In late July of 1587, the dictator Hideyoshi clamped a ban on Christ in Japan. Having just finished his conquest of Kyushu, he was relaxing in Hakata with Toku-un, his private quack and trusted advisor, and overindulging in draining the cask of Portuguese port wine he had been given that very evening by Padre Coelho, the Jesuit Vice-Provincial, the senior clergyman in Japan.
Earlier that day Hideyoshi had inspected the Padre’s sailing-ship—well gunned to protect herself against the pirates prowling Japan’s sea lanes—and had left in an apparent fit of joy; a Japanese Catholic observer had, however, warned Padre Coelho that he must offer the ship to Hideyoshi at once, for this man could see (unlike the Europeans, not so steeped in the subtleties of unspoken Japanese communication) that the dictator was jealous. Sadly for Christendom in Japan, the Padre did not heed that prophetic warning.
He learned its truth in the wee hours of the night: Hideyoshi’s sheriff came to the dock, demanding that the Vice-Provincial debark to hear the dictator’s charges, presumably written up by Toku-un in the depths of the ruler’s drunken revel.
The Fourth of July marks not only the birth of American independence, but also the anniversary of one of the most heroic declarations of freedom Man has ever made. On 4 July 1639, Japanese samurai and Jesuit priest Father Peter Kasui Kibe refused to renounce Christ under the most grueling regime of torture ever devised by man or devil. In the wake of Father Peter’s death, the Shogun’s master torturer dubbed him “the man who would not say I give in:” a perfect epitaph to his heroic life.
The Fourth of July marks not only the birth of American independence, but also the anniversary of one of the most heroic declarations of freedom Man has ever made. On 4 July 1639, Japanese samurai and Jesuit priest Father Peter Kasui Kibe refused to renounce Christ under the most grueling regime of torture ever devised by man or devil. In the wake of Father Peter’s death, the Shogun’s master torturer dubbed him “the man who would not say I give in:” a perfect epitaph to his heroic life.
Item: The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.
(excerpt from the Platform of the Democratic Party, 2012)
Slaughtering the Healers
“It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, completely out of the blue. I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin, and out came this treasure from the store-room of his heart.
It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of the face of a child. This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18.10) That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones, untainted as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God, so much like the face of the Infant Jesus.
When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Lk 5:31) Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing. How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world: murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms. How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians. And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony. How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights’.
If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child, but perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘experienced’, too hardened of heart: perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain. We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.
How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones.
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The jumbled boulders of Nakaura lie brooding on the shore, defying the sea to do its worst. Behind them squats a hill clothed in bamboo, its giant knees of rock protruding through the trees. A continent of charcoal cloud looms over the coast, yet the sun blazes triumphantly in the distant west, riding high above the Gotoh Islands: it burns one’s face, even in the tail-end of winter.
Julian Nakaura was born here. They honor him with a memorial that overlooks the village: a pony-tailed boy in bronze pointing out at the sea, towards the Rome the real boy visited. But I prefer the Julian in bronze who stands, weathered and flinty, at the entrance to the Shimabara Catholic Church, way down south: a gentle old man steeled by trial and perseverance, a Missal in hand and nothing but his own two sandaled feet to carry him. Those old feet would carry him to a death unheard of even in a Europe where the burning of heretics and the disemboweling and mutilation of Roman Catholic priests was the order of the day.
In 1582 Catholicism was flourishing in some parts of Japan—especially on the island of Kyushu. The Jesuits had opened a school in Arima, southeast of Nagasaki, for training Catholic samurai youth to become future teachers, catechists and priests—a Seminario. Father Alessandro Valignano, dispatched by Rome as Visitor to Japan, had set up the school in 1580, and two years later he came up with a brainstorm: choose some fine young samurai from the student body and send them on an embassy to Rome as showpieces of the Japanese Church. Their mission would be to impress upon the nobility of Catholic Europe the quality of this newest and farthest-flung Catholic seedbed; and to impress upon themselves the grandeur of Catholicism in Europe and report their impressions to their native brethren on their return. Omura Sumitada, the first Japanese daimyo (domainal lord) to be baptized, loved the plan as soon as it hit his ears; he promised his full support. Two other daimyo also joined in; the mission was prepared immediately
The jumbled boulders of Nakaura lie brooding on the shore, defying the sea to do its worst. Behind them squats a hill clothed in bamboo, its giant knees of rock protruding through the trees. A continent of charcoal cloud looms over the coast, yet the sun blazes triumphantly in the distant west, riding high above the Gotoh Islands: it burns one’s face, even in the tail-end of winter.
