The Surgeon’s Capital: Luís de Almeida in Japan, 1552–1583

Sixteen Rooms and an Altar

Almeida's Jesuit Hospital at Funai and Its Sixteen Rooms, Built in 1559

In 1559 the Jesuit hospital at Funai took possession of a new building: sixteen small rooms set in two rows of eight, each with its own door, and an altar standing between the rows so that a patient could follow Christian worship without leaving his bed.

The hospital’s Portuguese surgeon, Luís de Almeida, described the arrangement in his letters. It was a missionary achievement that could be counted in rooms, the easiest kind to report and the least informative to read.

Funai, now part of Ōita, was the capital of Bungo on the eastern side of Kyūshū. Its ruler, Ōtomo Sōrin, had allowed the missionaries to establish themselves there and had supported their charitable work, without at that point having become a Christian himself. The hospital had grown through the middle of the 1550s out of efforts to shelter children and care for the sick, and by 1557 it was doing surgery and dispensing medicines drawn from Chinese practice. The familiar foundation date of 1557 marks a stage in that growth, not the morning an institution appeared fully formed.

Almeida brought a surgical training from Lisbon and money made in the Asian trade. Japanese Christians brought medical knowledge, households, and the local relationships without which nothing in Bungo could be arranged. The staff also included assistants from elsewhere in Asia. Between them they handled wounds, persistent skin conditions, and internal illnesses treated with Chinese remedies. Patients suffering from leprosy were accommodated separately. Religious care went with physical treatment, as it did in every hospital of the period.

None of which resembles the account that later attached itself to the place, in which a European doctor arrives in a country waiting for medicine. Japan had physicians. Japan had traditions of religious care. Even the new ward, with its sixteen private doors, sat closer to Japanese precedent than to the large communal halls familiar in Portuguese institutions. The historian James Fujitani, working through the correspondence, has shown how completely the hospital’s daily operation rested on its Japanese Christian community.

Almeida’s contribution was substantial enough without crediting him with everything that happened inside the fence. He helped pay for the institution, he practiced surgery in it, and he taught others to do the same.

Then the mission sent him away.

What kept the hospital working afterward was precisely the people a story centered on its Portuguese founder leaves outside the frame.

A License and a Cargo

Luís de Almeida's 1546 Surgical License and His Merchant Career Before the Jesuits

The best-dated fact of Almeida’s early life is a piece of paper. On 30 March 1546 a royal diploma authorized him to practice surgery. He had trained at the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos, the Royal Hospital of All Saints, in the city where he had probably been born around 1525, though that date is not secure. Two years after the diploma he sailed for India. He reached Japan in the early 1550s, conventionally in 1552, with a merchant’s interests as well as a surgeon’s skills.

The two occupations sat comfortably in one life: Portuguese ships carried men whose living combined a service with a stake in the cargo, and nothing in a surgical qualification obliged its holder to forgo an investment. Almeida became associated with Duarte da Gama and traded on the circuit joining Malacca to the China coast and to Japan. The business was silk. Japanese buyers wanted Chinese silk, Japanese silver paid for it, and the silver bought the next cargo. The Portuguese had not built this market. They had joined an Asian one whose goods, customers, and working knowledge were all in place before they arrived.

Almeida prospered.

Accounts of his eventual gift to the Jesuits differ considerably, running to several thousand cruzados, and the figures should not be added together into a single balance sheet: a description of a man’s wealth, a record of his charitable spending, and a sum assigned to a mission are three different measurements, and the letters do not always say which they are taking. What they establish is that he had enough to alter the circumstances of a small and poorly funded religious enterprise.

He encountered Cosme de Torres, who had taken charge of the Japanese mission after Francis Xavier departed. By September 1555 Almeida was writing about relinquishing his merchant career, in a letter that also arranged another commercial transaction. He sent 2,000 cruzados to be invested in silk and to assist the mission. His movement toward religious poverty consisted, in practice, of deciding what his money should do once it stopped being his.

In 1556 he entered the Society of Jesus at Funai as a lay brother. He could work within the order and take on missionary duties; he could not celebrate Mass or administer the sacraments reserved to a priest. He would remain in that grade for most of the rest of his life.

