So in the thirteenth century, Antonio of Padua was fed up with how unimpressed his (supposedly heretic) audience was with his preaching. So he literally went to preach to the fishes instead who, surprisingly, stuck their heads out and listened. This then impressed the heretics so much, they too started to listen.
Anyway, 1654 or about 450 years later, on the feast day of Antonio, his namesake António Vieira, a Jesuit Monk in Brazil, gave the “Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish”. In it, he argued against the cruelty of the colonizers against the natives and condemned slavery. (Also he includes a list of good fishes and bad fishes)
Accordingly, three days later, Vieira secretly set sail for Lisbon to plead the cause of the Indians, and in April 1655 he obtained from King John IV a series of decrees which placed the missions under the Society of Jesus, with Vieira himself as their superior, and prohibited the enslavement of the natives, except in certain specific cases.
Conflicts between the settlers and the Jesuits in Brazil went back as far as 1549, and were to last until the latter were banished in 1760.
This is not the full story and the Jesuits probably wanted the natives alive and un-enslaved mostly for the sake of more easily converting them to Christianity, but it still sounds cool, that they opposed the settlers for so long.
Found more than I’d hoped on Wikipedia:
So in the thirteenth century, Antonio of Padua was fed up with how unimpressed his (supposedly heretic) audience was with his preaching. So he literally went to preach to the fishes instead who, surprisingly, stuck their heads out and listened. This then impressed the heretics so much, they too started to listen.
Anyway, 1654 or about 450 years later, on the feast day of Antonio, his namesake António Vieira, a Jesuit Monk in Brazil, gave the “Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish”. In it, he argued against the cruelty of the colonizers against the natives and condemned slavery. (Also he includes a list of good fishes and bad fishes)
This is not the full story and the Jesuits probably wanted the natives alive and un-enslaved mostly for the sake of more easily converting them to Christianity, but it still sounds cool, that they opposed the settlers for so long.