On 25 August 1624, five Catholic heroes faced hellish deaths for having brought Christ to the people of Japan. Burned at the stake in Ōmura, east of Nagasaki, were Father Miguel Carvalho, S.J., Fathers Luís Sotelo and Luís Sasada, Franciscans, Father Pedro Vázquez, Dominican, and Franciscan Brother Luís Baba.

     Padre Miguel Carvalho, the Jesuit, had entered Japan in 1622 on a Portuguese trading-ship, having disguised himself as a soldier. The three Franciscans had been sent from Japan as private ambassadors to King Philip III of Spain and the Vatican, only to be arrested on their return. Fray Pedro Vázquez, dauntless Dominican, had once risked death by disguising himself as a Japanese official to gain entry to Nagasaki’s prison, where he heard the confessions of Catholic prisoners bound for execution.

     A decade had passed since the fateful Anti-Christian Edict of  1614 exploded onto Japan on 14 February—ironically, Saint Valentine’s Day. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the retired-yet-reigning Shogun, on that day fettered Japan with a brutal regime of suppression worthy of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, a regime that his progeny would tighten with each new accession to the Shogunal throne. By 1624, every cleric in Japan was living on the scythe’s edge, daring a gruesome death; nevertheless, these men of God carried on.

     In July 1623, Father Carvalho had slipped into the Ōmura domain to hear the confessions of her underground Christians. Having done his heroic work, he was betrayed by a spy, arrested, and jammed into a hellhole of a prison where the four other servants of God already languished, awaiting martyrs’ deaths.

     Ōmura was the first domain in Japan where Catholicism took deep root; its ruler, Ōmura Sumitada, christened Bartolomeo, had embraced the Faith in 1563 and championed it, braving violent opposition and even a rebellion led by his anti-Catholic half-brother. Bartolomeo stood firm as a pillar of the Church unto his death in 1587.

     Bartolomeo’s progeny, however, did not prove so redoubtable: his son and heir apostatized in a fit of pique, and his son, christened Bartolomeo like his grandfather, was cowed into apostasy when the second Tokugawa Shogun fumed threats of dire consequences at him should he not rid his domain of that irking religion of truth and light. The cowed apostate started executing priests in May 1617; perhaps by the time Father Carvalho showed up in Ōmura, its ruler’s conscience was numb, inured to spilling holy martyrs’ blood.

     On 22 July 1623, Father Miguel Carvalho was thrown into a foul, stinking cell no bigger than a closet—“16 hand full long and 8 broad,” he wrote—with the four Christian stalwarts with whom he would die. It comforted him that his imprisonment began on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, his patroness, and that he had managed to convert two of his captors on his way to jail.

     Thirteen months the five faithful men endured an unendurable penance, awaiting the chance to prove to the downtrodden souls of Ōmura that Christ lives in His martyrs. That chance finally came on the feast day of the saintly King of France who had daily set beggars at his own table.

     August 25, 1624: the Feast of Saint Louis. The five condemned men of God were led to the execution-ground in Ōmura with ropes strung tight around their necks and their arms bound. Only their hands were free—free enough for each priest to walk clutching a cross on the way to his Calvary. The Palme of Christian Fortitude (Douai, 1630) relates their ordeal:

   They arrived at the place appointed for their death, a field called Hokonohara, when giving thanks unto those who had conducted them, … the Priests lifting on high the crosses which they bare in their hands, they began to recite psalms with a loud voice; when Father Carvalho, perceiving now a great multitude to be assembled, turning unto them, You must understand, said he, that we are Christians, and that we die of our free and voluntary accord, for the faith of Christ our Lord.  The admirable serenity of their countenances put their joy so clearly in view of the beholders, that amazed thereat they said, these men seemed to go rather to some feast or banquet, than unto death.

          The five men were loosely tied to their stakes in order that, flailing about in their agonies, they might provide amusement to the crowd: the loose cords would also burn away quickly, giving each victim the chance to flee the flames and apostatize.

          But not a man gave in. The first to die was Brother Luís Baba, the native Japanese catechist.  Freed by his burnt-away cords, he ran to the stakes of his priest-companions to kneel and kiss their hands, and

then exhorting with a loud voice the standers by to embrace the faith of Christ in which alone is true safety and salvation,  he returned generously unto the stake again, and leaning himself unto it, without any further tying … he endured, without ever moving himself, the fury of those flames, until at length he rendered his invincible soul to God.

          The next to die was Father Carvalho, and then Father Luís Sasada, a native-born Japanese who tried, like his countryman Luís Baba, to leave his stake and do reverence to the surviving priests. He could not move his feet, though, for they were burnt to cinders. The longest survivors were Fathers Luís Sotelo and Pedro Vázquez, who endured the torment of a slow, smoky fire of straw “and other dry litter” to choke them and cook them slowly, torturously—to effect their apostasies. Yet they hung on

3 hours in the fire, ever immovable, consuming away in lingering slow flames; after which space of time they ended the course of a combat so much [the] more glorious, as it was produced longer, upon the twenty-fifth of August 1624, by order of the Governors of Ōmura and Nagasaki.

          Five shining examples of faith, five luminaries to strengthen us from Heaven.  

 ***

            Luke O’Hara became a Roman Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.

Saint James the Greater by Guido Reni, ca. 1636-1638

          Today, July 25, is the Feast of Saint James the Greater, the first of Christ’s Apostles to suffer martyrdom. He and his brother Saint John the Beloved were nicknamed “Sons of Thunder” by Jesus for their audacious faith and desire for glory.

          Perhaps it was audacious, thunderous preaching of the Word of God from out of the mouth of Saint James, that Son of Thunder, that drove King Herod Agrippa to order his beheading in A.D. 44—a year that also saw the death of Herod himself while he was on a visit to Caesarea. Saint Luke tells us in Acts of the Apostles:

          On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat on the platform, and delivered a public address to them [i.e. the people of Tyre and Sidon]. The people kept shouting, “The voice of a god, and not of a mortal!” And immediately, because he had not given the glory to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.                                                                                                                 Acts 12:21-23 (NRSV)

          A fitting recompense for taking the life of a chosen Apostle of Christ—yet the voice of that Son of Thunder is eternally alive in his epistle, tempered and honed to perfection.

          My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.

                                                       James 1:2-4 (NRSV)

          I think this is the soul of martyrdom: a perfected joy, mature and complete, that steels a believer even in the very jaws of the lion.

(アントニオ石原孫右衛門)

Antonio Ishihara Magōemon:

Warrior of Bizen, Merchant of Sanuki, and Faithful Samurai of Christ

July 16, 1617

 

                                               Ikoma Masatoshi

        It all started with a lust for vengeance burning in the heart of a certain man of Sanuki who had been the loser in a certain lawsuit. Digging for dirt with which to destroy the victor, he heard that his opponent was harboring a Christian uncle in his home and reported this to the Daimyō of Sanuki, Ikoma Masatoshi. The uncle slipped away discreetly, unscathed, but the unsubstantiated charge sparked a roundup of Christians in Ikoma’s domain—a roundup that turned up several faithful Catholics, none of whom was willing to deny the Faith.

       Seven or eight of these Ikoma exiled from his domain, thus ridding his hands of them—perhaps they were peasants, inconsequential men living hand-to-mouth. But then there was the man named Ishihara Magōemon: a man of means, a warrior-turned-merchant who was also a faithful Kirishitan christened Antonio.

