A ‘Sanctus’ for the Ages

          Calabria in Italy has produced some remarkable warriors for Christ, men of insuperable courage and faith, yet even among these titans, Fr. Camillo Costanzo stands tall. Born in 1571 in Bovalino, a village perched on the Ionian Sea under the boot of Italy, young Camillo Costanzo must have glimpsed eternity awaiting him across that fabled sea, for he would live out his life as if the promise of Heaven were always before his eyes.

Having studied law at the University of Naples and served as a soldier in Flanders, Camillo finally found his vocation in the Society of Jesus, which he entered on September 8, 1591. Once ordained, he set his heart on converting China and sailed for Macao, a Portuguese outpost west of Hong Kong housing the Jesuits’ Far Eastern headquarters. On his arrival in 1604, however, Fr. Costanzo saw his hopes of mission in China sunk by bureaucratic intransigence; instead, he was sent to Japan by a particular providence of God (says historian François Solier), arriving in Nagasaki on August 17, 1605.

The brilliant priest was soon fluent in Japanese and labored fruitfully in Christ’s Japanese vineyard nine years: first at Kokura, in northeastern Kyushu, and later at Sakai, a major commercial center near Kyoto, the imperial capital. Yet this tireless missionary traveled all the length and breadth of Japan in his evangelical labors, for we find him in southerly Nagasaki in 1609, where the widely-beloved Fr. Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo, three years bedridden, died in his arms, and some years later in Tsugaru, at the northernmost end of Japan proper, visiting Catholics exiled to the wintry north by shogunal command.

While Fr. Costanzo was in Tsugaru, the daimyo of Matsumae up in Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) requested that a Japanese physician be sent his way. A solid Catholic was chosen for the job, and Fr. Costanzo trained him in catechesis, wrote out many prayers in common use as well as the formula for baptism, and sent him northward. The doctor soon reported back that the people of Matsumae were so open to the Gospel that he was baptizing great numbers of them. Fr. Costanzo would have traveled to Matsumae himself to build a strong apostolate in that vast, virgin northland of Ezo were it not for the Tokugawas’ sledgehammer-blow of 1614 on Japanese Christendom.

Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Christian Expulsion Edict exiled all churchmen and banned Christianity across the Empire. Although some clerics managed to remain in country and carry on their ministries by going underground, the name of Camillo Costanzo was near the top of the Shogun’s list of prominent missionaries assiduously building the Kingdom of God [in Japan], and he had no choice but to surrender himself to the shogunal authorities at Nagasaki for expulsion. 

 

Once back in Macao, Father Costanzo began seven years’ intensive study of Japanese and Chinese religious texts, devoting himself wholly to a new mission he now envisioned. He would use the idolaters’ own “sacred” texts to prove the vacuity of their doctrines. The memory of that Catholic doctor’s glowing report from northerly Matsumae on the sprawling landscape of Ezo must have burned in his Ignatian heart all those seven years. This, apparently, was what God had made him for: to confute the lies that had long blocked the Gospel’s sweeping over Japan, the “land of the gods,” and open the floodgates to the very tsunami of Christ’s love that the Japanese, straining as they were under the Tokugawas’ cruel yoke, so desperately needed. 

With that bright dream illumining his soul, Fr. Costanzo took passage in 1621 with two other priests on a Japan-bound ship, all three disguised as Portuguese soldiers. Enroute, however, Fr. Camillo’s priestly demeanor roused the suspicions of the ship’s master, who, for fear of his own life, would have turned his passenger in to the local magistrate on landing had not certain faithful Catholics stopped him in his tracks. By 1621, most Japanese Catholics had been starved of the Sacraments for seven years or longer: the arrival of the tall, noble and erudite Father Camillo Costanzo must have come as an angelic visitation from Heaven to countless cruelly-orphaned souls. 