His family’s reported New Christian background added a further complication. In Portuguese usage the designation marked descent from Jews who had converted to Christianity, and it could stay attached to the descendants long after the conversion. It carried social suspicion, including inside Catholic institutions. That ancestry belonged to his circumstances, though the record of what he did is a great deal clearer than the record of what he may privately have wanted.

The Work of Mercy

Who Really Ran the Funai Hospital: Japanese Physicians and the Confraria da Misericórdia

Before the hospital had its expanded wards, it had infants.

Almeida and Baltasar Gago had organized support for abandoned children, an effort the missionary accounts connect with their opposition to infanticide. The remedy was more demanding than the denunciation. A rescued infant cannot feed itself: it requires a wet nurse, and then provision for years. Ōtomo Sōrin supplied patronage and help in securing that care, and Almeida undertook the financial responsibility. A promise to save children had become an obligation to maintain them.

The same arithmetic shaped the hospital. Alms supplemented the founder’s resources, arriving from Portuguese merchants and Japanese supporters, and alms do not collect themselves: somebody had to gather the gifts, purchase the supplies, and decide how assistance was distributed. Christian charity required as much regular administration as a trading venture did. Its accounts simply recorded a different expectation of return.

At Funai the missionaries drew on the Confraria da Misericórdia, the confraternity of mercy, an institution familiar from Portuguese towns and overseas settlements, which Japanese Christians adapted to their own community. Its members helped care for the sick and carried assistance beyond the hospital grounds. The wider history of these associations, traced by Takashi Gonoi, shows how heavily missionary Christianity leaned on lay organization wherever ordained clergy were scarce, which in the Japan mission was the permanent condition.

It was not, however, a municipal charity transferred intact from Lisbon. Torres selected its two leading officers rather than allowing the prescribed election, and kept authority over the major decisions. Among the men who managed its affairs was Pedro, a Japanese blacksmith. Converts held real influence over the care and none over the Society that supervised it, an arrangement more complicated than either foreign control or local autonomy, as is generally true of arrangements that work.

Medical practice was shared on the same terms. A Japanese Christian physician named Paulo, associated with Tōnomine and with a Buddhist background, treated internal illnesses using Chinese remedies. Paulo died in 1557, and replacing what he knew proved difficult. An older physician from outside the Christian community also attended patients, taking their pulses according to local practice. A Portuguese surgical diploma gave Almeida no reason whatever to dispense with expertise his colleagues needed.

Women sustained the institution with work and with donations. Clara, a Japanese Christian woman who appears in the correspondence, belonged to the community around the hospital. Family residences and charitable activity occupied the same ground, which made the care part of an inhabited neighborhood.

Prayer ran through all of it. Almeida used religious objects and encouraged Christian devotion alongside his treatments, and his colleagues expected bodily recovery and conversion to benefit the same person. Their letters could therefore count a cure as evidence of surgical skill and of divine favor at once, without experiencing the division a later reader wants to impose between them.

Another Luís

The Javanese Luís: Almeida's Freed Slave Who Became a Surgeon

One of Almeida’s assistants was a young man from Java, baptized Luís. Almeida had held him in slavery. He freed him when he entered the Society.

The younger Luís learned surgery and became an accomplished practitioner, and then vanished twice over: once behind the shared baptismal name, which makes the letters ambiguous, and once behind the assumption that a surgeon’s pupil working in Japan must have been Japanese. Fujitani identifies him in the missionary correspondence.

He belonged to the movement of Asian people through Portuguese commercial networks, which ran on employment and migration and also on coercion. The training did not cancel the enslavement that preceded it. It did mean that his place in the hospital cannot be reduced to carrying a European’s instruments. The accounts credit him with treating difficult cases himself, including a Japanese lord whose recovery impressed the people who witnessed it.

Those accounts were written by missionaries with an interest in demonstrating that their work succeeded. The spectacular cures were not clinical trials, and the counts of patients and recovery times do not form a series anyone could use. What they do establish is that the skill had passed out of Almeida’s own hands. The hospital taught, and what it taught was repeated, which is why the treatments continued when the founder was no longer there to supervise them.

In June 1561 Torres ordered Almeida onto the road. The small number of Jesuits in Japan had become a pressing constraint: communities lay long journeys apart and could go long periods without a missionary, and Almeida had enough language and experience to help. Diego R. Yuuki’s reconstruction of his travels puts that shortage, and Torres’s direct order, at the center of the departure.