            Antonio Ishihara Magōemon had served as a samurai of Bizen until the autumn of 1600, when the dynasty of the Tokugawa Shōguns was set in stone by Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory over the Western forces at the battle of Sekigahara on 21 October of that year. Antonio would probably have served the Daimyō of Bizen, Ukita Hideie, on the Western side—the losing side—until that day, after which he would have found himself cut loose from both his erstwhile earthly lord and his living.

            With samurai grit he rebuilt his life, becoming a successful merchant in the province of Sanuki on the island of Shikoku, most likely in the town of Takamatsu, a short sail from Bizen across the Seto Inland Sea. That is where he met his faithful end on 16 July 1617, offering his neck to the executioner’s sword rather than mouth the words of apostasy that both friends and foes were urgently demanding of him.

            In 1616, Antonio had traveled to the province of Harima, just east of Bizen, on the trail of a certain priest, presumably traveling incognito, who had come to Sanuki to minister to its Catholic faithful but had somehow missed Antonio. Catching up with this intrepid missionary, Antonio confessed his sins and received not only Christ’s absolution, but also a cornucopia of Christian teaching from out of the mouth of this man who was living on the very sword’s edge of death to fulfill his vows to Christ. Antonio then returned to Sanuki afire with the Spirit and began to live his faith openly and boldly, indifferent to the Shōgun’s ban on Christianity. On Sundays, he opened his home to his fellow-Catholics for prayer, discussion and spiritual reading.

       Then the roundup: when the Daimyō’s men came sniffing around for Christians, one or more of Antonio’s neighbors, terrified to have an openly-practicing Kirishitan in their midst, reported his faithful love of God and neighbor to them. At that report, Ikoma, the Daimyō, exploded with rage, ordered the good man’s arrest, and confiscated all his property.

       In his imprisonment, Antonio was deluged with pleas from his friends, both pagan and Christian, that he make a merely-outward show of recantation in order to appease the Daimyō’s anger and thereby save not merely his own life, but those of his wife and children too, not to mention his confiscated property. Antonio replied that he would obey his lord the Daimyō in everything, even give his life for him—but that he could not betray Christ. He then requested that he be crucified for being Christian. On hearing this, Ikoma fumed that he would kill Antonio with his own sword and leave his corpse to be chopped to pieces by his men. News of this death-sentence filled Antonio with joy, and he called his entire household to the jail—he had that privilege, for he was samurai—to beg forgiveness for any offence he may have given any of them.

       With nightfall, Ikoma’s men came to take Antonio to his death and led him out of prison with his hands bound tight behind him. When a friend of his complained to the guards that it was unbefitting a samurai to be so handled, Antonio assured them that all was good and well. “It suits me to go thus, sirs,” he said, “since I did not merit being crucified as I requested and desired—for my Lord Jesus Christ was bound.” He then went on to thank them profusely for the good they were doing him.

       As Ikoma’s men led Antonio down the dark road to the execution-ground with torches lit, he prayed aloud, preached Christ to his captors, and urged some Christians who were following along to go home before any harm should come to them. Reaching the execution-ground, he fell to his knees and recited the Confiteor aloud. Next he prayed some final prayers, called the names of Jesus and His Mother, and bent his head to receive the executioner’s sword. The slash did not come, however: instead, one of the executioners begged the stout Christian to reconsider, promising to make peace between Ikoma, the Daimyō, and Antonio, if only he would feign apostasy—just a simple word…

       “The law of the Christians is not one that suffers such deceptions and embellishments,” Antonio proclaimed, firmly planted on his knees and awaiting his glorious end. He then declared to his reluctant executioners that he could already see his eternal crown.

       Dazzled by that vision, Antonio implored all within earshot to study the Faith. Next, he turned to one man who had apostatized out of fear and urged him to repent. Finally, before bending his head to receive the fatal slash, he asked a friend to bury him as a Christian, and only then did he signal the swordsman. Thus, there on his knees on the soil of Takamatsu, that town perched at the edge of the shimmering Seto Inland Sea in the benighted province of Sanuki, Antonio Ishihara Magōemon baptized the island of Shikoku with his sacred lifeblood.

     Behold the Daimyō’s proclamation, inscribed on a placard put on public display along with the Martyr’s severed head:

      This man was killed by order of Sanuki-dono for being Christian against the law of the Tenka [i.e. the Shōgun] on the 14^th day of the 6^th month in the 3^rd year of Genna [i.e. 16 July 1617].

      The third year of Genna, literally “original Japan”: an imperial-era name redolent of retrogression, of what Japan was meant to be—according, at least, to the Shogunal dynasty so cruelly committed to extirpating Christ. Yet Ikoma, the Daimyō, so intent on proving his fealty to the Shōgun by this gruesome display, had with his inscription conjured up an echo of Pontius Pilate’s own placard reading:

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

     An echo shimmering in every precious drop of that sacrificial Christian blood poured out as a testament of Christ among us, victorious in death.

Sources:

1.  Pedro Morejón, Historia y Relacion de lo sucedido en los Reinos de Japon y China, en la qual se continua la gran persecucion que ha avido en aq̃lla Iglesia, desde el año de 615. hasta el de 19. Por el Padre Pedro Morejon de la Compañia de Iesus, Procurador de la Prouincia de Iapon, natural de Medina del Campo. (Lisboa: Rodriguez, 1621)

2. Webpage:  ここに立つ教会　at:     http://ch.febcjp.com/2017/10/10/resp171010_00/

3. Webpage:　讃岐の殉教者　アントニオ石原孫右衛門親子　at: http://www.sakuramachi.catholic.ne.jp/martyrs/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0bUVIUhlLxhsP1hhrgnNzhzbUMOZj8RFdWWzxlIPJF3hy1hwTa0CDB88w

 

 Copyright 2019 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toyotomi Hideyoshi

• Photo: Public Domain (PD-Japan)

 “I do not want this religion:  a religion of love and union, which is therefore harmful for this kingdom.”   

                                                                        The Taikō Hideyoshi

On February 5, 1597, twenty-six bloodied men and boys were crucified on a mountain overlooking Nagasaki Bay for the crime of being Christian. For twenty-eight days they had been marched through towns and villages and countryside, being spat upon and ridiculed and otherwise abused along the way to their destination, Nagasaki, at the westernmost edge of Japan—for the Christian town of Nagasaki was, in the dictator Hideyoshi’s eyes, the perfect place to make a show of his power.

Hideyoshi had proscribed the Faith a decade earlier, perhaps in the merest fit of pique—fueled by drunkenness—and had ordered all clergy, or bateren, out of Japan. Unwilling to abandon their flocks, however, most of the clergy in the country had stayed on at the risk of their lives and gone incognito, abandoning the Jesuit habit to wear the ordinary Japanese clothing of the day.

They knew the ruler well—Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the Taikō, the Retired Imperial Regent—and they knew that he needed the good offices of the Jesuit clergy in Japan to smooth his acquisition of Chinese silk and European guns from the Portuguese traders who brought those goods to Nagasaki from Canton and beyond. Treading on this uncertain ground, the incognito Jesuits went on pastoring their flocks discreetly, striving to save their parishioners’ immortal souls while keeping their own heads down and making no blatant displays of their presence that might light the fuse of Hideyoshi’s volatile temper.

