“It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, from out of the blue. I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin when 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 horrified 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.
A glowering, scar-faced volcano named Unzen reigns over the Shimabara Peninsula in southwestern Japan. Atop it, bubbling, sulfurous hot springs vomit out white crud and belch acrid steam. They call this place “Unzen Hell.” In the 1600s, the daimyo of Shimabara found the biggest of its caustic, skin-eating pools perfect for torturing Christians.
Most tourists connect Unzen’s boiling fury only with the posh spas that ring her “Hell”; almost unknown is the history that lies buried within that smoking netherworld–a tale of superhuman heroism and epic tragedy. Unzen transfigured this land and laid bare its people’s souls. The volcano has reshaped the Peninsula time and again, most recently in a series of eruptions from 1991-94; and as for Shimabara’s Catholics of old, it fired them in its crucible, proving some, like Paulo Uchibori, to have been made of tempered steel. If only the whole world knew.
Back in the days when it was ruled by Arima Harunobu, this land, known as Arima, had been the Catholic bulwark of Japan; but in 1612, the Shogun exiled Harunobu for bribery, ordering his death and giving Arima to Harunobu’s spineless son Naozumi. Naozumi renounced Christ on the Shogun’s orders, joined a Buddhist sect, and vowed to his earthly lord and master to stamp out the Faith in his ancestral domain. On 7 October 1613–the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary–he burnt three of his top samurai along with their families outside the walls of his castle because they had refused his order to deny Jesus; yet Arima’s staunch Catholics, rather than being cowed, attended this glorious martyrdom in their thousands singing hymns and wearing rosaries around their necks while their earthly lord Naozumi cowered in his fortress on a hilltop overlooking the scene. Soon Naozumi asked the Shogun to transfer him out of Arima to another fief; rather than join him in apostasy and accompany their despised lord to his new home, most of Arima’s Christian samurai renounced their livelihoods for Christ and stayed behind in Arima. One of the staunchest Catholics among these samurai was Paulo Uchibori, and his three sons took after their father, their souls as tough and keen as Japanese swords.
In 1614, the Shogun’s vise tightened on Arima: Hasegawa Sahioye, the Magistrate of Nagasaki, invaded her with an army of ten thousand men to wage a gruesome campaign of anti-Christian terror, and he threw Paulo Uchibori into prison. Although the Shogun had promised Hasegawa the fief of Arima if he solved the Christian problem, he was soon recalled to Edo, the Shogun’s capital, leaving behind in Arima many mutilated but victoriously-faithful Catholics and two hills of Christian flesh, one of chopped-up bodies and the other of heads, in a field below Naozumi’s abandoned hilltop castle in the south of Arima.
Arima was next entrusted to Matsukura Shigemasa, a tough warrior and an old stalwart in the retired Shogun Ieyasu’s camp. At first, Shigemasa turned a blind eye to the Christians in Arima, and since he respected Paulo Uchibori’s samurai grit, he let him out of prison; but in 1626, Shigemasa went up to the capital to do homage to the Christ-hating Shogun Iemitsu, the third of the Tokugawa Shoguns and Ieyasu’s grandson. According to the late Jesuit historian Father Diego Yuuki, Iemitsu could think of nothing but the crackdown on Christianity, as if he were possessed (Yuuki, Unzen no Junkyo-sha, 1984, p. 52).
In his year at the Shogun’s palace at Edo, Shigemasa drank deep of the poison in the wretched Shogun Iyemitsu’s soul: he went back to Arima a changed man, determined to purge Christ from his domain, and from the capital he had sent down orders to arrest Paulo Uchibori and his family. When he arrived at his castle at Shimabara, he found thirty-seven Christians in his dungeon. On 21 February 1627, Shigemasa decreed this doom for sixteen of them: cut their fingers off, hang stones around their necks, and drown them in the sea. Paulo’s three sons were among them.