The Society’s restrictions on medical work belong to the same institutional story, but they should not be collapsed into a single ban that emptied the wards overnight. Almeida’s transfer, the later policies on hospital management, and the anxieties about the standing of men who handled stigmatized diseases unfolded at different times. The hospital continued. So, on occasion, did Almeida’s practice, since he treated people on his subsequent travels.

His new assignments drew on both earlier occupations. He could negotiate with merchants, arrange supplies, and talk to people who wanted access to a physician or to Portuguese shipping. A brother sent to visit an isolated congregation might also settle a question of property or prepare a residence for a priest who had not yet arrived. Torres had not simply removed a surgeon from a hospital. He had redeployed a man whose usefulness had never been confined to the thing he is remembered for.

A Harbor with Conditions

The 1562 Yokoseura Agreement: Almeida, Ōmura Sumitada and the Portuguese Harbor That Burned

The Portuguese needed somewhere dependable to unload.

Violence at Hirado in 1561 made the need urgent, and deep water alone did not meet it. Ships needed protection, traders needed permission to do business, missionaries wanted room to preach, and the search for an anchorage was a search for a lord who would grant all three at once. In 1562 Almeida helped negotiate such an arrangement at Yokoseura, in the territory of Ōmura Sumitada.

The terms tied commercial privileges to religious ones. Portuguese merchants received exemption from customs duties for ten years. Land was assigned to the Jesuits. People outside the faith could not settle in the privileged area without permission. A church followed, merchants followed the exemption, and Sumitada’s domain acquired access to the traffic other lords on that coast were also hoping to secure.

For Almeida the negotiation drew on relationships formed before his vows. The missionaries could recommend an anchorage to traders; the prospect of traders made missionary requests worth granting. Neither side controlled the whole transaction, which is what made the influence worth having: a hold over a merchant captain was useful because it had to be exercised each time, and was never the same thing as issuing orders to a fleet.

Sumitada was baptized in 1563 and took the name Bartolomeu. His conversion entered a domain already divided by political interests, and his hostility toward Buddhist institutions sharpened the opposition. His enemies attacked.

Yokoseura burned that year.

A settlement designed to give commerce greater security had been caught in the local struggle its own privileges helped to intensify. The agreement had never removed Yokoseura from Japanese politics; it had only written the Portuguese into them. Missionary rights rested on a ruler whose position could be challenged, and the exemptions and residence restrictions had redistributed opportunity inside his territory, benefiting some people and excluding others who had not gone anywhere. What the fire exposed was that both signatories had promised more protection than either could deliver.

Almeida kept working along the coast. In 1563 he established a church at Kuchinotsu, in the Arima domain, and the following year Torres made that port his base. Kuchinotsu’s connection with overseas trade predated the Portuguese entirely, as its Chinese quarter indicated. The newcomers had walked into an existing maritime town and attached one more religious and commercial relationship to it.

A port, in the end, meant a political arrangement that would last, and Yokoseura’s failure did not end the search for one. It sent ships and missionaries toward other harbors, carrying their claims and their experience with them.

Before Nagasaki Became Nagasaki

How Nagasaki Began: Almeida's 1567 Land Grant Before the Port Opened in 1570

Almeida was working at Nagasaki by 1567.

It was not yet Nagasaki. The great center of Portuguese trade and Japanese Christianity was still in front of it, and getting there required local landholders as well as the lord of the domain.

Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, a retainer of Sumitada, granted Almeida land. Gaspar Vilela subsequently converted the Buddhist temple on the site into a church, Todos os Santos, All Saints, in 1569. The division of labor survives in the history of the site: Almeida obtained the ground, Vilela established the church, and Japanese authority made both actions possible.

The port agreement followed in 1570, and Portuguese shipping arrived in 1571. Almeida’s earlier work belonged to the preparation for all of that. Calling him the founder of Nagasaki compresses several years of negotiation and construction into one man’s visit, and writes out the settlement and the people who were there before him.

As the city grew it gathered into one place activities that had been dispersed among less reliable bases. A merchant’s cargo, a missionary’s letter, and a newly arrived priest could now pass through the same harbor. The connection with Macao helped sustain Christian institutions in Japan, while the expanding Christian population gave the city a religious character that ran well beyond anything commerce required.