The fateful spark, however, was bound to come sooner or later. It came on October 19, 1596, when the San Felipe—a Mexico-bound Spanish galleon laden with rich Chinese silks—limped into the Japanese port of Urado after having been blown off course by a typhoon. The local daimyō (feudal lord), feigning helpfulness, had the ship towed into his harbor and right onto a sand-bar, which broke the ship’s back and converted her into a shipwreck. Now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit, or so the daimyō told the Spaniards, and he quickly sent word to Hideyoshi, from whom he could expect a rich reward in the divvying-up of the spoils.

 The Spanish captain dispatched an embassy of two Franciscan friars and two of his crewmen to Ōsaka, the Taikō‘s capital, to save his cargo, but such an embassy could be embarrassing for Hideyoshi: he had already claimed the cargo for himself. He therefore engineered an interrogation of the ship’s pilot at the hands of a clever underling: Hideyoshi’s man construed a “confession” that the friars were the vanguards of Spanish conquest; this gave Hideyoshi an excuse to explode with rage and in his fury order the round-up and crucifixion of all Franciscans in his captive realm. In the event, his zealous men netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and fifteen Catholic laymen. (Two more martyrs would be added to their number later on.) Hideyoshi ordered their ears and noses cut off; next they were to be paraded around the cities of Kyōto, Ōsaka and Sakai in carts, and thereafter marched eight hundred kilometers to Nagasaki, there to be crucified. A sympathetic official in Kyōto intervened: only their left earlobes were cut off, but the rest of the sentence would be carried out in full.

The Twenty-Six Martyrs had started their death-march on the tenth of January, 1597. The youngest of the martyrs was twelve, the oldest sixty-four. Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki laughed when they clipped his ear, and thereafter he marched along jauntily toward Nagasaki. On their wintry road to Calvary, Thomas Kozaki, fourteen, wrote to his mother, “You should not worry about me and my father Michael”—his father was marching with him to be crucified—“I hope to see you both very soon, there in Paradise,” he explained.¹

At one point in their trek, the guards grabbed Peter Sukejiro, a young believer accompanying the martyrs, robbed him of everything he had with him and threw him in with them, thus sentencing him to death on their own authority. Rather than protest, Peter merely remarked, “Seeing that we all have to die anyway, it’s better to die for the Faith,” ² thus proving his own fitness for martyrdom.

 The martyrs’ last night on earth was miserable: it was a bitterly frosty night and they must have prayed and shivered all night long, since they were hunched together in open boats offshore of Togitsu, a Christian village north of Nagasaki, with musket-men guarding the shoreline. Hideyoshi’s sheriff, afraid of Christian violence, would not take the risk of putting them under a Christian roof for the night, as if he had something to fear from that “religion of love and union” that Hideyoshi had proscribed.

On the Fifth of February the martyrs were marshaled to their feet at dawn and marched double-time toward Nishi-zaka, the mountain slope atop which they would die; it would be a twelve-kilometer marathon. The local Christians lined the roadside in silent reverence watching them pass, breathing not a whisper of hostility. From time to time Jesuit Brother Paul Miki exclaimed, “Today is Easter Sunday for me! The Lord has shown me such mercy!” as he climbed toward his Calvary.³ The martyrs arrived there at half-past nine in the morning: just about the time Our Lord was crucified.

   Up on their crosses the Twenty-Six awaited the coup de graçe that would end their Japanese-style crucifixions: twin spear-thrusts from below, into their left and right sides and upward through their hearts and out their shoulders. The false charges laid against them were painted on a placard stood in front of the row of crosses for all to see, but all of Nagasaki knew that they had been condemned merely for the crime of being Christian. Paul Miki spent his last minutes preaching, just as he had been doing all the length of their grueling march to Nishi-zaka, proclaiming to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians blanketing the hillside below, “I greatly rejoice to die for this cause!”

St. Paul Miki crucified
by Antonio Cardim, Elogios, 1650

When the soldiers unsheathed their spears, the crucified martyrs and the crowd all started shouting in one voice, “Jesus!  Mary!” This holy cry resounded again and again until every last martyr’s heart was pierced; it resounded among the hills of Nagasaki, across the waters of the bay, and through the rigging of the ships from halfway round the world that lay in Nagasaki Bay tethered to their moorings, their crewmen watching transfixed by the spectacle above, as if it were they themselves and their holy Faith whose hearts were being pierced.

Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki had long been prepared for this moment. At the start of their journey, the martyrs had been paraded in oxcarts around Hideyoshi’s capital of Ōsaka and around nearby Sakai, the mercantile center of Japan; standing in one of those oxcarts the three youngest boys had brightly sung the Our Father and the Hail Mary as their just-clipped ears poured blood. Now, raised on their crosses, the three sang a Psalm—Praise the Lord, O ye children, praise ye His Holy Name. Louis alone among the Twenty-Six was there entirely by personal choice, for he had been offered his life by Hanzaburō, the sheriff in charge of the execution, on condition that he give up the Faith.

Louis didn’t hesitate; his answer was swift and clear: “I do not want to live on that condition, for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes.” ⁴ — a holy precocity reminiscent of Our Lord at age twelve in the Temple, “Sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at His understanding and His answers.” ⁵

In that same spirit, on the Fifth of February in the Year of Our Lord 1597, atop that slope called Nishi-zaka that overlooked wholly-Catholic Nagasaki and its perfect harbor, the boy-Saint Louis Ibaraki shouted words that would carry his blessing to the ears and hearts of all the listening world, before the soldiers gouged their spears into his sides and up through his twelve-year-old heart:  “Paradise!  Paradise!” he shouted, struggling toward Heaven, “Jesus!  Mary!”

 Martyrdom of Paul Miki S.J., Jacob Kisai S.J., John Goto S.J. and

P. Petrus Battista. Engraving, 1667, after A. van Diepenbeeck.

Source: Wellcome Collection, London

 

_______

¹ Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki  (Tokyo, Enderle, 1998), 55.

² Yuuki, 56.

³ Yuuki, 70.

⁴ Yuuki, 60.

⁵ Luke 2:46b-47 (New American Bible, Revised Edition)

    It was the first of June, Octave of Corpus Christi, in the Year of Our Lord 1617. On the virgin soil of an offshore islet in Ōmura Bay, three brothers in faith were on their knees awaiting the executioner’s blade. Two were foreign priests, the other a Japanese Catholic layman.

     The layman, surnamed Tanaka, had been christened Leo at his baptism. Leo Tanaka had lately been laboring as assistant and host to Padre João Machado, a Jesuit martyred just ten days before on the orders of Ōmura Sumiyori, the apostate daimyō of the Ōmura domain. This ruler of tens of thousands of Catholics, christened ‘Bartolomeo’ like his grandfather before him, had by his apostasy besmirched the very name by which his heroic grandfather had planted the Faith in Ōmura and defended it at great peril against the frenzied opposition of zealous enemies of Christ.

     Now that frenzy ruled all Japan. Under the heel of the Shōgun Hidetada, every visible manifestation of the Faith that Saint Francis Xavier had brought to Japan sixty-eight years earlier was now being stamped to bloody pulp and ground into the dust. To his private horror, Sumiyori, the erstwhile Bartolomeo, must partake in this holocaust lest he provoke the Shōgun’s lethal displeasure.

