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

Kirishtan.com

On 14 February 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu, “retired” Shogun and de-facto ruler of Japan, promulgated his Christian Expulsion Edict.  How ironic that he chose Saint Valentine’s Day to set in motion the juggernaut that would, like a steamroller, smash into oblivion every public, visible manifestation of Christianity—that “religion of love and union” that his predecessor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had first attacked in 1587 with his own Expulsion Edict.

Hideyoshi had decreed: “I do not want this religion: a religion of love and union, which is therefore harmful for this kingdom.” To press his point, he crucified 26 Christian men and boys on a mountainside overlooking Nagasaki bay on 5 February 1597.

His successor Ieyasu’s 1614 edict declared: “the Kirishitan band have come to Japan … longing to disseminate an evil law … so that they may change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land.”[i]  In reality, though, far from aiming to ‘change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land,’ the Jesuit mission to Japan strove to win souls to Christ so that the people of Japan themselves might ‘obtain possession’ of Heaven.

The question of whether or not the men bringing Christ to Japan were plotting to “disseminate an evil law” the ruler might well have left to the judgment of the Japanese people themselves.  Saint Francis Xavier records that:

The bonzes [i.e. the native Buddhist clergy] were much displeased at [the mission’s success], and when they were present at the sermons and saw that a great number became Christians daily, they began to accuse them severely for leaving their ancestral religion to follow a new faith. But the others [i.e. the converts] answered that they embraced the Christian law because they had made up their minds that it was more in accordance with nature than their own, and because they found that we [Christian missionaries] satisfied their questions while the bonzes did not. [ii]

Indeed, Saint Francis Xavier held the Japanese in such high regard that, after his providential arrival in Kagoshima on 15 August 1549, he was inspired to report:

By the experience which we have had of this land of Japan, I can inform you thereof as follows,–Firstly the people whom we have met so far, are the best who have as yet been discovered, and it seems to me that we shall never find among heathens another race to equal the Japanese. [iii]

He found no other race their equal because of the disposition of the Japanese to embrace the truth, once it had been clearly presented to them and all their doubts confuted.

Furthermore, the mission’s goal was clearly not to ‘change the government of the country,’ and the missionaries’ reward was just as clearly not to ‘obtain possession of the land’ as Ieyasu had falsely claimed.  Rather, their goal was to change human hearts and lead sinners to Christ, and their reward was the joyful anticipation of hearing: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord’[iv] once they themselves had passed from this life into Heaven. Another letter of Saint Francis Xavier’s makes this clear:

The labours which are undergone for the conversion of a people so rational, so desirous to know the truth and be saved, result in very sweet fruit to the soul. Even at Amanguchi [Yamaguchi], when the King allowed us to preach the faith and a vast concourse of people gathered round us, I had so much joy and vigour and delight of heart, as I never experienced in my life before. … These things made me so overflow with joy, that I lost all sense of suffering. Would to God that these divine consolations which God so graciously gives us in the midst of our labours might not only be related by me, but also some experience of them be sent to our European Universities, to be tasted as well as heard of! Then many of those young men given up to study would turn all their cares and desires to the conversion of infidels, if they could once taste the delight of the heavenly sweetness which comes from such labours, and if the world knew and was aware how well the souls of the Japanese are prepared to receive the Gospel, I am sure that many learned men would finish their studies, canons, priests, and prelates even, would abandon their rich livings, to change an existence full of bitterness and anxiety for so sweet and pleasant a life. And to gain this happiness they would not hesitate to set sail even to Japan.[v]

Setting sail to Japan from Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century involved great risk:  besides the dangers of scurvy, amoebic dysentery, food poisoning, starvation, shipboard fires, and countless communicable diseases, there were typhoons, shipwreck, and pirates to be feared.  No wonder then that time and time again, when their Japanese hosts asked the missionaries why they had braved such dangers to sail to the very end of the earth, to faraway Japan, the answer so astonished the natives:  these fearless men had come to save human souls, pure and simple.

Rather than ‘longing to disseminate an evil law … so that they may change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land,’ then, the Jesuit mission that opened Japan to Christ sought a much more lasting reward, an eternal one, as described by Christ Himself:  ‘But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through, nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.’[vi]

Where Saint Francis Xavier’s heart and treasure were, he himself made clear in closing his letter of 29 January 1552:

So now I will end though I know not how to end when I am writing to my dearest fathers and brothers, and about my joys in Japan too, the greatness of which I could never express, how ever much I might wish to do so. I end my letter then, begging and imploring God to vouchsafe to unite us some day in the bliss of heaven.  Amen.[vii]

To unite him with all his brethren in Christ, that is, including—if God would grant his dearest hope—every last precious human soul in Japan.

[i] C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan.  (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993) p. 318.

[ii] St. Francis Xavier: Letter from Japan, to the Society of Jesus at Goa, 1551

[iii] St. Francis Xavier: Letter from Kagoshima, Japan, to the Society of Jesus at Goa, November 1549.

[iv] Matthew 25:21, Douay Rheims Bible, excerpt.

[v] The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, v. 2, Henry J. Coleridge, S.J., ed. (London:  Burns and Gates, 1872.) p. 349.

[vi] Matthew 6:20-21, Douay Rheims Bible.