Julian Nakaura was born here. They honor him with a memorial that overlooks the village: a pony-tailed boy in bronze pointing out at the sea, towards the Rome the real boy visited. But I prefer the Julian in bronze who stands, weathered and flinty, at the entrance to the Shimabara Catholic Church, way down south: a gentle old man steeled by trial and perseverance, a Missal in hand and nothing but his own two sandaled feet to carry him. Those old feet would carry him to a death unheard of even in a Europe where the burning of heretics and the disemboweling and mutilation of Roman Catholic priests was the order of the day.
In 1582 Catholicism was flourishing in some parts of Japan—especially on the island of Kyushu. The Jesuits had opened a school in Arima, southeast of Nagasaki, for training Catholic samurai youth to become future teachers, catechists and priests—a Seminario. Father Alessandro Valignano, dispatched by Rome as Visitor to Japan, had set up the school in 1580, and two years later he came up with a brainstorm: choose some fine young samurai from the student body and send them on an embassy to Rome as showpieces of the Japanese Church. Their mission would be to impress upon the nobility of Catholic Europe the quality of this newest and farthest-flung Catholic seedbed; and to impress upon themselves the grandeur of Catholicism in Europe and report their impressions to their native brethren on their return. Omura Sumitada, the first Japanese daimyo (domainal lord) to be baptized, loved the plan as soon as it hit his ears; he promised his full support. Two other daimyo also joined in; the mission was prepared immediately.
Adam Arakawa under torture at Shiki. By Nicolas Trigault, 1623
“Martyr” is a word much abused in our day; here’s one excellent definition: “True Christian martyrs forgive others,” says Joseph Takami, the Archbishop of Nagasaki. “Even while being killed by others, they forgive them. They teach us the meaning of a death like Jesus’ death.”
Take Adam Arakawa, for example, one of the 187 Companions of Peter Kibe, beatified en masse by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008: “He was a man of prayer,” Jesuit historian and pastor Father Diego Yuuki told me. “When the last missionary in Amakusa was expelled, he took the responsibility of the church, and for that reason he was killed.”
Adam was a samurai, brought up in that proud martial tradition, but a samurai who had the humility to become a servant to his fellow-Christians after having been dismissed by his feudal lord. He served the church at Shiki, in the Amakusa Islands.
The Shōgun had banned the Faith in 1614, expelling all Christian missionaries, and Kawamura Jirōemon, the castellan of Tomioka Castle, which overlooked Shiki from a nearby mountaintop, was ordered by his lord to exterminate Christendom in the Amakusa Islands. Humble old Adam, in his seventies, was the obvious primary target: if he renounced the Faith, the other local Christians would follow his example–or so thought Kawamura.
Renounce? Not Adam, steely old Catholic samurai: when heheard that they were looking for him, he fell to his knees, thanking God, and asked Him to grant him martyrdom. Friends warned Adam to abandon Christ, lest he be killed. His answer is recorded in history: “’Disobey God,’ you’re telling me? You’re telling me to shame my God? Kawamura-sama’s orders or the law of the Shōgun of all Japan notwithstanding, please understand: I am a Christian. A true Christian puts Christ’s teaching above his own life. No matter how they torture me, I cannot disobey Christ, true God.”
Kawamura, the castellan, had Adam brought to his castle for interrogation and bound to a pillar outside; to break the old man’s spirit he kept him out there all night. Come morning, though, Adam’s spirit was unbroken. When Kawamura told him it was not just his own nor just his feudal lord’s command, but the very Shōgun’s orders that he apostatize, Adam replied, “A man’s soul is more important to him than his body. I obey the true God, Deus, savior of souls.” In old Japan, they called God by his Latin name, Deus, to avoid confusing Him with the “gods” of superstition.