Having professed his fourth Jesuit vow in Japan, Fr. Costanzo was sent to Fudoyama in Hizen, not far from Higashi-Sonogi, from whose shore the 26 Martyrs had been embarked 24 years earlier to sail across Omura Bay toward Nagasaki and the execution-ground where their crosses awaited them atop a slope called Nishi-zaka. Perhaps Father Camillo visited that gray-pebbled shore and asked for those martyrs’ prayers just as this author often did. Perhaps he pictured them spending their last night on earth huddled in three open boats anchored off the opposite shore, shivering in the February cold. And then, perhaps, he envisioned their being rousted from their boats at dawn in the bleak winter chill to march the 7 or 8 miles to the foot of the steep slope called Nishi-zaka, which they would climb in exhaustion to reach that execution-ground and find their crosses laid out flat on the earth. There, atop that slope overlooking beautiful Nagasaki and its sparkling harbor, 12-year-old Luís Ibaraki would ask the executioners, “Which cross is mine?” and, running to the one they had pointed out — the smallest — the boy would fall to the ground to embrace that vessel that would carry him home.

 

          From Fudoyama, Fr. Camillo moved on to Karatsu (literally “China Port”) on the north coast of Kyushu, whose harried flock he shepherded three months. This was the castle-town of Terazawa Hirotaka, who had pulled down churches and persecuted Catholics in Nagasaki before becoming a Catholic himself in 1595. Nevertheless, after Hideyoshi, Japan’s overlord, crucified the 26 Martyrs on February 5, 1597, Terazawa reverted to persecutor. His depredations would play a role in the seeding of the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-1638, which eventually left 37,000 Catholic men, women and children brutally slaughtered in its wake.

Off the northwest corner of Kyushu lay Hirado Island. Heavily-forested and largely rural, Hirado afforded ample space for hidden Christian worship, and just past Hirado, Ikitsuki Island, the fief of the staunchly-Catholic Koteda clan, stood alone like a lighthouse at the western edge of Kyushu. In this region, Fr. Camillo kept busy day and night traveling to towns, hamlets and islets ranging across Hirado, Ikitsuki, and even the Goto Islands in the East China Sea, delivering the sacraments to forlorn Catholics long orphaned of their pastors. He even managed to slip into Hirado’s prison to confess three faithful souls — Hernando Jimenez, his wife and his servant —  who had given shelter to Fr. Luís de Flores and would thus be martyred.

 

While on Ikitsuki, Fr. Camillo heard the confession of an earnestly-Catholic woman who hoped to convert her pagan husband. Feigning interest in the Faith, this reprobate artfully mined details about the Father’s mission route from her and duly reported all to the authorities. Boatloads of armed men were dispatched to hunt down Fr. Camillo, that dauntless, tireless shepherd of human souls whose very existence on Japanese soil seemed to irk the devil’s minions like a barbed arrow in the belly.

But all to God’s greater glory, as countless witnesses, human and angelic, would soon be privileged to see.

It was in Goto, in the harbor at Uku Island, that the inevitable arrived, sparked by the treachery of that informer on Ikitsuki Island.

Perhaps Fr. Costanzo was taking a moment’s rest in his boat when the daimyo’s soldiers sailed into the harbor — he so rarely had a safe place to lay his head. In that boat, just as predicted by the Judas on Ikitsuki, the hunters found their prey.

Who, unlike the slippery sort of fugitive they had expected, received them graciously, for this meant certain martyrdom, a prospect that filled Fr. Costanzo with joy. His joy disarmed his captors: they carried him to Hirado unbound, like a guest rather than their prisoner, after arresting his two dojuku (lay helpers), Augustino Ota and Gaspar Koteda. Seeing these two brought on board tightly bound, Fr. Camillo asked the soldiers to bind him too, but they demurred — perhaps this noble Italian priest visibly carried Heaven in his countenance, so close did he hold it to his heart.

The judges in Hirado proved less sympathetic than the soldiery had been. Asked why he defied the Shogun’s ban on Christ, Fr. Camillo answered that, although he obeyed all laws that did not violate the Commandments of God, as the Shogun had proscribed the preaching of the Gospel, a ban “utterly contrary to the will of the King of Heaven, [he] could not obey the kings of the earth to the prejudice of his service.”

          This answer infuriated one of the judges, who shouted that Fr. Camillo deserved to die. He was dragged away with a rope around his neck and taken to Iki Island to be thrown into prison with two Spanish friars captured by English corsairs on the high seas. Like St. Paul, though, Fr. Camillo used this opportunity to convert the hearts of the turnkeys and guards of his prison.