Paulo himself and nineteen others were stripped naked and forced to watch the tortures and executions. First, the executioners lined the condemned Christians up along the bank of the moat around Matsukura’s fortress, calling each one forward and cutting that victim’s fingers off one by one: some all ten, some less, at the torturer’s whim. Paulo’s eighteen-year-old son Antonio they called first: he bravely strode up and spread his hands out on the cutting-board, showing not a wince as they sliced his fingers off. Paulo’s youngest, five-year-old Ignacio, manifested a miracle when they cut his tender little index-fingers off: after each slash, he brought that hand to his face and smiled, watching the blood jet out. The astonished pagans drew away in fear: like the Gerasenes, terrified by Christ’s power over evil.
After mutilating these heroes, Matsukura’s men stripped them, tied ropes around their necks and ankles, and took them out in a boat for the final torture: hanging stones around their necks, they plunged each into the icy sea, pulling him out and demanding that he renounce Christ to save his life, and dropped him in again, pulling him out to give him another “chance”, and in, and out, over and over. None of them apostatized; every one drowned a Christian.
Looking on from a nearby boat were the twenty other Christians forced to watch the tortures and drownings, with Paulo among them. He heard his heroic son Antonio gasp, “Father, let us thank God for such a big blessing” before they drowned him; and he watched them suspend little Ignacio above the waves before his eyes for a small eternity before they finally sunk the mutilated five-year-old to the bottom of the sea.
The twenty witnesses they then took back to their stripped-off clothes; warning-signs had been sewn on them, threatening with grave punishment anyone who would dare give these Christians any shelter. Next, they cut the three middle fingers off each of their hands, branded the word CHRISTIAN on their foreheads and set them loose to fend for themselves: stark, horrific examples to would-be believers of the Shogun’s certain wrath; but rather than show their misery, these stalwart Catholics went around preaching Christ fearlessly, urging apostates to return to the Faith. This was not the lesson Matsukura-dono had intended for the souls of Arima, so the twenty were eventually ordered back to his castle.
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; finally, singing another hymn, they arrived at the “hell” where they were to die; there 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 surrender 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, which would fly over Hara Castle, where 37,000 Catholics would shed their blood for Christ. (It had long been 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.)
The air was electric with a holy silence, all Nagasaki dumb with grief, as the parade of martyrs marched past toward the hilltop where their crosses waited.
Wolfgang Kilian, “The Martyrs of Nagasaki,” 1628 (photo: Public Domain)
Raked by frothing waves and howling wind, the galleon San Felipe rode the merciless Pacific bereft of mainmast and rudder, her battered old hull the merest plaything of the tempest. Aboard her were a litany of friars — Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian — clinging for their lives to whatever handholds the creaking old behemoth could provide and praying for deliverance, if not for themselves, then at least for her proud Spanish captain and his crew. All had been alarmed by signs in the heavens — first, a blazing comet, then crosses burning in the clouds, seemingly pointing toward Japan.
The San Felipe had been bound for Acapulco in New Spain. An old workhorse heavy-laden with fine Chinese silks and other riches, she was grossly overloaded, well beyond the limit for safe sailing. She had left Manila on 12 July 1596, and well into her journey she was hit head-on by the last typhoon of the season. Not only did that raging tempest rip away her mainmast and her rudder; it carried her along on its rampage to Japan, dumping her at last off the west coast of Shikoku, near the port of Urado, on Oct. 19.
San Felipe’s pilot, Francisco de Olandia, wanted to limp his vessel down the coast to Kyushu and on up to Nagasaki, Christian haven, with a makeshift rudder. The exhausted passengers, however, insisted on putting in to port at once, and their demands won the Captain, Matías de Landecho, over to their side.
The pilot duly sounded the harbor at Urado and came back with bad news: a sand bar lurked underwater; the overloaded galleon would scrape bottom; some cargo must be offloaded first to lighten the ship.