      On the Japanese Lunar New Year of 1617, Sumiyori had visited the Shōgun Hidetada at his palace in Edo to make his obligatory annual show of obeisance. Bartolomeo Ōmura Sumiyori was a third-generation Catholic. His grandfather, the great Bartolomeo Ōmura Sumitada, had been the first daimyō in Japan to receive baptism. This first Bartolomeo of Ōmura had championed Christ at risk of his domain, his fortune, and his life, facing treason and rebellion because of his conversion, and he had maintained the Faith unto death in spite of all that hell could throw at him. His son, though, christened Sancho, had thrown away the Faith in a fit of pique, and his son, the benighted grandson christened Bartolomeo, had been a faithful Catholic all his life—until that wrenching visit to the Shōgun’s palace in February of 1617. There, having avowed to the Shōgun Hidetada that he had expelled all Catholic priests from his domain, Bartolomeo Ōmura Sumiyori was confronted with reports from Nagasaki to the effect that he was in fact conniving at the continued presence of priests in Ōmura. The shaken daimyō, kowtowing to the lethal pressure of the Shōgun’s will, submitted to the ruler’s orders: he would hunt down and execute some Catholic priests in a bloody display of fealty to his Christ-hating earthly lord.

     On May 22, 1617, Sumiyori made his demonstration with the double beheading of Jesuit Father João Machado and Franciscan Friar Pedro de la Asunción atop a hill named Kōri just north of his castle. By this one blood sacrifice of his own Catholic conscience, Sumiyori intended to frighten all Christian missionaries out of his domain and thereby prove his fealty to the Shōgun once and for all. Contrary to the apostate former-Bartolomeo’s expectations, though, the killing of those two priests aroused fervor among the Catholics of Ōmura and its environs, a fervor that would culminate in a holy tsunami of faith, hope, and death-conquering love sweeping over nearby Nagasaki to flood back into Ōmura and engulf the traitorous apostate in the backwash of his sin.

     Let us behold that victory of Eternal Life over merely-mortal death. When news of that double martyrdom in Ōmura reached Nagasaki, the cradle of Japanese Christendom, Friars Alfonso Navarrete, Dominican, and Hernando de San José, Augustinian, met to confer on an inspiration stirring both their hearts. They concurred that there was only one course of action that could satisfy their Christian consciences: they must strike out for Ōmura and there preach the Gospel far and wide to bring back into the Church the many apostates who had succumbed to the pressures of the Shōgun’s persecution. Next they would try to win the apostate Daimyō of Ōmura’s soul back to Christ; that failing, they would render up their own souls to God by handing their bodies over to martyrdom. Having vowed to carry out this mission, the two priests pledged obedience to one another. Father Navarrete then met with his Dominican brethren in Nagasaki to announce his decision; he also appointed a successor to replace him as the Dominican Provincial in Japan. Father Hernando, the sole Augustinian in Japan, wrote to his brethren in Manila, urging them to send more laborers into the harvest.

      Japan was now in its third year of an absolute, empire-wide ban on Christianity that would extend for the next two and a half centuries and beyond. Public worship had not been risked since the early days of 1614, with all priests hiding underground or going incognito, saying Mass only in secret lest they be delivered up to the authorities for imprisonment and inevitable execution. Nevertheless, a mere three days after that double martyrdom in Ōmura, Father Alfonso Navarrete and Father Hernando de San José marched out to the city gate of Nagasaki, set up a makeshift altar, and said Mass before a crowd of thousands. Penitent Christians flocked to the front of the crowd, falling to their knees to confess their sins sacramentally. Many couples who, robbed of their pastors, had been living in common-law marriages, came to partake of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Faithful Christians long starved of the Bread of Life found their souls’ hunger fulfilled in the Eucharist.

     The next day—Friday, May 26—the two priests set out for the Ōmura domain. Their first stop was Ikiriki, a farming village nestled in the verdant hills overlooking the southwestern shore of Ōmura Bay. These sun-blessed hills produce luscious crops of mandarin oranges, a sanative God-given, perhaps, to counter the deathly gloom that had settled on the daimyō’s castle on the opposite shore. At Ikiriki, Fathers Alfonso and Hernando restored 300 apostates to communion with the Church; among these was Lino Tomonaga, the very sheriff who, feigning a desire to confess his sins, had lured the recently-martyred Friar Pedro de la Asunción into a trap and arrested him.

      On Sunday the two priests set up an altar outdoors and said Mass before a multitude. Friar Hernando preached his homily “with great zeal,”¹ and afterwards both men taught the crowd from Friar Luis de Granada’s Sinner’s Guide. From Ikiriki they moved on to Nagayo, where they said their final public Mass before a crowd starved of the Sacraments and hungering for the Bread of Life. In the night, under the twinkling vault of Heaven, came a cloud of flickering lights crawling across the bay from the apostate former-Bartlomeo’s castle: boats full of men with flaming torches, underlings sent by that Judas to do his dirty work—to tear the two Heaven-sent shepherds away from their forlorn lambs. At the sight of the approaching horde, the priests intoned the Te Deum, a hymn of welcome to their coming Passion.

      Once arrived on shore, their captors, all baptized-but-fallen Catholics, fell to their knees with faces and palms to the earth in grave bows of shame and apology. The priests presented gifts to these men, a custom congruent with a visit to a patron of high degree. For the wretched apostate daimyō to whom their lives and fortunes would soon be delivered, however, their only gift was a letter to be put into his hand on their arrival on the far shore: a plea not for their lives, but for his return to sanity—a warning and instruction that he, a baptized Catholic, was most certainly bound for hell should he not repent of his recent, barbaric crime, restore his own soul to the Faith, and free his subjects to do the same.

      When these two faithful priests arrived at the apostate lord of Ōmura’s castle on the southeastern shore of the bay, he charged them with crimes against the dictates of the bloodthirsty Shōgun up in Edo. In reply, Father Navarrete explained—as if a baptized, born-and-raised Catholic lord should need such basic schooling—that he acknowledged the reign of the Emperor of Heaven above the throne of any earthly king. Silenced by that insurmountable truth, Ōmura Sumiyori had his captives thrown in jail while he hunkered down with his council of advisors to mull over his options. Certainly the thought of returning to Christ, whatever the earthly consequences, must have entered his head. In the end, though, the formerly-Catholic ex-Bartolomeo could not find within his harried soul the grit to scale that Everest of truth from whose summit he would assuredly view Beatitude in aeternam. Instead, he surrendered to the crushing gloom that had descended on his soul, his castle and his state, a slavering leviathan whose taste for Christian souls would not be quenched by any head-count of priests or brothers or catechists or simple children of the Faith.

     He would kill the priests along with that irksomely-faithful Catholic Leo Tanaka, the lay churchman who had been languishing in Ōmura’s jail ever since the prison guards gave in to his pleas that he be thrown into that stinking hell to join his pastor, Father João Machado. Machado, the Jesuit, Sumiyori had beheaded along with a Franciscan named Friar Pedro; he had hoped that those killings would end all this trouble. How very naïve he had been; perhaps he had never heard that axiom about the blood of martyrs being the seed of the Faith, or perhaps he had never really believed it. Perhaps he simply had never believed. At any rate, after three days his orders went out, along with minute instructions as to how the appointed place of death was to be shrouded from the public eye.

