Departing monsignor leaves his own mark on history
RENOWNED historian Monsignor Manuel Teixeira returned to Portugal for good this week with a salvo of bon mots, such as his startling claim that Macau's 'most hated' pre-handover Portuguese governors were 'indeed the best'.
The 89-year-old priest singled out for acclaim Joao Ferreira do Amaral, who was beheaded by Chinese peasants in 1849 after levelling their ancestors' graves, and General Vasco Rocha Vieira, who furtively remitted 50 million patacas (about HK$48.5 million) in public funds from Macau to a private foundation in Lisbon just days before the 1999 handover.
The monsignor, who had previously vowed to 'leave my bones in Macau', returned to his homeland after nearly 77 years in Asia. He blamed long nights of 'infernal din' at Macau's public hospital, where he was resting after a recent fall at his home, for his sudden change of mind.
He had arrived as a 12-year-old seminarian in Macau, where he started researching the history of Portuguese seafarers and missionaries in Asia while still an adolescent. He quickly established himself as an ecclesiastical historian and columnist, publishing 125 treatises and compilations and more than 2,000 newspaper and magazine articles over the past seven decades.
Although his admirers regard him as Macau's greatest historian, his detractors have criticised him for his almost systematic neglect of the 'Chinese side' of Macau's four-century-long history under Portuguese rule. The monsignor admitted shortly before his departure that he had never been interested in China and that he had therefore never bothered to study the Chinese language.
He acquired world fame by appearing in scores of international television documentaries about Macau over the past few decades. Producers found his telegenic long white beard and 'trademark' white cassock simply irresistible, and journalists remember him as a wise-cracking raconteur who served them his beloved 'Scottish tea' (whisky).
The monsignor, who described Macau's handover from Portuguese to Chinese rule as a 'sad' event, never shied from controversy - often expressing strong opinions on matters close to his heart, such as 'the evils of birth control'. Many were shocked by his rather unchristian diatribes against communists, atheists, adulterers, divorcees, lesbians ('worse than animals') and others in his daily columns in the local Portuguese press.
However, his amiable personality made it possible for even those in strong disagreement with his extremely conservative social and political views to make friends with him.
His claims, made in a column in 1995, that during World War II a local hotel bought babies for the purpose of fattening and serving them as meat to customers and that starving beggars devoured the vomit of drunken Japanese officers are still widely disputed.
Monsignor Teixeira left Macau with the only wish that his life's writings, most of which are out of print, be newly edited. There are a number of Portuguese foundations, which received large funds from Macau before the handover, that could undertake this costly task.
'Man is dust, fame is smoke and the end is ashes; only my books will remain,' the monsignor said in an interview two decades ago.
Although some admire him as a living legend and others simply regard him as a cult figure, the self-made historian will always remain a towering figure in Macau's rather idiosyncratic history.
Harald Bruning is the Post's Macau correspondent