The local ruler, Chōsokabe Motochika, forbade that necessary move. He offered, though, to tow the ship in and dredge a passage if needed. He at once enforced his “offer,” sending 200 armed boats out to tow the galleon straight onto that sand bar, breaking San Felipe’s back. Now she was a shipwreck, and now, by Japanese law, her rich cargo was forfeit.
Motochika sent a dispatch to the warlord-ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, with an inventory of the treasure-trove he had just purloined, expecting a rich reward.
Hideyoshi was elated. He sent a man down at once to confiscate the cargo — who “even seized the gold that the shipwrecked Spaniards carried in their pockets.”
Historians have noted that Hideyoshi’s vengeful war in Korea, in addition to rebuilding in the wake of recent earthquakes, was draining his coffers. His driving force, though, is best explained in the words of Fray Pedro Bautista, Franciscan: “His greed devoured and engulfed everything.”
Captain Landecho sent his pilot, along with a friar-interpreter, on an embassy of protest to Hideyoshi, who had previously guaranteed security for Spanish shipping. This embassy was waylaid by Hideyoshi’s own confiscator, Masuda Emon, who asked the pilot to explain how the King of Spain had conquered his vast empire spanning the globe. Francisco de Olandia purportedly told him that first they sent in friars to suborn the locals, who then joined ranks with invading Spanish troops to take over the country. One Jesuit historian wrote that the wound this rash answer inflicted was still gushing blood 120 years later.
At any rate, it served as a pretext for Hideyoshi to explode into a rage and demand the execution of all Catholic priests in Japan. He soon realized, though, that without the intermediation of the Jesuits, he would be hard put to strike profitable deals with the Portuguese merchants bringing Chinese silks and gold from Macao. Thus, he moderated his orders: his men were to round up all religious in his capital of Osaka and the nearby imperial city of Kyoto. They would then cut off their ears and noses, parade them in oxcarts through Kyoto, Osaka, and nearby Sakai, and march them southwest to Nagasaki, where they would be crucified.
Ishida Mitsunari, Governor of Lower Kyoto, mercifully intervened. At Captain Landecho’s request, he ordered his men to clip only the left earlobes of the prisoners, who numbered 24. The blood-letting began on Friday, Jan. 3, 1597, at a crossroads in Upper Kyoto. The youngest prisoner, 12-year-old Luis Ibaraki, laughed when they cut his ear, and Thomas Kozaki, 14, dared them to cut his, saying, “Come on, cut me and shed the blood of Christians!”
After this mutilation, all 24 were loaded onto oxcarts, three martyrs in each, and paraded around Kyoto, the imperial capital. All were Franciscans but the three in the last cart, Jesuit Brother Paul Miki and his two lay catechist companions. Many called Paul Miki the best preacher in Japan; he preached ceaselessly along his via crucis. The two catechists, John Goto and James Kisai, would become Jesuits before they mounted their crosses.
With their ears dripping blood, the three youngest — Luis, 12, Anthony, 13, and Thomas, 14 — sang the Our Father and the Hail Mary from their oxcart while others preached to the crowd, a spectacle that must have dazzled even the hardest of heart.
This parade was repeated in Osaka and Sakai. Then, on Jan. 9, the martyrs began their brutal winter’s trek to Nagasaki, a journey of 27 days. They traveled daily from dawn to sunset in single file, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, until they reached their lockup for the night. Brother Miki used every opportunity to preach, and many wrote letters that have been handed down to us.
“You should not worry about me and my father, Michael,” Thomas Kozaki, 14, wrote to his mother. “I hope to see you both very soon there in Paradise.” His father was with him on that via crucis; the bloodstained letter would be found on his crucified body.
To the Jesuit Provincial, Brother Miki wrote, “Please don’t worry about us three and our preparations for death, because by divine goodness we go there with joy and happiness.”
