A ‘Sanctus’ for the Ages
Calabria in Italy has produced some remarkable warriors for Christ, men of insuperable courage and faith, yet even among these titans, Fr. Camillo Costanzo stands tall. Born in 1571 in Bovalino, a village perched on the Ionian Sea under the boot of Italy, young Camillo Costanzo must have glimpsed eternity awaiting him across that fabled sea, for he would live out his life as if the promise of Heaven were always before his eyes.
Having studied law at the University of Naples and served as a soldier in Flanders, Camillo finally found his vocation in the Society of Jesus, which he entered on September 8, 1591. Once ordained, he set his heart on converting China and sailed for Macao, a Portuguese outpost west of Hong Kong housing the Jesuits’ Far Eastern headquarters. On his arrival in 1604, however, Fr. Costanzo saw his hopes of mission in China sunk by bureaucratic intransigence; instead, he was sent to Japan by a particular providence of God (says historian François Solier), arriving in Nagasaki on August 17, 1605.
The brilliant priest was soon fluent in Japanese and labored fruitfully in Christ’s Japanese vineyard nine years: first at Kokura, in northeastern Kyushu, and later at Sakai, a major commercial center near Kyoto, the imperial capital. Yet this tireless missionary traveled all the length and breadth of Japan in his evangelical labors, for we find him in southerly Nagasaki in 1609, where the widely-beloved Fr. Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo, three years bedridden, died in his arms, and some years later in Tsugaru, at the northernmost end of Japan proper, visiting Catholics exiled to the wintry north by shogunal command.
While Fr. Costanzo was in Tsugaru, the daimyo of Matsumae up in Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) requested that a Japanese physician be sent his way. A solid Catholic was chosen for the job, and Fr. Costanzo trained him in catechesis, wrote out many prayers in common use as well as the formula for baptism, and sent him northward. The doctor soon reported back that the people of Matsumae were so open to the Gospel that he was baptizing great numbers of them. Fr. Costanzo would have traveled to Matsumae himself to build a strong apostolate in that vast, virgin northland of Ezo were it not for the Tokugawas’ sledgehammer-blow of 1614 on Japanese Christendom.
Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Christian Expulsion Edict exiled all churchmen and banned Christianity across the Empire. Although some clerics managed to remain in country and carry on their ministries by going underground, the name of Camillo Costanzo was near the top of the Shogun’s list of prominent missionaries assiduously building the Kingdom of God [in Japan], and he had no choice but to surrender himself to the shogunal authorities at Nagasaki for expulsion.
Once back in Macao, Father Costanzo began seven years’ intensive study of Japanese and Chinese religious texts, devoting himself wholly to a new mission he now envisioned. He would use the idolaters’ own “sacred” texts to prove the vacuity of their doctrines. The memory of that Catholic doctor’s glowing report from northerly Matsumae on the sprawling landscape of Ezo must have burned in his Ignatian heart all those seven years. This, apparently, was what God had made him for: to confute the lies that had long blocked the Gospel’s sweeping over Japan, the “land of the gods,” and open the floodgates to the very tsunami of Christ’s love that the Japanese, straining as they were under the Tokugawas’ cruel yoke, so desperately needed.
With that bright dream illumining his soul, Fr. Costanzo took passage in 1621 with two other priests on a Japan-bound ship, all three disguised as Portuguese soldiers. Enroute, however, Fr. Camillo’s priestly demeanor roused the suspicions of the ship’s master, who, for fear of his own life, would have turned his passenger in to the local magistrate on landing had not certain faithful Catholics stopped him in his tracks. By 1621, most Japanese Catholics had been starved of the Sacraments for seven years or longer: the arrival of the tall, noble and erudite Father Camillo Costanzo must have come as an angelic visitation from Heaven to countless cruelly-orphaned souls.