Almeida spent much of his career on the work that precedes consolidation. He arranged houses and churches, visited communities, and negotiated permissions. Francisco Figueira de Faria has examined whether those activities made him, in substance, a procurator, the official responsible for a religious institution’s material affairs. The argument concerns his functions. It is not a claim that anyone ever conferred the title on him.

The description joins the hospital to the ports instead of treating either as an interruption in a career. A residence had to be acquired before a priest could use it. Supplies had to arrive before a community could be maintained. It also explains why Almeida appears in so many places in the record: the mission kept sending him to establish the conditions under which somebody else might stay.

The Price of a Repaired Tripod

Almeida's 1565 Letter on Chanoyu: The Tea Ceremony at Sakai and Tamon Castle

An old iron tripod, broken and mended, was said to have cost 1,030 cruzados. Its owner considered it worth more.

Almeida reported the valuation without treating the repair as a reason to dismiss it, which is the most interesting thing in the passage. His travels had taken him off Kyūshū, through the region of Kyoto, Sakai, and Nara, into an urban world whose wealth and ceremonial habits offered a very different view of Japan from the Funai wards. In a letter dated 25 October 1565 he set down the service of tea and the objects that accompanied it.

At Sakai he was received by the Christian merchant Hibiya Ryōkei, who appears in the account as Sancho. Almeida recorded the preparation of powdered tea with hot water, the order of the meal, and the care with which the utensils were handled. The practice of chanoyu, the formal preparation and service of tea, directed a guest’s attention toward objects whose value a foreign visitor could easily fail to recognize.

Almeida understood that such objects had a market. Age, reputation, and connoisseurship were in the price, and the damage was not deducted from it. He explained the utensils to his European readers through an analogy with the jewels valued at home: there were specialists who knew the pieces and advised on purchases and sales. The comparison gave a distant reader something more useful than a declaration that Japanese taste was strange. These were prized possessions inside a system of appraisal.

He had given up trading on his own account when he took his vows. He had not given up noticing who assigned value, or how an object moved through a market. His is among the early European descriptions of the practice discussed by Michael Cooper in his work on tea.

At Tamon Castle near Nara he attended to a different display of wealth. Matsunaga Hisahide’s residence combined defense with carefully presented interiors and rooms built for reception. Almeida’s visit of 1565 left a description of white walls and impressive construction, and comparisons with buildings in Christian lands that conveyed admiration without requiring his hosts to resemble Europeans.

The castle was dismantled on Oda Nobunaga’s orders in 1576. Its main building was moved to Kyoto and the stone from its walls went to Tsutsui Castle. Almeida’s letter preserves the residence as it stood eleven years before it was distributed around the province in pieces, its defenses and its reception rooms still part of the same political arrangement.

The surgeon’s attention moved from a wound to a wall to an expensive piece of broken iron without changing register. In every case what makes the account worth having is the particular thing he looked at.

A Creature Sent for Examination

Almeida's 1566 Sea Creature Report from the Gotō Islands, Reidentified as a Seal in 2025

In 1566, working in the Gotō Islands with the Japanese Jesuit Lourenço, Almeida was told that a certain land creature, resembling a dog or an otter, entered the sea and became a fish. He asked to be shown one in the course of the transformation.

A specimen was sent.

It did not settle the question the way he had expected. His account describes limbs with joints, claws, and hair, together with features resembling fins. He did not report that he had decisively disproved anything. He reported that he was confused. Then he removed parts of the animal, prepared the bones, and sent material to fellow Jesuits.

The episode appears in his letter from Shiki of 20 October 1566. A study published by Masatoshi Yasuda in 2025 reconsiders it as a historical record of an animal of the family Otariidae, the sea lions and fur seals, which is a far more plausible zoological home for the description than a dog that turns into a fish. The precise species remains a separate question.

What the episode shows is not a modern natural scientist. Almeida requested something he could inspect, recognized that it presented a problem, and circulated the evidence; his interpretation stayed open to a possibility that later zoology would reject. Observation and an adequate explanation had not arrived together, and he did not pretend otherwise.