Perhaps the most bitter leg of their journey was their last night on earth, spent huddled, freezing, in three boats moored in Omura Bay offshore of Togitsu, a fishing village. The men in charge feared a Christian uprising if these bloodied religious were to be lodged ashore, for Togitsu was just north of Nagasaki, the Rome of Catholic Japan.
Come morning, the road to Nagasaki was indeed lined with Christians, but there was not a hint of danger. Rather, the air was electric with a holy silence, all Nagasaki dumb with grief, as the parade of martyrs marched past toward Nishi-zaka, the hilltop where their crosses waited. The martyrs’ number was now 26, two laymen having been robbed and thrown in with them enroute by greedy guards. Neither protested, but accepted martyrdom as a blessing.
Atop Nishi-zaka lay the crosses. Although the climb was steep, young Luis was full of energy and asked, “Which cross is mine?” Then he ran to the one pointed out, lay down and hugged it: this vessel would take him home.
Unique among the Twenty-Six, Luis had been offered a chance to save his life. The sheriff in charge of this execution had orders to crucify only 24; he wanted to save this innocent boy and offered him the chance to be his page — on condition that he stop being a Christian. “I do not want to live on that condition,” the brave boy replied, “for it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon finishes.”
The crosses rose; Paul Miki began his last sermon, preaching that the only way to salvation was through Christ; the three youngest boys sang a Psalm, “Praise the Lord, ye children”; some sang the Te Deum and the Sanctus; and then the coup de grâce.
Japanese crucifixions ended with paired spearmen driving their spearheads up into the flanks of each victim, through the heart and out the shoulders. On Nishi-zaka two pairs began their work, starting at opposite ends of the row of crosses and working toward the center. All, both the martyrs and the crowd, started chanting Jesus! Mary! as the martyrs’ hearts were pierced one by one.
Before the spearmen reached young Luis Ibaraki, he was struggling to climb toward Heaven, and these words of hope burst from his lips: “Paradise, Paradise!” he shouted, his 12-year-old heart still beating. “Jesus! Mary!”
Words that no raging tyrant can ever hope to still.
Luke O’Hara became a Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.
This article appeared in The National Catholic Register.
Looking down from Heaven on frosty Yonezawa in the winter of 1629, one would have seen blooms of crimson spreading upon the white-blanketed earth below, for her mantle of virgin snow was being baptized with Christian blood.
Although Yonezawa, in north-central Japan, was home to many Catholics, it seems to have escaped shogunal scrutiny for some years. Perhaps because its ruler, Uesugi Kagekatsu, was a redoubtable warrior, the Shogun Hidetada ignored his tolerance of Christians in his domain. Kagekatsu ruled Yonezawa until his death in 1623, the very year that Tokugawa Iemitsu succeeded to the shogunate.
Iemitsu had a demonic taste for personally observing the torture of Christians. Perhaps this taste rubbed off on Kagekatsu’s heir, Sadakatsu, for in 1628, while paying homage to Iemitsu in Edo (now Tokyo), Sadakatsu sent orders back home to register all Catholics in his domain and order them to apostatize.
Ishida Shuuri, the head sheriff in Yonezawa and a decent man with no taste for injustice, reported back to Sadakatsu that there were no Christians in his domain. Shuuri’s immediate underling, however, jealous of his position, reported to Sadakatsu that Yonezawa was in fact rife with Catholics.
On Dec. 22, 1628, Sadakatsu sent down orders to Shuuri to put to death all Catholics unwilling to apostatize.
“There are 3,000,” Shuuri replied. This quashed Sadakatsu’s enthusiasm for murder for a time — he would be exterminating too many of his vassals and sacrificing considerable tax income and manpower.
But Sadakatsu had the twisted Shogun Iemitsu breathing down his neck. He needed a sop.
Prominent among Yonezawa’s Catholics was Amagasu Yemon, christened Luís, a veteran samurai. Sadakatsu ordered Yemon and all his family to apostatize on pain of death.