Having professed his fourth Jesuit vow in Japan, Fr. Costanzo was sent to Fudoyama in Hizen, not far from Higashi-Sonogi, from whose shore the 26 Martyrs had been embarked 24 years earlier to sail across Omura Bay toward Nagasaki and the execution-ground where their crosses awaited them atop a slope called Nishi-zaka. Perhaps Father Camillo visited that gray-pebbled shore and asked for those martyrs’ prayers just as this author often did. Perhaps he pictured them spending their last night on earth huddled in three open boats anchored off the opposite shore, shivering in the February cold. And then, perhaps, he envisioned their being rousted from their boats at dawn in the bleak winter chill to march the 7 or 8 miles to the foot of the steep slope called Nishi-zaka, which they would climb in exhaustion to reach that execution-ground and find their crosses laid out flat on the earth. There, atop that slope overlooking beautiful Nagasaki and its sparkling harbor, 12-year-old Luís Ibaraki would ask the executioners, “Which cross is mine?” and, running to the one they had pointed out — the smallest — the boy would fall to the ground to embrace that vessel that would carry him home.
From Fudoyama, Fr. Camillo moved on to Karatsu (literally “China Port”) on the north coast of Kyushu, whose harried flock he shepherded three months. This was the castle-town of Terazawa Hirotaka, who had pulled down churches and persecuted Catholics in Nagasaki before becoming a Catholic himself in 1595. Nevertheless, after Hideyoshi, Japan’s overlord, crucified the 26 Martyrs on February 5, 1597, Terazawa reverted to persecutor. His depredations would play a role in the seeding of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-1638, which eventually left 37,000 Catholic men, women and children brutally slaughtered in its wake.
Off the northwest corner of Kyushu lay Hirado Island. Heavily-forested and largely rural, Hirado afforded ample space for hidden Christian worship, and just past Hirado, Ikitsuki Island, the fief of the staunchly-Catholic Koteda clan, stood alone like a lighthouse at the western edge of Kyushu. In this region, Fr. Camillo kept busy day and night traveling to towns, hamlets and islets ranging across Hirado, Ikitsuki, and even the Goto Islands in the East China Sea, delivering the sacraments to forlorn Catholics long orphaned of their pastors. He even managed to slip into Hirado’s prison to confess three faithful souls — Hernando Jimenez, his wife and his servant — who had given shelter to Fr. Luís de Flores and would thus be martyred.
While on Ikitsuki, Fr. Camillo heard the confession of an earnestly-Catholic woman who hoped to convert her pagan husband. Feigning interest in the Faith, this reprobate artfully mined details about the Father’s mission route from her and duly reported all to the authorities. Boatloads of armed men were dispatched to hunt down Fr. Camillo, that dauntless, tireless shepherd of human souls whose very existence on Japanese soil seemed to irk the devil’s minions like a barbed arrow in the belly.
But all to God’s greater glory, as countless witnesses, human and angelic, would soon be privileged to see.
It was in Goto, in the harbor at Uku Island, that the inevitable arrived, sparked by the treachery of that informer on Ikitsuki Island.
Perhaps Fr. Costanzo was taking a moment’s rest in his boat when the daimyo’s soldiers sailed into the harbor — he so rarely had a safe place to lay his head. In that boat, just as predicted by the Judas on Ikitsuki, the hunters found their prey.
Who, unlike the slippery sort of fugitive they had expected, received them graciously, for this meant certain martyrdom, a prospect that filled Fr. Costanzo with joy. His joy disarmed his captors: they carried him to Hirado unbound, like a guest rather than their prisoner, after arresting his two dojuku (lay helpers), Augustino Ota and Gaspar Koteda. Seeing these two brought on board tightly bound, Fr. Camillo asked the soldiers to bind him too, but they demurred — perhaps this noble Italian priest visibly carried Heaven in his countenance, so close did he hold it to his heart.
The judges in Hirado proved less sympathetic than the soldiery had been. Asked why he defied the Shogun’s ban on Christ, Fr. Camillo answered that, although he obeyed all laws that did not violate the Commandments of God, as the Shogun had proscribed the preaching of the Gospel, a ban “utterly contrary to the will of the King of Heaven, [he] could not obey the kings of the earth to the prejudice of his service.”
This answer infuriated one of the judges, who shouted that Fr. Camillo deserved to die. He was dragged away with a rope around his neck and taken to Iki Island to be thrown into prison with two Spanish friars captured by English corsairs on the high seas. Like St. Paul, though, Fr. Camillo used this opportunity to convert the hearts of the turnkeys and guards of his prison.