On March 21, 1614, the Friday before Palm Sunday, Kawamura ordered Adam stripped naked and paraded through town, and then hung by his elbows from a cross-bar (or lintel) supported by two pillars; they tied his legs to these, with his tiptoes barely touching the ground. Adam was in constant agony, straining against gravity, besides being exposed to the elements and public ridicule. It was March—cold and windy—and Kawamura had had the pillars set up at land’s edge to expose him to the cold sea wind, but to keep from killing him, they untied him at night and took him indoors. This torture lasted nine days. Unable to join his hands while praying, Adam did his best to raise them toward Heaven. Rather than show his pain, he encouraged the local Christians in their faith, speaking only of things of the soul. He was finally untied on Holy Saturday, his faith untouched, and put in the hands of a local Christian, under house arrest—an internment that would last for sixty days.
Kawamura eventually sent a message to Adam: “We’ll cut your fingers off unless you renounce your faith. Not all at once, but slowly, one by one, prolonging your agony.” Adam’s response: “I’m determined to bear any sort of torture. God will surely strengthen me and give me perseverance to the end. Even if I die after long suffering, having undergone repeated tortures, I’ll be happy to get it, for penance’ sake and for love of God.” On hearing that, Kawamura, the castellan, ordered his fingers cut off; but his men, afraid of Heaven’s recompense should they mutilate such a good old man, held off.
Finally, Kawamura sent to Terazawa Hirotaka, his feudal lord up in Karatsu, in northern Kyushu, for orders, reporting Adam’s unshakable determination to hold onto his faith. A courier came back at breakneck speed with new orders: kill him. Meanwhile, in his imprisonment, Adam had seen a vision of the Mother of God: she was holding a cross in her hands, and Adam understood that he was to become a holy Martyr.
Kawamura had Adam brought to his castle. Along the way a crier kept blowing a conch shell and announcing that Adam would be executed in two or three days. This was a lie: they just wanted to put the local Christians off the track, lest they come in droves to his execution, seeking relics. The next morning, at first cock’s crow, they took Adam out of the castle in the pre-dawn darkness and led him up a steep mountain path with a rope around his neck. Anxious for martyrdom, Adam “climbed like a leaping deer,”[1]pulling the soldier with the rope in his grip right off his feet. At the chosen place, Adam knelt and prayed. He then advised his executioners to make their children study the Christian Faith, and told them they had better become Christians too, and fast.
The swordsman must have been unsteady on his feet on the steep slope, for his first slash went awry, into Adam’s shoulder: Adam didn’t flinch; he was too busy praying to Jesus. The second slash then took off his head.
They put Adam’s bloody remains in a net, weighted down with two large stones, took them out in a boat and sunk them into the sea, afraid, perhaps, of that eternal truth: The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Faith. The local Christians, though, scooped up the earth on that hillside that had drunk Adam’s sacred blood and saved it as a relic.
Seed of the Faith indeed: repentant Catholics all over the Amakusa Islands publicly declared their faith, emboldened by Adam’s example after having been cowed into silence by the Shōgun’s ban on Christ. In one village alone, more than 150 emboldened souls declared their faith in the Truth that has overcome the world.
One almighty Truth indeed, and terror to the Enemy of all men’s souls.
**************************
Notes:
Blessed Adam Arakawa, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008, is one of the 187 Companions of Blessed Peter Kibe Kasui. He was beheaded on or about Tuesday, June 5, 1614. (The date is unclear; that his martyrdom was fulfilled on a Tuesday, before dawn, is established.)
Father Diego Yuuki, consummate historian of Japanese Christendom, passed away on November 17, 2008 in Nagasaki, city of Martyrs. As of today, June 10, 2013, Joseph Takami continues in the office of Archbishop of Nagasaki.
Above a hilltop overlooking Nagasaki Bay floats a row of men and boys in bronze, frozen eternally in attitudes of joy. ‘Floats,’ I say, because they seem to hang suspended in mid-air along a wall of stone. These are the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. Most of them have their hands folded in prayer, and all their mouths are open in praise. Like a halo around each martyr’s head, words are inscribed behind him in bronze relief. These are the last words each was heard to say or sing before being pierced with spears from below; this is how Japanese crucifixions usually ended.
The Twenty-six were crucified on this hill on the Fifth of February, 1597 because, according to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who then ruled Japan, they were “foreigners … come from the Philippines” who had “built churches, preached their religion, and caused disorders.” In point of fact, most of the martyrs—twenty of them—were Japanese.