      The three faithful servants of Sumiyori’s former God would be spirited out of his prison at the edge of his castle-town, slipped into a boat, and shunted from islet to islet in a furtive, zigzag pilgrimage across Ōmura Bay, a frantic wriggle to shake off the clinging believers, the proscribed Catholic faithful who nevertheless showed up at every landfall to hear a word of healing, to beg a final blessing, to wring out rushed confessions from their long-tortured souls. For their land itself, the very womb from which had sprung Christian Nagasaki, was in the mighty Shōgun’s vise, and all Heaven’s ears would be witness to the shrieks of those souls abandoned to its iron teeth by their ruler’s treason. Among these were the ex-Bartolomeo’s own grandmother and aunt.

     On their furtive voyage to martyrdom, the two priests managed to write letters of instruction and encouragement to the brethren they would leave behind, pleading for unity among the Catholic religious orders struggling to keep the Faith alive beneath the Shōgun’s heel. Father Navarrete urged his soulmate in Nagasaki, Paolo Garrucho de la Vega, to keep up the work closest to his heart, the saving of abandoned babies.²

      Finally, arrived at the last stop—an islet called Takashima—the condemned men thanked their executioners with affection and offered them the sakazuki, a farewell drink, having saved some good wine made for Mass for this glorious farewell.³ Leo Tanaka, meanwhile, had been joined to their party on the third islet in their pilgrimage to eternal life via blessed death. Their time was at hand, the fullness of God-given time in their meager tents of flesh: now to kneel on that virgin soil appointed to be baptized with their blood.

      The three fell to their knees with Father Navarrete in the middle, a crucifix in one hand and a candle in the other. Friar Hernando, to his right, held a candle and a rosary, as did faithful layman Leo Tanaka, on the left. Thus: three witnesses, three lights, two rosaries, with Christ crucified in the center.

     The first head to fall was Friar Hernando de San José’s. He requested permission to touch the headsman’s sword; taking the blade into his hand, he kissed it and blessed it with these words: “Our death is a living epistle that will go to Spain and Rome to awaken other evangelical laborers.”⁴ That blade took off his head in one perfect slash.

     Father Navarrete was next. At the first cut, the sword merely bit into his neck to reach his ears: the dauntless priest rose to his feet and looked up to regard the heavens. Perhaps he was granted a glimpse of the eternal home prepared for him. On his knees once more, he felt the sword’s bite a second time, but still his stubborn tent of flesh clung to life and breath. Only with a third, reluctant slash did the swordsman finally find his mark and send Alfonso Navarrete home.

     Now Leo Tanaka, so long prepared for death, found himself alone. He thought himself unworthy to die with the two heroic Fathers whose heads now lay on the earth before him, their headless corpses just to his right, seeding the land with holy martyrs’ blood—but this, after all, was ordained. Humbly Leo bowed his head to add his own lifeblood to that Faith-seeding stream: he joined his brethren on the second slash of the sword.

     On their hurried voyage to martyrdom, the two priests had written pleas for Christian unity in Japan. In death their prayer was answered by a sign: the coffins of the priests martyred ten days earlier were opened, and Father Navarrete’s body was put in with the beheaded corpse of Father João Machado; Friar Hernando was united with Friar Pedro de la Asunción. Thus, four religious orders united in death: Dominican, Jesuit, Augustinian, and Franciscan.

     Their two coffins were weighted with stones and furtively sunk into the sea: perhaps the apostate lord of Ōmura feared the power of relics as much as he did the Truth those living witnesses had preached to him. Even Leo Tanaka’s remains he had whisked away to be sunk into the same waters, wrapped in a net and also charged with stones.

     The Faith, however, did not sink into oblivion with those stones. Indeed, her seeds were germinating far and wide: in Ōmura and Nagasaki, in Urakami, Sotome, and the Gotō Islands, in Shimabara and Amakusa—a far-flung seedbed of heroic souls hidden from all but God’s all-seeing eyes, reaching for Heaven, groping for the Light, ready to burst through that soil stamped hard and dull beneath the Shōgun’s heel.

Copyright © 2019 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

Father Marcello Mastrilli, S.J. is a martyr credited in his lifetime with countless miracles, an intrepid warrior for Christ whose dream was to convert the Emperor of Japan to the Faith or die martyred as a testimony to its absolute truth. Twice he testified to that truth with his lifeblood, first on a parchment signed in his own blood and placed in the hand of Saint Francis Xavier’s corpse in its sepulchre at Goa, India. His second and final blood testament was his voluntary death by torture in Nagasaki, the fulfillment of his longing to atone for the apostasy of a fellow Jesuit who had preceded him to Japan.

Marcello Mastrilli was born in Naples on 14 September 1603, the son of the Marquis of San Marzano. Although born into a life of aristocratic privilege, at age 14 Marcello recognized his calling to religious vocation and announced this to his parents. Despite his father’s opposition, the determined Marcello left home in 1618 and entered the Jesuit novitiate at Naples. Soon thereafter he had a vision of Heaven opening and instantaneously understood his life’s purpose: a mission to the Indies. In that same instant, he was infused with a love for Christ that he knew he must live out by suffering for Him. [1] During his years of novitiate, he was often visited by apparitions of Saint Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the Indies, in the form of a horseman dressed in white.

On 11 December 1633 a workman was hanging draperies in the Cardinal’s palace at Naples for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception when he dropped a hammer from a great height; it hit Fr. Mastrillii’s right temple.  The priest fell into delirium and lingered on the edge of death for ten days. On the 21st he was visited by yet another apparition of that friend of his in Heaven, who led him through a series of prayers and vows, finally declaring, “You are healed: kiss in thanksgiving the sacred wounds of the Crucifix.” [2]

And healed he was, restored to perfect health. [3]

Although the news had not yet reached Catholic Europe, on October 18th of that same year, the Jesuit Provincial in Japan had apostatized under torture at Nagasaki. This man, Christovão Ferreira, had given in after five hours’ hanging in “the pit”—perhaps the most horrible torture ever devised by man. When the disconcerting news did finally arrive, many European Jesuits came forward to volunteer themselves for an atoning mission to Japan, hoping to die there as martyrs. Father Mastrilli was chosen as the mission’s superior, with good reason: he had earlier asked the Father General of the Society of Jesus for permission to go to the Indies to convert souls, whereupon the Father General responded that he need not ask him for the permission that Saint Francis Xavier—in apparition—had already given him.

The mission left Lisbon on Holy Saturday, 7 April 1635. Forty religious were originally to have left for Japan, but, “due to the parsimony of the Royal Treasury” of Philip IV, only 33 embarked.[4] On 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, they reached Goa, the capital of Portuguese India. There they learned of the martyrdom in Japan of twenty-four Jesuits the preceding year.

In Goa, Father Marcello spent many hours praying at St Francis Xavier’s tomb; he had it opened and the Saint’s corpse dressed in a “magnificent chasuble” donated by the Spanish Crown. He also got leave from the Provincial to take relics from the body—a handkerchief soaked in Francis Xavier’s blood and a little box containing a relic of his flesh—and left in the Saint’s hand a letter signed in his own blood. [5]

From Goa the mission sailed to Macau—the Portuguese base in East Asia—hoping to proceed onward to Japan, but they found there that no Japan-bound Portuguese ship would take a priest aboard. For fear of cutting Macao’s economic lifeline—the Japan silk trade—and of putting all Portuguese in Nagasaki at risk of capital punishment by the Shōgun’s deputies, the clerical authorities in Macao had banned the smuggling of clergy into Japan on pain of excommunication. [6] The Jesuits sailed on to Manila to try their luck there, arriving on 3 July. The Governor of the Philippines, Don Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, was enthusiastic about their intended mission to Japan, but the Spanish populace opposed the plan for fear of the mass slaughter of clergy that it would almost certainly entail; they dissuaded Father Mastrilli’s companions from accompanying him, and all but he returned to Macau.