His letters also carried observations that complicated the mission’s preferred account of itself. Paula Hoyos Hattori, comparing manuscript-derived texts with the Évora edition of 1598, found omissions in Almeida’s letter of 1562. One removed passage described Christians in Kagoshima asking why Xavier had identified the Christian God with Dainichi, a Buddhist figure. Another described Almeida adopting the appearance of Buddhist religious men when approaching Japanese lords. The printed version lost an awkward question in the first case and a practical accommodation in the second.

Letters passed through an institution before they reached a wider readership. Their author could report a productive uncertainty on one page and an inconvenient religious resemblance on the next, and an editor could decide that only one was suitable for publication. Almeida’s observations survived that process, sometimes in altered form, and survived again in the later Jesuit historians who used them. His reputation as an eyewitness rests on texts that had careers of their own after he sealed them.

The Capital Was to Remain

Valignano on Almeida's Gift: The Capital That Funded the Jesuit Mission's Silk Trade

The arrangement he left behind outlasted him by decades.

Money assigned to the mission was invested through Portuguese merchants, who bought silk in China, sold it in Japan, and passed the proceeds to the missionaries. Alessandro Valignano, explaining the scheme later, stated its purpose exactly: the earnings were to support the mission while the underlying capital was preserved and, if possible, increased.

This was an endowment exposed to maritime risk. A gift spent on food or timber runs out when the food is eaten. Capital turned over repeatedly in cargo can produce a continuing income, but only if the goods arrive and only if they sell. The mechanism tied the upkeep of religious houses to merchants’ purchasing decisions, to shipping conditions, and to access to Japanese buyers. Delegating the transactions spared priests the work of each sale. It did not make the income independent of the trade.

The distinction was nevertheless the whole of the defense. Clerical commerce attracted criticism, and the Society’s vow of poverty made its participation especially sensitive. Valignano emphasized the lay intermediaries and the charitable destination of the profits, presenting the mission as the beneficiary of investment managed by other people rather than as a body of priests bargaining over silk.

Francisco Cabral, superior of the Japanese mission from 1570, objected to the commercial involvement associated with Almeida’s money. His objection belonged to a longer argument inside the Society about whether financial necessity justified activities that appeared incompatible with its rules. Superiors in Europe wanted the trade curtailed or ended. The men responsible for keeping the mission fed had to name a substitute.

Royal grants were the obvious substitute and an unreliable one. A promise assigned against distant revenues could fail to become money available in Japan, and the expenses continued regardless. The practical defense of commerce therefore never rested on the claim that it was profitable. It rested on the claim that the mission could not be maintained on the alternatives actually supplied.

The controversy was also about appearances. Merchants and rivals could see the mission inside the same trade from which private traders were extracting fortunes, and a charitable purpose did not prevent them from reading its activities as business, nor did receipts for necessary expenditure answer the questions raised by institutional wealth. Almeida’s personal renunciation had created an asset whose management required justifying, repeatedly, by men who had never met him.

Later arrangements gave Jesuit investment a more formal place in the Macao–Japan silk trade, on a scale belonging to a larger and far more expensive mission than the one he had joined. His original gift helped establish the practice. What the practice became depended on further decisions, further resources, and other people, and the capital survived inside an institution whose needs could no longer be measured against a founder’s contribution.

Three Years as a Priest

Almeida's Late 1580 Ordination and His Death in Amakusa in 1583

In 1579 Valignano sent Almeida and three other brothers to Macao to be ordained. The shortage of priests in Japan gave the voyage its urgency. He was ordained in 1580, after more than two decades as a brother, and returned to serve as superior in Amakusa, where he could at last celebrate Mass and administer the sacraments.

The lateness of it has invited explanations that run well past the evidence. Prejudice against New Christians existed within the Society, and Almeida’s reported ancestry cannot simply be set aside. But establishing that a prejudice existed does not establish that a particular decision was taken for that reason over all those years. His duties were extensive and the preparation was demanding, and those facts are in the record too. What is not in doubt is that his work as a brother carried considerable responsibility while leaving the sacramental duties to other men.

The change of status did not retire him from travel. He attended the Nagasaki consultation of 1581 and undertook another difficult assignment in Satsuma the following year. His familiarity with local rulers continued to make him useful. The mission by then had more personnel and a more developed structure than it had in the 1550s, and it was still sending an aging man wherever his existing relationships offered an advantage.

