powers; in his devotions there was nothing that could be called mystical in any strict sense of that term. He seems to have followed the broad lines of medieval devotional practice, profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of his master Ignatius. Xavier, like Ignatius, was in all things a medieval man, untouched by any of the new currents of thought in theology or in the daily affairs of life. It is probable that, in the ten years of his sojourn in the East, he never possessed a Bible or even a New Testament. Apart from his breviary and his missal, his sole companion seems to have been the work of Marcus Marulus, Opus de religiose vivendi institutione, a thick book of 680 pages, published at Cologne in 1531. He seems rarely to have based his discourses directly on the Bible...