[vii] The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, v. 2, Henry J. Coleridge, S.J., ed. (London:  Burns and Gates, 1872.) p. 349

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

(Toyotomi Hideyoshi)

            He had proscribed the Faith a decade earlier, perhaps in the merest fit of pique fueled by drunkenness, and ordered all clergy, or bateren, out of Japan.  Unwilling to abandon their flocks, however, most of the clergy in the country stayed on at the risk of their lives and went incognito as it were, 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.  In the Japanese scheme of things, his so-called retirement was a screen behind which to freely wield dictatorial power, and he accepted the proscribed clergy’s screen of seeming-obedience to his edict as a convenient compromise, for he needed the good offices of the Jesuit clergy in Japan to smooth his acquisition of Chinese silk and European guns through the Portuguese traders who sailed to Nagasaki from Macao.

            But then, on October 19, 1596, 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.

            The Spanish captain dispatched an embassy of two Franciscan friars and two of his crewmen to Osaka 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 the ruler 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 Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai in carts, and thereafter marched eight hundred kilometers to Nagasaki, there to be crucified.  A sympathetic official in Kyoto intervened:  only their left earlobes were cut off, but the rest of the sentence would be carried out in full.

         The 26 Martyrs started their death-march on the tenth of January, 1597.  They were marched from dawn till nightfall for twenty-seven days, paraded as criminals and outcasts through town after town.  The youngest of the martyrs was twelve, the oldest sixty-four.  Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki laughed when they clipped his ear, and thereafter 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 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.

            Their last night on earth was miserable:  it was a bitterly frosty night and the Martyrs must have prayed and shivered all night long, since they were hunched together in open boats anchored offshore at 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” he had proscribed.

            On the Fifth of February the martyrs were marshaled to their feet at dawn and marched double-time toward Nishizaka, 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 rebellion.  From time to time Jesuit Brother Paul Miki exclaimed, “Today is Easter Sunday for me!  The Lord has shown me such mercy!” as they climbed toward their Calvary.³   They arrived 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 twenty-seven day march to Calvary, proclaiming to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians blanketing the hillside below, “I greatly rejoice to die for this cause!”

             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, 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.  Twenty-seven days earlier, at the start of their journey, the martyrs had been paraded in oxcarts around the capital and around nearby Sakai, the mercantile center of Japan, and in their oxcart 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 freedom 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” (Luke 2:46b-47).

       In that same spirit, on the Fifth of February in the Year of Our Lord 1597, atop that slope called Nishizaka 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!”

-End-

Copyright 2007/2014 by Luke O’Hara

390 years ago, on August 25, 1624, five Christian heroes were executed “by slow fire” for the crime of bringing Christ to the Japanese.  Burned at the stake in Ōmura, east of Nagasaki, were the Jesuit Father Miguel Carvalho, the Franciscan Fathers Luís Sotelo and Luís Sasada, the Dominican Father Pedro Vázquez, and Brother Luís Baba, a Lay Franciscan Japanese catechist who made his religious profession before his martyrdom.[i]  A decade had passed since the “retired” Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had promulgated his ironclad Anti-Christian Edict, and all five of the holy martyrs knew full well that a grisly death awaited anyone caught in the act of obeying Christ, the Prince of Peace, in furthering His Great Commission; daring the flames of death, they all obeyed nonetheless.

Padre Miguel Carvalho, the Jesuit, had entered Japan in 1622 on a Portuguese trading-ship, disguised as a Portuguese soldier. The three Franciscans had been arrested on their return to Japan from an ambassadorial mission to King Philip III of Spain and the Vatican sponsored by a Japanese daimyō, Date Masamune.  Fray Pedro Vázquez, the dauntless Dominican, had once disguised himself as a Japanese official and gained entry to Nagasaki’s prison, where he heard the confessions of Catholic prisoners bound for execution.[ii]

On the day of their martyrdom they were taken to the execution-ground with ropes around their necks, the four priests carrying crosses.  The Palme of Christian Fortitude (Douai, 1630) relates their ordeal thus:

    “They arrived at the place appointed for their death, a field called Hokonohara[iii], 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.”[iv]

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

None did.  The first to die was Brother Luís Baba, the native Japanese catechist.  Freed by the burning cords, he ran to the stakes of his priest-companions to kneel and kiss their hands,

“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.”[v]

The next to die was Father Carvalho, and then Father Luís Sasada, another native-born Japanese who tried, like Luís Baba, to leave his stake and do reverence to the surviving priests but could not move his feet, already 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” artfully heaped in two piles about their feet to make their deaths as lingering and torturous as possible—to the end of effecting their apostasies. Needless to say, these two champions of Christ 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.”[vi]

Five glorious examples of superhuman faith, five men to remember when asking for prayers in Heaven.

©2014 by Luke O’Hara

            Ōmura, the sizeable domain ruled by Sumitada, was home to two ports suitable for hosting visits by the great sailing-ships of Portugal:  Nagasaki and Yokose-ura.  Overcome by the power of the truth of the Gospel, Sumitada offered the port of Yokose-ura to the missionaries of Christ as a home where they could live freely and preach their Gospel and convert whomever they could; to the Portuguese merchants who accompanied the missionaries he offered anchorage and trading-rights in Yokose-ura with the first decade tax-free.  As soon as he had been instructed in the basic tenets of the Christian faith, Sumitada declared that he was already a Christian in his heart.