Meanwhile, the Shogun Hidetada, informed of the arrests of Fr. Costanzo and company, ordered him burnt alive and all his helpers beheaded. Augustino Ota, Gaspar Koteda, and eight others were severally shorn of their lives before the holocaust of Fr. Costanzo. The burning alive of the tall Calabrian Jesuit was saved till last as a public spectacle staged to terrify all would-be faithful Catholics on the scene — and calculated to impress the Dutch and English sojourners in Hirado, merchant-pirates who preyed on Iberian shipping and oftentimes traduced Catholics preserving the Faith underground. Thirteen Dutch and English vessels lay in harbor at Hirado on 15 September 1622, the day appointed for the Shogun’s spectacle: a large audience was thus guaranteed for Hidetada’s perverse display of shogunal justice.

 

When the ministers of death came for Fr. Costanzo, he greeted them with a broad smile and such graciousness as to astonish them, and before setting off, he thanked his jailers courteously. Gonroku, Governor of Nagasaki, had sent an officer to witness the execution in his name; Fr. Camillo bowed to the man, thanked him for coming, and offered his sympathy for causing him to do this unfortunate duty. Gonroku’s officer was struck dumb.

About 100 paces from the shore at Tabira, facing Hirado Island from across a narrow strait, lay the death-ground, bamboo-fenced and stocked with firewood. Beyond the opposite shore, Hirado’s citadel stood out on its mountaintop. A huge crowd had come to observe the execution, both Japanese — some of them underground Catholics — and European Protestants steeped in hatred of the Catholic Faith, a legacy handed down by their fathers. Here was the perfect battleground for this Ignatian soldier’s one-man assault on the devil’s citadel of lies: a patch of soil ordained to taste his blood and his ashes, a pulpit built as if by Almighty God Himself to confirm the believers in their faith and disabuse the haters of those lies they had suckled on. Fr. Camillo covered that hundred paces like a runner bursting with a message of victory, a dispatch in three tongues.

Once inside the fence, he announced,

          My name is Camillo Costanzo. I am a religious of the Society of Jesus and of Italian nationality, condemned to the fire for having preached the Christian Faith. I ask the spectators to remember this.

                   As the executioners tied Fr. Camillo to his stake, he began preaching with an extraordinary fervor — in Japanese first, and then in Portuguese and Flemish — a homily on Matthew 10:28, Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. The executioners lit the firewood, but the Jesuit preached on, his voice piercing the smoke and flame. In the midst of the inferno he finished his homily before crying out,

The sects of the Bonzes [Buddhist priests] are only dreams and fictions to divert men from the right path of their salvation.

Thick smoke covered him as if to banish his words, words pregnant with a truth that could pulverize the concreted myths of a millenium: but the smoke and flame parted like an opened curtain to reveal Fr. Costanzo praying as if unharmed. He sang out the Psalm Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes! to its end and then the Gloria before exclaiming three times in Japanese, “Oh, how well I am!” in apparent ecstasy.

But, like a lightning-quick, strangling python, a whirlwind of flame devoured Fr. Costanzo’s clothing, exposing his broiling skin as white as snow, and then he was charcoal-black.

This holocaust was over, it seemed, seared into countless human memories as if with a branding-iron. Some of the audience, stunned into circumspection, must have turned to go—when, from the midst of the fiery furnace, that glorious image of God named Camillo Costanzo, burnt black as cinder, sang out, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus! as boldly and beautifully as if he were at the Altar in the very court of Heaven raising a song of praise to the Lamb of God Himself, and the flames consuming his mortal flesh the merest kisses of a thousand angels. Only then did this scion of Calabria, the perfect incarnation of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s vision of the soldier of Christ, bow his head in death.

The spectators could barely keep their hearts in their chests: this priest had truly been a paragon of in persona Christi, miraculous proof of the Power of the Keys, of the Divine Wind proceeding from the mouth of the risen Jesus when he blew on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” a wind more powerful than all the hurricanes of every age rolled into one — a blow that extinguishes eternal death. None could have left that scene, that port to Eternal Life reduced now to choking smoke and glowing embers, unchanged. 

Glory be to God in all His angels and saints—and especially in the person of Blessed Camillo Costanzo, S.J. on this 15^th of September.

(This story, in a slightly different version, first appeared on Churchmilitant.com.)

Luke O’Hara lived 23 years in Japan, where his interest in the martyrs drew him into Holy Mother Church. He has never once looked back.

His articles and books can be found at his websites, kirishtan.com and lukeohara.com.