The ‘disorders’ they had caused were as follows: they had built hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria for the poor and outcast, offered charity to the indigent, and labored tirelessly to spread the Gospel of Christ in a land whose people had been esteemed by Saint Francis Xavier as “the best who have yet been discovered.” As for their having “built churches,” Hideyoshi himself had given the Franciscans a plot of land on which to build.
But a few of the Franciscans had indeed arrived recently from the Philippines. They had come in a crippled Spanish galleon headed for Mexico that had been blown off course by a typhoon and had limped into Japan in dire need of repairs. When the battered San Felipeshowed up at the port of Urado richly laden with Chinese silks and other treasured cargo, the local ruler contrived to tow the ship into port against the ship’s pilot’s wishes—ostensibly for repairs—and in the process broke her back on a sand bar, spilling much of her cargo into the bay. Now the San Felipe was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit.
But Hideyoshi himself had promised his personal protection to Spanish ships only four years earlier. With this in mind the Spaniards sent a deputation to him to petition for return of the confiscated cargo, but by the time they arrived, the divvying-up of the spoils had already been decided. Now Hideyoshi had to save face. He contrived to ‘discover’ a Spanish plot to take over Japan by Catholic infiltration, and when he had produced some fishy evidence he flew into a rage and ordered the rounding-up of the Franciscans. In the end the round-up netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen hapless Japanese laymen: the youngest twelve years old, another thirteen, and the oldest sixty-four.
Hideyoshi ordered that their ears and noses be cut off and they be paraded around the cities of Osaka and Kyoto in carts and then marched to Nagasaki to be crucified, a journey of perhaps eight hundred kilometers; it would take them twenty-seven days. A sympathetic official mitigated the sentence; only their left ears were cut off.
Along the route, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki distinguished himself for his constant preaching; Bishop Dom Pedro Martins called him the best preacher in Japan. The youngest, Louis Ibaraki, traipsed along laughing, and reportedly laughed even when they cut off his ear. Four days before the end the boy was offered his life on condition that he renounce the Faith. His reply: “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.”[1] When the Twenty-six arrived at the execution-ground their crosses were there awaiting them. Twelve-year-old Louis asked “Which one is mine?” and then ran to embrace the one pointed out.
The monument depicts in bronze how they died: Paul Miki, hands spread, was preaching to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians kneeling on the hillside below when the spears pierced his heart, and Louis’s last words shout out from the wall behind him: “Paradise! Jesus! Mary!”
Saint Francis Xavier’s praises still ring true.
(The Twenty-Six were canonized on June 8, 1862.)
(First published in Our Sunday Visitor.)
[1] Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, p. 60. (Enderle Book Co., Tokyo, 1998)
Above a hilltop overlooking Nagasaki Bay floats a row of men and boys in bronze, frozen eternally in attitudes of joy. ‘Floats,’ I say, because they seem to hang suspended in mid-air along a wall of stone. These are the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. Most of them have their hands folded in prayer, and all their mouths are open in praise. Like a halo around each martyr’s head, words are inscribed behind him in bronze relief. These are the last words each was heard to say or sing before being pierced with spears from below; this is how Japanese crucifixions usually ended.
The Twenty-six were crucified on this hill on the Fifth of February, 1597 because, according to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the man who then ruled Japan, they were “foreigners … come from the Philippines” who had “built churches, preached their religion, and caused disorders.” In point of fact, most of the martyrs—twenty of them—were Japanese.
The ‘disorders’ they had caused were as follows: they had built hospitals, orphanages and leprosaria for the poor and outcast, offered charity to the indigent, and labored tirelessly to spread the Gospel of Christ in a land whose people had been esteemed by Saint Francis Xavier as “the best who have yet been discovered.” As for their having “built churches,” Hideyoshi himself had given the Franciscans a plot of land on which to build.
But a few of the Franciscans had indeed arrived recently from the Philippines. They had come in a crippled Spanish galleon headed for Mexico that had been blown off course by a typhoon and had limped into Japan in dire need of repairs. When the battered San Felipe showed up at the port of Urado richly laden with Chinese silks and other treasured cargo, the local ruler contrived to tow the ship into port against the ship’s pilot’s wishes—ostensibly for repairs—and in the process broke her back on a sand bar, spilling much of her cargo into the bay. Now the San Felipe was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her cargo was forfeit.
