Life
Carvalho first appears in the sources at . Manuel Dias Sénior held the rectorship of the college until 1601, when he was replaced by Valentim Carvalho (1559-1630), a priest with whom he disagreed deeply and irredeemably.As rector he signed the Macao college catalogue of January 1604 and the college's annual letter for 1603.
He became provincial of Japan in July 1611 and held the office until 1617.When the came, the missionaries assembled at and sailed into exile on November 8 and 9. The Provincial, Carvalho, and other priests planned to jump ship under cover of darkness and return secretly, but in the event only Jeronymo Rodrigues was able to do so.Carvalho reached Macao in November 1614.From there he governed the province at a distance: until October 1617, Rodrigues had only been Vice-Provincial, that is, he had acted as the representative of the Provincial, Valentim Carvalho, who himself was in Macao.
In 1617 he answered the Franciscan friar Sebastián de San Pedro. San Pedro had blamed the Jesuits' part in the Macao-Nagasaki silk trade for the ban. Carvalho wrote an apologia responding to San Pedro's accusations and included a translation of the Spanish treatise into Portuguese.He did not deny the trade but defended it as necessary and lawful. His own verdict was that the real cause was "reason of state": the Japanese rulers' suspicion that the missionaries meant to take the country.Copies survive in London, Lisbon and Rome, and José Eduardo Franco published the British Library manuscript in 2007.
About 1618, with some students unfit for the priesthood, the training of Japanese seminarians at Macao was stopped through Provincial Carvalho's opposition; some of the seminarians went home or on to .
His years in Macao were stormy. The college was split by his quarrel with Manuel Dias Sénior. The Visitor Francisco Vieira wrote in October 1616 that Carvalho and Dias were among the best Portuguese priests of the province but, through lack of gentleness and humility, not fit to be its superiors.The quarrel was never settled. A letter of 1624 says that Carvalho, Dias and Gabriel de Matos could not get along, written a year before Carvalho left for .
Not to be confused with
Blessed Diogo Carvalho, the Jesuit martyred on February 22, 1624, one of the 205 Martyrs of Japan, is a different man.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Unverified: that he arrived in Japan in 1598 with Bishop Luís de Cerqueira and . No opened source.
- Unverified: that his first term as rector of Macao ran to 1609, and that he returned to Japan in 1609. Pina confirms only that he began as rector in 1601.
- Unverified: the 1614 to 1616 dispute over who governed the diocese after Cerqueira's death, which ended with Carvalho confirmed by the Archbishop of Manila on March 20, 1616. No opened source. The title "Primate of the Indies" belonged to the Archbishop of Goa, not Manila.
- Unverified: some listings give his death year as 1631 rather than 1630; that source has not yet been opened.