A Ladder to Heaven, Part I

It all started in 1620 with some Japanese Catholics, bereft of their pastor, pleading for his return to Nagasaki to console them in their sufferings and their needs.

After Tokugawa Ieyasu’s expulsion of all Catholic clergy from Japan in 1614, Augustinian Friar Pedro de Zúñiga had stayed on to minister to his flock in secret, his survival in that deadly task being due in large part to the connivance of Hasegawa Gonroku, the Shogunal Governor of Nagasaki. Gonroku had succeeded the former governor, his uncle Sahioye, in 1615 — but, unlike him, had no taste for overseeing gory scenes of torture and bloodshed in the name of the Shogun’s law.

By 1619, though, finding himself increasingly compelled to shed the blood of Christians, Gonroku urged Father Zúñiga, whom he knew and respected, to leave for the Philippines lest he be forced by the Shogun Hidetada to burn him alive. On conferring with the Augustinian Vice Provincial in Japan, the friar was ordered to do just that, for he was known to all and sundry in and about Nagasaki. With Gonroku’s guarantee of safe passage out of Nagasaki, Father Zúñiga sailed for Manila via Macao.

The following year, two letters arrived in Manila from Father Zúñiga’s former flock — one for the friar himself and another for the Definitor of the Augustinians in the Philippines — requesting that he return to them. In exchange for that favor, they offered to send the remains of the Augustinian martyr Friar Hernando de San José, which they had managed to fish out of the depths of Omura Bay, where the bodies of five martyrs had been sunk together on 1 June 1617.    

The letters arrived just as the fathers of the Augustinian Province of the Philippines were holding their provincial meeting of 1620.

Léon Pagès writes,

After having consulted one another on the fruits that might be expected if Fr. Zúñiga were sent [back to Nagasaki], they proposed to him the apparent advantages of this new voyage.

Fr. Zúñiga, with a wealth of onsite experience under his belt, pointed out that, being so well known in Nagasaki, he would be seized immediately upon arrival, and although his inevitable suffering and martyrdom might redound to the greater glory of God, his former parishioners’ desire of his pastorship would remain unfulfilled; nevertheless, he added, he would render obedience to his superiors, whatever they decided.  

Fr. Zúñiga’s orphaned flock had promised in the letter to rendezvous with his ship and bring it to safe haven. Given that assurance, the Augustinian fathers felt compelled to grant those persecuted Christians that gift they so desired, and Fr. Zúñiga surrendered himself to the will of God.

Among the local Dominicans, meanwhile, Fr. Luís Flores, aged and infirm, had retired from active mission work in Nueva Segovia, Philippines, and settled into a life of prayer and contemplation. News of the Japanese persecution fired his spirit, though, with a desire to join the Japan mission, which could bring him suffering, Pagès explains, and, perhaps, martyrdom. In early June of 1620, Fr. Flores found himself in Fr. Zúñiga’s company, along with two other Spaniards, headed for Japan aboard a junk captained by Joachim Hirayama, a staunch Japanese Catholic. They soon hit heavy seas and were forced to dump part of their cargo and put in at Macao. The suffering had already begun.

On 2 July they set out again and, 20 days later, were within sight of Formosa when English pirates on the bark Elizabeth attacked, took them captive, and commandeered their ship. The Elizabeth, captained by Edmund Lenmyes, had sailed out of Batavia (now Jakarta) in a merchant-pirate fleet of five sail, three English ships and two Dutch, to prey upon Portuguese and Spanish shipping and sell their booty (as well as some trade goods) to the Japanese at Hirado.  

Captain Lenmyes soon sussed out the fact that two of his prisoners were “Papist” priests, a fact discernible in their deportment. He locked them below in the hold without food or drink, jammed in among a heap of deerskins whose stench was insufferable, afraid, apparently, of losing such valuable cargo as those two friars. If their priestly identities were proven, the captured junk would, by the Shogun’s law, become the pirates’ prize, with her captain and crew condemned to death for transporting Catholic priests to Japan.

As the Dutch and English were cooperating in brigandage in the Eastern seas, the captured junk and its cargo became their common property. They sailed their prize to the Dutch trading-post at Hirado with her passengers and crew imprisoned below, all chained together so closely that none could move without jostling the others. At Hirado, the Dutch found three letters in their captives’ luggage, one conferring the title of Augustinian Provincial Vicar on Fr. Zúñiga and two confirming Fr. Flores’ authority among Dominicans in Japan, yet neither priest would acknowledge his identity for fear of thereby condemning Captain Hirayama and his Japanese crew to death. Now the real suffering would begin.