But Hideyoshi himself had promised his personal protection to Spanish ships only four years earlier. With this in mind the Spaniards sent a deputation to him to petition for return of the confiscated cargo, but by the time they arrived, the divvying-up of the spoils had already been decided. Now Hideyoshi had to save face. He contrived to ‘discover’ a Spanish plot to take over Japan by Catholic infiltration, and when he had produced some fishy evidence he flew into a rage and ordered the rounding-up of the Franciscans. In the end the round-up netted six Franciscans, three Jesuits and seventeen hapless Japanese laymen: the youngest twelve years old, another thirteen, and the oldest sixty-four.
Hideyoshi ordered that their ears and noses be cut off and they be paraded around the cities of Osaka and Kyoto in carts and then marched to Nagasaki to be crucified, a journey of perhaps eight hundred kilometers; it would take them twenty-seven days. A sympathetic official mitigated the sentence; only their left ears were cut off.
Along the route, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki distinguished himself for his constant preaching; Bishop Dom Pedro Martins called him the best preacher in Japan. The youngest, Louis Ibaraki, traipsed along laughing, and reportedly laughed even when they cut off his ear. Four days before the end the boy was offered his life on condition that he renounce the Faith. His reply: “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.”[1] When the Twenty-six arrived at the execution-ground their crosses were there awaiting them. Twelve-year-old Louis asked “Which one is mine?” and then ran to embrace the one pointed out.
The monument depicts in bronze how they died: Paul Miki, hands spread, was preaching to the thousands of Nagasaki Christians kneeling on the hillside below when the spears pierced his heart, and Louis’s last words shout out from the wall behind him: “Paradise! Jesus! Mary!”
Saint Francis Xavier’s praises still ring true.
(The Twenty-Six were canonized on June 8, 1862.)
(First published in Our Sunday Visitor.)
[1] Diego Yuuki, S.J., The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, p. 60. (Enderle Book Co., Tokyo, 1998)
Finally, at dawn on 28 February 1627, Paulo and fifteen others were taken out of Matsukura’s dungeon to start their climb up Mount Unzen. Along the way they sang hymns and recited the Creed, and when their guards stopped to rest, they knelt, made an Act of Contrition, and prayed a Rosary; and, singing another hymn, arrived at the “hell” where they were to die; where the guards tied ropes around their necks, as if they were not human beings but the merest meat for boiling.
(Two boiling pools (above and below) in "Unzen Hell." What remain today are mere vestiges of the "Hell" of 1627: Mount Unzen was reshaped by a 1792 eruption.)
The first to die jumped into the violently-boiling sulfur-water on the executioners’ command; Paulo admonished the others to wait for Matsukura’s men to do the killing: faithful Catholics must not kill themselves. He kept on encouraging and guiding his fellow-Catholics through their martyrdoms, guiding them Heavenward, which infuriated Matsukura’s executioners; so they saved Paulo for the last, grisliest execution: they hung him upside-down by his feet and dunked him head-first, yanking him out to see the result. He sang out, “Praised Be the Most Blessed Sacrament!”
They dunked him again, maybe expecting better results this time, and pulled him out a second time. Again he prayed, “Praised Be the Most Blessed Sacrament!” No whining, no squirming, no sur- render to the Shogun: only praise for the Conqueror of death, until they plunged him in a third time, for good.
This was the stuff of which Saint Francis Xavier had exulted on his first arriving in Japan: here was the good earth that bore fruit a hundredfold. Eleven years later, Paulo’s prayer would crown Amakusa Shiro’s flag of rebellion, the flag that would fly over Hara Castle, where 37,000 Catholics would shed their blood for Christ. It was the flag of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament. Those words of praise, joy and victory would soar over the Shimabara martyrs’ final battleground while the Shogun’s horde stamped out his fury; words that cannot be erased or silenced, singing through Japan’s buried centuries of darkness; words flying high and ringing still: Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament.
We dare not shut our eyes, nor stop our ears.
(A reproduction of Shiro's battle-flag, flying at a memorial Mass on the sacred earth where Hara Castle stood.)
-End-
Text and Photos Copyright 2007 by Luke O'Hara