His companions gone, Father Mastrilli accompanied Governor Hurtado de Corcuera on an expedition against the Mindanao pirates. The Spanish forces flew two standards: an image of Saint Francis Xavier and an image of Christ crucified that had been rescued from the pirates’ hands. During the battle Father Marcello was struck on the flank by a cannonball; it bounced off him, leaving him unharmed. In the end the Spaniards achieved a resounding victory—which they attributed to the power of Saint Francis Xavier and Father Mastrilli’s intercession. [7]

With that victory sealed, Father Mastrilli joined the Japanese exile community in the Philippines and devoted himself to learning their language. He also procured their services in building him a boat of Japanese design in which he planned to slip into Japan in Japanese guise; many of the Japanese exiles insisted on going with him. A Chinese ship carried Father Mastrilli, his companions, and their boat to Macau, where the Governor became their secret ally: he pardoned a certain ship’s pilot condemned to death for transporting a Dominican Friar to Japan on condition that he carry Father Mastrilli’s mission to Japan. Embarking on a Spanish ship that would carry them and their landing craft to Japanese waters, they met with numerous vicissitudes along the way, including a fierce storm off Formosa. Father Mastrilli is reported to have calmed the storm by making the Sign of the Cross over the sea with his reliquary containing a relic of Saint Francis Xavier. [8]

Once lowered onto the waves, the little vessel [9] carrying Father Mastrilli and his companions struck out for shore, making land at Satsuma on 19 September. He entered Japan with one Japanese companion and was immediately discovered, but he bribed his discoverer and set off inland; as their boat lay offshore, all his other Japanese companions were recognized as Christians and seized. Eventually they confessed that they had sailed with Father Mastrilli, which information sparked a frenzied search of the countryside for the intrepid priest. After several days he was discovered, his captors led to him by the smoke of his campfire. When they arrived he told them, “My sons, come and seize me.”

Taken to Nagasaki, Father Mastrilli appeared before the Shōgun’s magistrates on 5 October 1637. When asked why he had come to Japan, he answered that he had come to speak to the Emperor, to restore him to health were he still alive, and to teach him the law of Jesus Christ.[10] (The “Emperor” of whom he spoke was in fact the Shōgun Iemitsu, who was thought to be afflicted with leprosy.[11]) He then told them that he had been sent as an ambassador by Saint Francis Xavier, whom the magistrates knew to have been long since dead, and he recounted to them the story of his miraculous healing by Xavier’s spirit.

Impressed though they were by their prisoner’s apparent sincerity and strength of character, the Nagasaki magistrates had to carry out the Shōgun’s law. To urge Father Mastrilli’s apostasy, they subjected him to the water torture for two days on end. The first day they used the funnel technique, wherein the victim has a funnel shoved into his mouth and great amounts of water poured into him so that water and blood come gushing out through the victim’s mouth, ears and nose. [12] The second day’s torture was more refined. A contemporary eyewitness, quoted by historian C. R. Boxer, describes this method:

“They tie the martyr down on a board, leaving his left hand free so that he can place it on his breast if he wishes to give a sign that he will recant. His head is left hanging down a little, and the torturers do not stop pouring great quantities of water on his face … The victims make such frantic efforts to breath[e] that they usually burst a blood-vessel.” [13]

Boxer tells us, “the record for enduring [this torture] is still that of the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit, Mastrilli, who is said to have withstood it for two days, and received four hundred jars of water on the second day alone.” [14]

Having been unshaken by the water torture, Father Mastrilli was returned to his prison cell, where he discovered that all his companions but one had apostatized; Andrew Koteda had died in the pit, holding out to the glorious end. [15] While interrogating the others, the magistrates gleaned information that Mastrilli had withheld from them; they interrogated him again, threatening direr torments. He told them to do their worst, adding, “My God will give me the strength to bear it.” [16]

Handed over to the torturers, he was stripped naked and subjected to scorching of his private parts with red-hot tongs. His modesty offended, he shamed the torturers for stooping to such vile torments; they put away their branding-iron and subjected him to the water-torture for a third time. [17] Although tortured to the edge of death, he still clung to his faith. [18]

Father Mastrilli was returned to his prison to recuperate for the final torture: he had been sentenced to die in the pit. Joyfully welcoming the bearer of his death-sentence, he prophesied that he would not die in the pit but would instead be beheaded. [19] It would prove to be his last night before the final horrors began. “He passed the rest of the night in an ecstasy accompanied by miracles,” reports Léon Pagès. [20]

At eleven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 14 October 1637, Father Mastrilli was led from his prison to the execution-ground atop the slope called Nishi-zaka that overlooked Nagasaki Bay. The Jesuits’ report on his martyrdom reads:

His mouth was gagged by an iron tongue with sharp, projecting points that prevented him from proclaiming our Holy Faith. Trussed with ropes and chains he was borne astride a horse. The right side of his head was totally shaven, while the left side was painted red, a token of extreme ignominy to the Japanese. [21]

Yet he was not jeered at by the crowd. Behind him was carried a banner proclaiming:

The Grand Shōgun, Emperor of Japan, orders this sentence to be inflicted on the person of this madman for coming to Japan to preach an alien religion contrary to the beliefs of Buddhism and Shintō, so that all others may learn from his punishment. [22]

And learn they did. When the “iron tongue” was removed from his mouth on that mountaintop killing-ground sanctified with countless martyrs’ blood, Father Mastrilli thanked the magistrates, who themselves had come to Nishi-zaka, and proclaimed to them, to the torturers, and in the hearing of all the crowd, the thousands of citizens of Nagasaki who had come to see this spectacle, “Now you shall know, Sirs, how great is the God whom we adore, and how precious the Paradise for which we hope.”[23]

This was the life-defining moment: from his youth Marcello Mastrilli had studied and labored and yearned precisely for this great and precious hour. The very proving-ground where Christovão Ferreira, his unhappy predecessor, had abandoned Christ, His Church, and the religious order called by His Name—the Society of Jesus—would be the stage upon which the integrity, truth, and power of that Name would shine forth in all its dazzling glory. Indeed, Ferreira’s own given name, Christovão, derived from the Greek Christophoros: “Bearing Christ.” Certainly, Mastrilli the scholar would have known that etymology and wrestled in his soul with its implications: he must bear the burden, the Cross, the honor and the glory of that Name into the darkness and horror of the Pit—bear the Name unflinching, unyielding, undaunted by the Pit’s dank, claustrophobic closeness, its unvented stench, its inferno of unrelenting, unendurable agonies that must be endured, that were his chosen path to Paradise, with no turning back short of apostasy. For Father Marcello’s apostasy would declaim the falsity and the madness of his “alien religion contrary to the beliefs of Buddhism and Shintō”; were he to break down after having proclaimed to all of Nagasaki—indeed, to all Creation—that his end would redound to the glory of his God and to his unshakable faith in that God’s promise of Heaven, then news of that breakdown, bruited far and wide, would gravely wound his already-brutalized religion and smear that spotless Name he bore into the Pit with the foul muck of cowardice, a fault unforgivable in martial-spirited Japan. Countless earthbound souls would indeed “learn from his punishment”—to the horror and dismay of all the onlooking souls up in Heaven.