The priests were lowered into a dark pit, where they languished in filth and near-starvation for thirteen days, squatting on the naked earth as vermin fed on them. This was but a prelude to their torture. The Dutchmen pulled them, crawling with vermin, out of the pit to strip them to the waist, tie their hands behind their backs, and hoist them up to hang them by their wrists with boxes full of gunpowder attached to their feet. They threatened to light the powder if the fathers didn’t confess their identities, to no avail; they would move on to more exquisite tortures in due time.

Eventually, thanks to the concerted pleading of the Spaniard Alvaro Muñoz — a friend of the English trading-chief in Hirado — the fathers were moved into a small cell with a narrow window, a distinct improvement over the torture-chambers they had grown used to.

On 16 February 1621, Gonroku left Nagasaki to head up to the Shogun’s court in Edo (Tokyo) and pay his New Year’s respects. On the way he stopped at Hirado, where he summoned the Dutch merchant-pirates to appear before him in audience and bring along the two prisoners in whom they placed such high hopes of lucre. Although the Dutchmen produced the aforesaid letters as proof that their prisoners were priests, the two friars denied the charge, and Gonroku rejected the proffered evidence as counterfeit, upbraiding the brigands for scheming to appropriate a Japanese merchant’s ship and holding its passengers hostage without substantiating their charges. He even warned them that he might cut off trade with Holland entirely if they couldn’t produce real proof. He sent the Dutchmen packing with a warning to look after their prisoners carefully until his return, assigning two of his own men to see that they did just that.

Incidentally, as Gonroku knew Fr. Zúñiga quite well, he must have strained his acting skills to the limit — and his performance would have unexpected and unforgettable consequences: consequences that will play out in Part 2 of this story.

A Ladder to Heaven, Part II

          On 22 July 1620, English corsairs on the barque Elizabeth seized a Japanese junk headed for Japan carrying two friars disguised as Spanish merchants: Augustinian Fr. Pedro de Zúñiga and Dominican Fr. Luís de Flores. Soon, the two were imprisoned in the Dutch trading-post at Hirado, north of Nagasaki, while the Dutchmen and their English cohorts strove to prove to the authorities that their prisoners were Catholic priests. If successful, they would see the two burned alive and keep the ship as their prize to boot.

The Dutchmen decided to wrench the truth out of their prisoners with torture: they bound Fray Pedro to an X-shaped “Saint Andrew’s cross” and poured a flood of water onto his face and down his throat so that he could hardly catch his breath; during this torture, blood vessels in the victim’s neck would often burst in his struggle to breathe. Once Fr. Zúñiga’s belly was swollen with water, his torturers beat on it to force it back out; as he vomited the mess out, bloody water seeped out through his pores. Jacques Specx, the Dutchmen’s boss, then demanded that the friar confess his true identity, and this failing, ordered more water poured. They repeated this procedure again and again, emptying a full hogshead of water onto Fr. Zúñiga’s face and down his throat before resignedly sending the tortured priest back to his cell in defeat.

Fr. Flores was next. Elderly and frail, he looked like a corpse by the time his torture was over. Nevertheless, neither man had given in, for the lives of Captain Joachim Hirayama and his crew hung on the fiction that their former passengers were merchants, not Catholic priests come to save endangered human souls.

In November, Hasegawa Gonroku, Governor of Nagasaki, visited Hirado to clear up the problem of the imprisoned friars and the sequestered ship. Along with Matsuura Takanobu, the local daimyo, he held four hearings wherein the Dutch merchant-pirates laid on the charge that their prisoners were the vanguard of Spanish conquest, agents sent by the very king who had subdued the Philippines and many other lands. Will Adams, the famous Englishman-turned-samurai, and Richard Cocks, his compatriot in Hirado, had kept that same bug of suspicion buzzing in Tokugawa Ieyasu’s ear as long as he lived, a bug now grown into rage in the mind of the Shogun Hidetada, Ieyasu’s son.   