Meanwhile, the Shogun Hidetada, informed of the arrests of Fr. Costanzo and company, ordered him burnt alive and all his helpers beheaded. Augustino Ota, Gaspar Koteda, and eight others were severally shorn of their lives before the holocaust of Fr. Costanzo. The burning alive of the tall Calabrian Jesuit was saved till last as a public spectacle staged to terrify all would-be faithful Catholics on the scene — and calculated to impress the Dutch and English sojourners in Hirado, merchant-pirates who preyed on Iberian shipping and oftentimes traduced Catholics preserving the Faith underground. Thirteen Dutch and English vessels lay in harbor at Hirado on 15 September 1622, the day appointed for the Shogun’s spectacle: a large audience was thus guaranteed for Hidetada’s perverse display of shogunal justice.
When the ministers of death came for Fr. Costanzo, he greeted them with a broad smile and such graciousness as to astonish them, and before setting off, he thanked his jailers courteously. Gonroku, Governor of Nagasaki, had sent an officer to witness the execution in his name; Fr. Camillo bowed to the man, thanked him for coming, and offered his sympathy for causing him to do this unfortunate duty. Gonroku’s officer was struck dumb.
About 100 paces from the shore at Tabira, facing Hirado Island from across a narrow strait, lay the death-ground, bamboo-fenced and stocked with firewood. Beyond the opposite shore, Hirado’s citadel stood out on its mountaintop. A huge crowd had come to observe the execution, both Japanese — some of them underground Catholics — and European Protestants steeped in hatred of the Catholic Faith, a legacy handed down by their fathers. Here was the perfect battleground for this Ignatian soldier’s one-man assault on the devil’s citadel of lies: a patch of soil ordained to taste his blood and his ashes, a pulpit built as if by Almighty God Himself to confirm the believers in their faith and disabuse the haters of those lies they had suckled on. Fr. Camillo covered that hundred paces like a runner bursting with a message of victory, a dispatch in three tongues.
Once inside the fence, he announced,
My name is Camillo Costanzo. I am a religious of the Society of Jesus and of Italian nationality, condemned to the fire for having preached the Christian Faith. I ask the spectators to remember this.
As the executioners tied Fr. Camillo to his stake, he began preaching with an extraordinary fervor — in Japanese first, and then in Portuguese and Flemish — a homily on Matthew 10:28, Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. The executioners lit the firewood, but the Jesuit preached on, his voice piercing the smoke and flame. In the midst of the inferno he finished his homily before crying out,
The sects of the Bonzes [Buddhist priests] are only dreams and fictions to divert men from the right path of their salvation.
Thick smoke covered him as if to banish his words, words pregnant with a truth that could pulverize the concreted myths of a millenium: but the smoke and flame parted like an opened curtain to reveal Fr. Costanzo praying as if unharmed. He sang out the Psalm Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes! to its end and then the Gloria before exclaiming three times in Japanese, “Oh, how well I am!” in apparent ecstasy.
But, like a lightning-quick, strangling python, a whirlwind of flame devoured Fr. Costanzo’s clothing, exposing his broiling skin as white as snow, and then he was charcoal-black.
This holocaust was over, it seemed, seared into countless human memories as if with a branding-iron. Some of the audience, stunned into circumspection, must have turned to go—when, from the midst of the fiery furnace, that glorious image of God named Camillo Costanzo, burnt black as cinder, sang out, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus! as boldly and beautifully as if he were at the Altar in the very court of Heaven raising a song of praise to the Lamb of God Himself, and the flames consuming his mortal flesh the merest kisses of a thousand angels. Only then did this scion of Calabria, the perfect incarnation of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s vision of the soldier of Christ, bow his head in death.
The spectators could barely keep their hearts in their chests: this priest had truly been a paragon of in persona Christi, miraculous proof of the Power of the Keys, of the Divine Wind proceeding from the mouth of the risen Jesus when he blew on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” a wind more powerful than all the hurricanes of every age rolled into one — a blow that extinguishes eternal death. None could have left that scene, that port to Eternal Life reduced now to choking smoke and glowing embers, unchanged.
Glory be to God in all His angels and saints—and especially in the person of Blessed Camillo Costanzo, S.J. on this 15th of September.
(This story, in a slightly different version, first appeared on Churchmilitant.com.)
Luke O’Hara lived 23 years in Japan, where his interest in the martyrs drew him into Holy Mother Church. He has never once looked back.
His articles and books can be found at his websites, kirishtan.com and lukeohara.com.