His closeness to Pope Benedict[7] led the pontiff to grant several privileges to the chapel of the ancestral manor house of Manuel de Azevedo's family, in Paredes da Beira.

[3][8][9][10] At that time, the granting by the Portuguese crown of lordships in perpetuity and without restrictions concerning its rights of transmission – that is, no clause requiring that the succession be valid only for male heirs – was extremely rare.

[7] The proximity between the Pope and Manuel de Azevedo, the influence he exercised in Rome, and his connection with the Portuguese Catholic movement known as A Jacobeia – an important sect, founded in Portugal in the 18th century that advocated a reform of the country's religious and moral life[11] – turned Azevedo in the eyes of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, into a political obstacle that needed to be set aside, so as not to harm the direct and exclusive access of the king's minister to the Head of the Holy See.

The forced departure from Rome was an abrupt interruption of the activities he had carried out until then, including the publication of ancient liturgical texts and the teaching of the chair of Liturgy, which he had idealized and later organized.

The suppression of the Society of Jesus evoked strong emotions in Manuel de Azevedo, as in many other Jesuits of the time, who sometimes expressed their sadness through writings composed in Latin.

Azevedo composed a great deal of Latin verse during these unhappy years, including a four-book epic poem about the return of the Jesuits expelled from the American colonies of Spain and Portugal – and also a detailed description, in twelve books, of the city of Venice.

[12] In his Latin verses, Azevedo seeks to atone for his sadness at the suppression of the company, and even tries to comfort his Spanish, Portuguese and American colleagues – who now lived in exile, in the Papal States and also in Russia under Catherine the Great.

[16] Also, when the future Tsar Paul I of Russia and his wife, the would be Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg) visited Venice in early 1782,[17] Manuel de Azevedo personally presented them with two volumes of his poetry, dedicated to Catherine the Great and the Russian princes.