Almeida died at Kawachinoura in Amakusa in October 1583. He had been a priest for approximately three years.

The hospital at Funai outlived him, continuing until the destruction associated with the Shimazu invasion of Bungo in 1586 and 1587. It never had to be closed by the nationwide suppression of Christianity, because a regional war reached it first. The buildings had never needed a general policy against Christians to become vulnerable.

The work done inside them was harder to commemorate than the man who had paid for them. It had included Japanese medical practice and domestic care, surgery performed by a freed Javanese assistant, and administration by converts who remained accountable to Jesuit authority. It was what allowed the institution to operate during the years its founder spent elsewhere. Nearly all its surviving traces lie in the correspondence that made him famous.

In 1969 the Ōita City Medical Association established a new hospital and named it after Almeida. Its own history explains the choice as a commemoration of his service to the sick. It is a modern foundation, separated from the Funai institution by nearly four centuries and claiming no uninterrupted descent. The name returned to medical use in the city where Almeida had once helped provide sixteen rooms and an altar.

The rooms were always the countable part. They were never the part that did the work.

Sources & Further Reading

Almeida Hospital. History of Almeida Hospital. Ōita City Medical Association, undated. The institution’s own account of its 1969 foundation and of the commemorative name; its broader claims about medical priority are not adopted here.

Cooper, Michael. “The Early Europeans and Tea.” In Paul Varley and Kumakura Isao, eds., Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989. Discusses the early European descriptions of chanoyu, of which Almeida’s 1565 letter is among the first; Steven D. Owyoung’s discussion of the passage was consulted alongside it.

Faria, Francisco Figueira de. “The Functions of Procurator in the Society of Jesus. Luís de Almeida, Procurator?” Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 15, 2007, pp. 29–46. Examines whether Almeida’s acquisition of land, residences, and supplies amounted in substance to the office of procurator.

Fujitani, James. “The Jesuit Hospital in the Religious Context of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 46/1, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2019, pp. 79–101. The essential corrective to accounts centered exclusively on European medicine, reconstructing the hospital’s Japanese Christian personnel, the confraternity’s officers, and the Javanese Luís.

Gonoi, Takashi. “The Jesuit Mission and Jihi no Kumi (Confraria de Misericórdia).” Transactions of the Japan Academy 72, special issue, 2018, pp. 123–138. Supplies the history of the charitable confraternities and of the lay organization on which Christian communities depended wherever ordained clergy were scarce.

Hoyos Hattori, Paula. “Políticas editoriales en las cartas jesuitas de Japón (Évora, 1598): análisis de tres epístolas.” Anuario de la Escuela de Historia Virtual 6/8, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 2015, pp. 90–109. Compares manuscript and printed versions of Almeida’s letter of 1562 and identifies what the Évora editors removed.

Japan Tourism Agency. Yokoseura Park; Arrival Point of the Nanban Ships; Site of Todos os Santos Church; Chronology of Christianity in Japan Centered on Nagasaki. Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, multilingual interpretation database, various dates. Official site histories corroborating the Yokoseura terms, the church at Kuchinotsu, and the sequence of land grant, port agreement, and shipping at Nagasaki.

Leitão, Ana Maria. “The Jesuits and the Japan Trade.” Revista de Cultura, Instituto Cultural de Macau, October–December 1993. Reproduces Valignano’s explanation of the investment through merchant intermediaries; its occasional conflation of brother and priest is not followed here.

Nara Prefecture. Tamon Castle. Castles of Nara, undated. Corroborates Almeida’s visit of 1565 and the dismantling of the residence in 1576.

Yasuda, Masatoshi. “A 16th-Century Record of the Family Otariidae in the Goto Islands, Nagasaki: Insights from a Letter by a Missionary Luis de Almeida.” Transactions of the Nagasaki Biological Society 97, 2025, pp. 1–6. Rereads the Gotō specimen as a record of the eared seals; this article follows its family-level identification and declines to choose a species.

Yuuki, Diego R. “Luís de Almeida: Doctor, Traveller and Priest.” Revista de Cultura, Instituto Cultural de Macau, June–August 1990. The biographical reconstruction of the itinerant years and the late ordination; its imagined scenes and its devotional explanations of private feeling are not reproduced here.