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 had studied Arts at Coimbra and taught Latin, rhetoric and philosophy.On August 5, 1598, he reached Nagasaki with Bishop Luís Cerqueira and Visitor Alessandro Valignano.He served for a time as the bishop's notary and took part in the consultation on slavery on September 4, 1598.
In 1606, Carvalho and Fr Sabatino de Ursis sent a report from Macao on Valignano's final illness and death to the Jesuit General.The rector and Fr Manuel Dias also sought to retain the mathematician Fr Carlo Spinola for work in China rather than Japan.
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.
Japan had been raised from a vice-province to a full Jesuit province in 1610, and Carvalho was its only provincial during the years 1610 to 1617.In October 1612 he warned Rome that the arrival of more religious from Manila could endanger the Japanese mission.He feared that some were encouraging plans for conquest, which he considered impossible against Japan's military strength.
When officials persecuted Christians in Arima, he sent Jesuits disguised in Japanese dress to assist the prisoners, and some were able to offer Mass and Communion.In the 1614 expulsion he also found a way for Fr Girolamo de Angelis to remain hidden rather than leave Japan.He selected a small group to stay underground, including Japanese and European priests and brothers considered able to endure a life in hiding.
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.
His defence also recorded the number of seminarians in 1612 and explained that the many boys employed as servants were not included in the count.
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 .
During the exile, relations with Japanese catechists were another source of dispute.One account accuses the former provincial of alienating fifty-three catechists who had accompanied the missionaries to Macao.
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 .
Carvalho later went to Goa, where he died in 1631 according to the chronology recorded by Pagès.
The vacant bishopric
After Bishop Cerqueira died in February 1614, the seven secular priests elected Carvalho administrator of the vacant diocese on February 22.The appointment was also defended on the ground that a papal provision entrusted the vacant see to the Jesuit superior.Disagreement soon broke out between him and members of the secular clergy and mendicant orders.In October five priests repudiated his administration and proposed Dominican and then Franciscan replacements.On October 23 Carvalho excommunicated the notary involved in the deposition.
The Holy See's arrangement for the Jesuit superior to administer the vacant bishopric continued under Carvalho's successors.Papal measures in 1618 and 1632 later reaffirmed the arrangement.From Macao Carvalho wrote to the Pope on December 28, 1614, asking for the see to be filled and describing the accusations used against the Christians.The accusations included claims that Christianity honored disobedient subjects and treated executed criminals as objects of worship.
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
- Carvalho arrived at Nagasaki with Bishop Luís Cerqueira and Visitor Alessandro Valignano on August 5, 1598.
- 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.
- Pagès records Carvalho's death at Goa in 1631, while the biographical account above gives 1630.
- The page's death year of 1630 differs from the 1631 date recorded in Pagès's chronology.
- Cerqueira's death is dated February 20, 1614 in Profillet, while other accounts place it on February 16.
- Sources describe Carvalho's authority over the vacant diocese both as an election by seven priests and as flowing from a prior papal provision.
- Jesuit and mendicant accounts disagree over Carvalho's legitimacy and over the deposition and excommunication in October 1614; a later Jesuit assessment judged the excommunication unfair.
- A source dates his promotion to provincial in 1611, while another describes the provincial office from 1610 following the province's elevation.