Gonroku therefore had to tread as if on eggs as he pretended to disbelieve the ever-more-convincing proof that the prisoners were indeed priests. Witnesses from Nagasaki who knew Fr. Zúñiga were brought in, one of them a blind man who swore he recognized the friar’s voice. Richard Cocks, head of the English trading-post in Hirado, had earlier said he wanted his own head cut off if the man before him was not in fact Fr. Zúñiga. Ignoring the mounting evidence could wind up being Gonroku’s self-inflicted death-sentence.

He had priests brought in from the prison in Omura: Jesuit Fr. Carlo Spinola, Dominican Fr. Francisco de Morales, and Fr. Pedro de Avila, Franciscan — pallid men (and future martyrs) who looked like walking corpses with hair and beards grown wild and fingernails curling beyond their fingertips. They barely had the strength to stand when called upon, yet all answered with discretion, neither lying nor admitting that they knew Fr. Pedro to be a priest as they tried to preserve the lives of Joachim Hirayama and his crew — and perhaps Gonroku’s life as well.

But things had gone too far: to go on denying the obvious could only lead to scandal, the priests concurred together, and thus, on 7 December, the feast of St. Ambrose, Fr. Zúñiga donned his Augustinian habit, shaved his tonsure, and declared himself a priest, insisting that the mariners he had sailed with hadn’t known.

Gonroku duly proceeded up to Edo to report this news to the Shogun. Infuriated, Hidetada ordered the priests and Captain Hirayama roasted by “slow fire” and all the ship’s crew beheaded. James Murdoch writes that all religious held in prison, along with their hosts, were also to be burnt alive, and the wives and children of the latter beheaded, “as well as the wives and children of the martyrs immolated three years before.” All the latter would be accomplished in the Great Martyrdom of 1622.

Just outside of Nagasaki lay a plain between two mountains stretching from the town to the sea. Nishi-zaka, also known as Martyrs’ Hill, overlooked the scene. Léon Pagès writes:

A stockade enclosed the place of execution. Three large stakes of two palms’ diameter were destined for the confessors who were to be burnt alive; the wood and the fascines lay twenty-five palms, or twelve feet, distant. … Opposite the stakes, a long table, arrayed with pegs, would receive the heads of the twelve condemned to decapitation.

         The firewood was set at a distance to prolong the martyrs’ agonies. The condemned arrived to find a sea of Christians spread across the plain: Nagasaki’s faithful, numbering thirty or sixty or even one-hundred-thirty thousand — various sources differ — raising their voices to Heaven in prayer and song. Children’s choirs were intoning Magnificat; Laudate, Pueri; Laudate Dominum, Omnes Gentes; songs that would not cease until all was accomplished. The martyrs knelt to pray once inside the execution-ground, and the twelve sailors were quickly beheaded. Seeing their heads lined up on the table, Fr. Zúñiga called them flowers of Paradise.

The three knelt and recited the Creed. Then, before being tied to their stakes, the two priests blessed the crowd. Captain Hirayama, finding his stake unsteady, stamped the dirt around it, firming up the vessel he would ride to Heaven. He then preached to the crowd, telling them that the Son of Man came to heal mankind of the infirmities they suffered because of sin. He went on:

The fathers you see, O Japanese people, are come from the ends of the earth, sent by the Lord Jesus to work your salvation, to reap the divine fruits of Redemption, and to make you worship the true God instead of idols of stone and wood.

Meanwhile, the executioners were beating him to shut him up, to no avail: what terror could they inflict, he asked them, when they were about to burn him alive? Captain Hirayama proclaimed to all Nagasaki that the bloody scene before their eyes was in fact a ladder to Heaven.

The fire was lit; to keep the flames from blazing too freely, the wood was doused with water, for “slow fire” was the torture the Shogun prescribed. It took forty-five minutes of roasting to wrench the souls out of those three images of God standing firm against the ruler’s odium fidei: first Fr. Luís de Flores, the eldest, bowed his head in death, and then Joachim Hirayama — the ship’s captain who had dared to bring Christ to his beloved land — followed him up that ladder to eternal life. Fr. Pedro de Zúñiga held on the longest, enduring hellish agonies for the sake of his former flock, whose dream of his return to them was being immolated before their eyes.

Yet they knew that in that fiery hell their precious pastor’s soul was climbing straight to Heaven.

Hallelujah.

A version of this story (not edited by me) first appeared on ChurchMilitant.com

    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

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