Father Marcello, hands tied behind his back, was wrapped in coils of rope from his feet up to his chest and, hanging by his feet from a gallows, lowered head-down into the pit. Then the wooden lid—made in two halves, with cut-outs in the center to clamp and pinch the victim’s body—was closed on him. This method of “persuasion,” invented by Takenaka Uneme-no-Shō, [24] a former magistrate of Nagasaki, had proven more effective in procuring forced apostasies from Christians than had any other regime of torture. This was understandable, given its effects on the victim:

It felt like his head was going to explode; his mouth, nose and ears would soon start oozing blood. François Caron, the chief of the Dutch trading-post in Hirado, wrote, “This extremitie hath indeed … forced many to renounce their religion; and some of them who had hung two or three days assured me that the pains they endured were wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence.” [25]

Contrary to the executioners’ expectations, however, this Bateren, [26] this priest, neither squirmed nor groaned, but kept perfectly still. Thinking him prematurely dead, the executioners opened the lid; Father Mastrilli told them, “I desire nothing; I am in Paradise.” When the magistrates renewed their effort to tempt him to apostasy, he told them that the sun would reverse its course before his faith would fail. When the guards, perhaps to tempt him or perhaps out of real concern, asked him if he wanted water, he answered, “I want neither water nor anything else; only glory, glory!” [27]

Normally, when a Christian had been hung upside-down in the pit for an extended time, toxic blood would collect in his head, blood that must be vented by means of incisions on the temples lest he die too soon—for, after all, the magistrates wanted apostasy through torture, not death. Yet, after four days’ torture in the pit, Father Mastrilli showed none of the usual symptoms. Reports of this phenomenon alarmed the magistrates. One can guess their fears: perhaps the Paradise this dauntless Bateren had spoken of was real. Perhaps the people of Nagasaki, the guards and executioners included, were witnessing an ongoing miracle granted this Bateren by his foreign God, a sign that all others might indeed learn from—but a lesson prejudicial to “the Grand Shōgun, Emperor of Japan,” an incontrovertible sign of the truth of that “alien religion contrary to the beliefs of Buddhism and Shintō.” If so, then they must act, and fast. [28]

The magistrates ordered that the priest be beheaded at once. On hearing the news, Father Mastrilli was jubilant, as this was precisely the end he had predicted. After the executioners had pulled him from the pit, he knelt on the sacred earth atop Nishi-zaka and, invoking his patron in Heaven, “he cried out with great emotion, ‘Father Saint Francis Xavier, Father Saint Francis Xavier,’ words that were heard by the Portuguese who were present.” [29]

And heard, no doubt, by that friend of his in Heaven and all the heavenly host.

It took three slashes of the sword to sever his venerable head. Perhaps the swordsman, in the silence of his heart and in that Name the Bateren had borne into the pit, was shouting his own cry to Heaven as he raised his sword atop Nishi-zaka—whose earth, mixed with holy Martyrs’ blood, overlooked Christian Nagasaki and its sparkling bay, Japan’s door to the wider world.

Copyright © 2016 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

[1] Léon Pagès, Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu’à 1651. (Paris: Charles Douniol, 1869), 828, note.
[2] Pagès, 829.
[3] For interesting details on this apparition, see: Ines G. Županov, “Passage to India: Jesuit Spiritual Economy between Martyrdom and Profit in the Seventeenth Century” in Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. 16, Issue 2 (2012), pp 121-159.
[4] Pagès, 830.
[5] Pagès, 831.
[6] C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. (Lisbon: Carcanet, 1951), 369-370.
[7] Pagès, 832.
[8] Pagès, 833.
[9] A replacement for the boat the Japanese exiles had built; it had been found unsuitable.
[10] Pagès, 834.
[11] He may in fact have had smallpox. See Liam Matthew Brockey, The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia.  ( Cambridge, Mass:  Belknap Press, 2014), 405.
[12] Saint Magdalena of Nagasaki received that torture, described here: https://kirishtan.com/santa-magdalena-of-nagasaki-spouse-of-christ-martyr-and-one-of-gods-greatest-miracles/
[13] Boxer, The Christian Century, 351.
[14] Ibid, 351.
[15] Pagès, 836.
[16] Willis, Clive. “The Martyrdom of Father Marcello Mastrilli S.J.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 53 (2013): 220. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23891244.
[17] Willis, 220-221.
[18] Pagès, 836.
[19] Pagès, 836-837.
[20] Pagès, 837.
[21] Willis, 222. A translation from the original Portuguese.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Pagès, 838.
[24] 竹中采女正, Nagasaki Bugyō from 1629 to 1633, when he was removed from his post for illegal trading. He was forced to commit seppuku in 1634.
[25] Borrowed from https://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-julian-nakaura/ . The excerpt from François Caron is quoted in Boxer, The Christian Century, 354.
[26] Japanese borrowing of the Portuguese ‘padre.’
[27] Pagès, 838.
[28] The Jesuits’ report notes an additional reason: “The reason for their hurry was a forthcoming celebration in the temple the next day, a day on which acts of judicial punishment were forbidden.” Willis, 223.  Also noted in Léon Pagès, Histoire, 838.
[29] Willis, 223.

 

 

 

 

 

Statue of Magdalena at the Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, Manila.           Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez (Wikimedia Commons)

Santa Magdalena of Nagasaki, the Perfect Bride

     Thirteen days and a half she hung in the pit, singing hymns and blessing the names of Jesus and His mother: no other human being in all the dark history of Japan’s persecution of Christ’s Church ever withstood the torturers’ cruelties so long. Yet, in the end, it was not the cruelties of the Shōgun’s minions that ended her life; rather, it was the merciful Hand of God that gently took holy Magdalena home.

      A young woman of extraordinary beauty and refinement, Magdalena so enthralled the diabolic Governor of Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, that he tried to dissuade her from seeking the arrest and martyrdom she so craved. She was worthy of marriage to a noble of the highest order, he insisted; nay, to the very Emperor himself. But Magdalena would have none of that. She boldly declared to Uneme’s face that her only spouse was Christ,¹ and in so doing handed herself, life and limb, over to him: to Uneme, the infamous deviser of the cruellest torture ever known to humankind.

     The life and glorious death of Santa Magdalena, or Saint Magdalene—or Marie-Madeleine, as French historian Léon Pagès called her—is a dazzling tale so replete with signs of supernatural power as to make modern atheists stop their ears and crimp shut their eyes, lest “they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted,” and Jesus should heal them.²

     Magdalena was a prodigy who displayed a love of learning from childhood, reading “pious books in the two languages of Portuguese and Japanese” and consecrating her virginity to God in front of an image of Our Lady of the Rosary.³ The orphaned daughter of Catholic martyrs, she risked martyrdom herself by laboring as interpreter and catechist for the Augustinian friars Francisco de Jesús and Vicente de San Antonio as she “accompanied them in their vicissitudes in the mountains.”⁴ Father Francisco gave her the habit of an Augustinian Tertiary and she later made her profession, though barely fifteen years of age.⁵ Léon Pagès tells us that she worked tirelessly for the conversion of pagans, and with great success.⁶

      Such a devoted disciple was she that, when her spiritual fathers were arrested in November of 1629, Magdalena wanted to join them in their inevitable martyrdom (they would be tortured to death by “slow fire”) by turning herself in to the authorities. God let her know that He had different plans for her, though: she would find new pastors and continue her work among her people. She served two more Augustinian Friars, Melchor de San Agustín and Martín de San Nicolás, as their right hand until they too were captured by the Shogunal authorities. She had been with them barely three months; they would die by “slow fire” on 11 December 1632.

      Execution by “slow fire” consisted in tying the Christian to a stake surrounded by firewood placed far enough away from him to produce an excruciatingly slow, agonizing death. To aggravate the torture, the executioners covered the firewood with a layer of leafy foliage, then a layer of straw mixed with green branches; they doused the whole with saltwater mixed with soil; this would produce a thick cloud of acrid smoke to sting the Christian’s eyes and nose and poison every breath he took.⁷ Death would finally come only after hours of choking, broiling torture. The point of all this was to procure public apostasy: to produce such torment in the Christian captive that he would publicly renounce his faith, thereby opening the flood gates to mass apostasy. Slow fire, however, wasn’t doing the job: something more gruelling was in order.

     Enter Takenaka Uneme. In August of 1629 the Shōgun had installed him as Governor of Nagasaki with orders to expunge the Catholic Faith from that staunchly-Catholic town, the historical wellspring of Catholicism in Japan. Since slow fire was producing only blackened corpses and seemed even to be fanning the flames of that proscribed Faith, the diabolical Uneme devised what would prove to be the ultimate in torture: “the pit.” Thus:

     This was their method of persuasion: they would coil their victim tightly in rope from the feet up to the chest, tie his hands behind his back, and then hang him upside-down from a gallows with his head and torso lowered into a hole, six feet deep, perhaps containing human waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the stench. The lid was made of two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the center closed tight around the victim’s body, pinching his waist and cutting off his circulation. It felt like his head was going to explode; his mouth, nose and ears would soon start oozing blood. François Caron, the chief of the Dutch trading-post in Hirado, wrote, “This extremitie hath indeed … forced many to renounce their religion; and some of them who had hung two or three days assured me that the pains they endured were wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence.”⁸

     This is how Magdalena’s next two pastors would die. The first, Dominican Father Domingo de Erquicia, described Uneme as “man dressed as demon, or devil incarnate.”⁹ He succumbed on 14 August 1633. The second, Italian Dominican Father Giordano Ansaloni, would meet his death on 17 November 1634. By that time Magdalena had already left this wretched earth, for she had sought out martyrdom, marching into that incarnate devil’s very lair in her black monastic habit to declare her burning love for Christ and her contempt for any torture that hell and all its minions could throw her way.

     Upon learning of Father Giordano’s arrest, she went straight to Nagasaki to present herself to the authorities and demand that she too—as a Christian, a disciple of Father Giordano’s, and a member of a religious order—be arrested. At first, taken by her beauty and her obvious refinement, Uneme tried to dissuade her, but seeing her unshakable faith, he ordered her put in jail. “She entered with great happiness, shedding tears of joy,” history tells us.¹⁰ To dampen her spirits, Uneme ordered her tortured; his torturers jammed sharpened strips of singed bamboo under her fingernails. Seeing blood pouring from her wounds, she reveled, “With what rubies have you adorned my hands!”¹¹ The torturers ordered Magdalena to scratch furrows in the earth with the bamboo strips; she obeyed, undaunted.¹² They tried a water torture, pouring copious amounts down her throat and then throwing her onto the floor and loading heavy stones onto her so that the water gushed out violently through her mouth, ears, and nose.¹³ Though they repeated this torture time and again, giving her no rest, beautiful Magdalena was unmoved. They hung her by her arms on ropes, raised her high, and dropped her, dislocating her shoulders,¹⁴ to no avail: still she clung to Christ.

      Giving up, Uneme condemned Magdalena to the pit along with ten other Christians. First he had them paraded around the streets of Nagasaki with Magdalena at their head on horseback, a rope strung tight around her throat like a garotte and tied to her wrists, bound fast behind her. A sign on her back proclaimed her sentence: condemned to death for refusing to abandon the Law of the Christians. ¹⁵ Her eyes showed no terror, nor the slightest hint of disquiet; indeed, they glowed with joy as she preached to onlookers all along the lengthy way. Finally her horse was led up the steep slope called Nishi-zaka to the execution-ground above, overlooking Nagasaki Bay. There the executioners cocooned her in rope, slung her by her heels from a gallows, and hung her, head downwards, into the pit of horrors—a six-foot-deep hole whose bottom, filled with the vilest filth the torturers could gather, reeked abominably—and clamped the lid around her waist, cutting off all light, fresh air, and even her own circulation. Perhaps, as usually happened, blood began to drip from her ears and mouth and nose; perhaps her agonies were ‘wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence’; but Magdalena uttered not one groan or plaint or squeal: instead, she happily sang sweet songs in Japanese to Jesus, her Spouse in Heaven.¹⁶

This went on for nearly fourteen days. The guards would hear her ask, “Would you like to hear a song?” in the cheeriest of tones, and on their answering ‘Yes,’ Magdalena would immediately break into song, singing “a thousand canticles of praise to God our Lord in the Japanese tongue.”¹⁷ Accounts abound of miracles performed by—or through—Magdalena during that fortnight, but it was miracle enough that she had remained alive without a sip of water or a bite of food through that overlong ordeal, incredible enough to bring the torturers’ overlords up to Nishi-zaka to see for themselves just what was going on. They had no doubt that the guards had been suborned, that some Christian misfits were slipping her food and drink and bribing the guards to let them in. This the guards denied, and Magdalena backed up their words when they opened the lid to have a look at her for themselves. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t die in this ordeal,” she told the incredulous officials. “The Lord whom I adore preserves me and holds me up. I feel a paternal hand touching my face, and my body is lightened, so that I don’t suffer.”¹⁸

     That was enough for Uneme’s minions: they told the guards to club her unconscious, orders they must have obeyed with bitter reluctance, having been soothed for nearly fourteen days on end by Magdalena’s sweet, angelic songs—songs “in praise of her Husband [sung] with singular melody and sweetness, so much so that they said it couldn’t be a human voice.”¹⁹

     Their dirty work done, those men must have closed the lid on Magdalena’s pit with leaden stomachs and searched their souls for some relief, something like that soothing Hand that had caressed that lovely maiden’s face throughout her impossibly-long ordeal. Perhaps they felt a hint of that relief when Heaven opened her floodgates that evening, drenching them as they stood at their posts atop Nishi-zaka, looking down on holy Nagasaki, home of so many martyrs, and trying to make sense of the horrors they had to stand watch over. Then, come morning, there was perfect silence: no heavenly joy, no sweet, angelic songs, for they saw Magdalena’s hole filled to the brim with Heaven’s cleansing rain, and pulling her out, they found that she had drowned: her Lord and Husband had finally, and ever so gently, taken her home.

     Pretty Magdalena, holy Magdalena: the perfect bride for Heaven’s earthborn King.

Copyright © 2015 by Luke O’Hara

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