Shuuri counted Yemon a good friend; to save his friend, he wrote up a summary of the Ten Commandments as best he could recall them, enhancing them, as he saw it, with one final commandment enjoining samurai loyalty, and presented this memorial to Sadakatsu. He then asked him to consider how a people so steeped in virtue could possibly be a threat to the state. This staved off the inevitable for a space of days; Yemon’s friends were overjoyed at the thought that he and his family would after all be spared.
Overjoyed until a friend of Yemon’s elder son, Tayemon, came from Sadakatsu’s castle to break the news to him that all of the family were to be executed. Tayemon was in his sickbed with fever, but at this news, he cried out that he was healed, jumped out of bed, and mounted a horse to gallop off and tell his father. Yemon ordered coffins prepared at once for all his family.
On Jan. 11, 1629, two samurai arrived at Yemon’s house to notify him, with Shuuri’s apologies, that he and his family were to die the next morning. Yemon thanked them and promised that all would be ready to leave at a moment’s notice when called.
As Yemon and his two sons were themselves samurai, they surrendered their paired swords, the long katana and the shorter wakizashi, to be delivered to Shuuri, promising that their matchlock guns and lances would be delivered on the morrow. It was the height of humility for a samurai to give up his swords.
Yemon immediately set things in order — all would wear their finest apparel. They would make a grand procession to the execution ground, for they were celebrating the holiday of their lives. Yemon then offered to pay his servants and send them off to freedom; all refused, insisting they wanted to die for Christ along with their master. The servants of Yemon’s sons, Tayemon and Ichibyoe, did the same.
With all the family and servants gathered at Yemon’s house, they spent the night in prayer. The next day, two hours before dawn, two of Shuuri’s officers arrived to start the proceedings. Yemon greeted them at the door and took them upstairs, where they found the entire household on their knees dressed in festal garb, the men and boys with hands tied behind their backs and rosaries around their necks and the ladies, hands untied, with rosaries in their hands. Two 12-year-old boys serving as pages would lead the procession, one carrying a pike on high with a picture of Our Lady fixed to its point and the other bearing a blessed candle.
Before leaving, the martyrs commended themselves to Our Lady’s protection and rose from their knees to file out onto the snowy street to begin their march. With Our Lady’s image on high, the two boys in front were followed by another servant, and then the women carrying their rosaries. Among these, 17-year-old Tecla, Ichibyoe’s wife, carried their infant daughter in her arms, perhaps with her rosary laced through her fingers, while Dominica, Tayemon’s young wife, walked ahead of her alone, clutching her rosary in silent anguish, I suspect, for her own infant daughter was nestled in the arms of her handmaid, Maria, to their rear. Perhaps she hadn’t the heart to coo to her child as she carried her off to be beheaded.
At a distance behind the women, Yemon’s sons led the men. Each had his hands bound behind his back and a rosary round his neck, with Yemon last. As people lined the street watching them in awed silence, two men joined them along the way, Christian faithful going to their deaths in peace.
By the time they arrived at the execution ground, the sun was full risen, emblazoning a sharp contrast between the pristine blanket of white spread out under Heaven and the crimson blooms that soon began to spread with each new slash of a sword — but first, all knelt in prayer around the Blessed Virgin’s image held on high.
The women and girls, the vanguard, were beheaded first, followed by the men, and Yemon last. The two boys who had led the procession were denied martyrdom despite their protests, and sent home in tears.
More martyrdoms would follow in Yonezawa that day — 53 Christian souls ascended to their Maker through the chill, crystal air of that January morning to nestle, finally, in his waiting, loving arms.
Luke O’Hara became a Catholic in Japan. His articles and books about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.
(This article appeared in the National Catholic Register.)
On the night of 6-7 January 1620, Father Ambrósio Fernandes, S.J. died in prison in Omura, east of Nagasaki, at age 69.
His crime, of course, was being a missionary of Christ. He had been in Japan since 1579, the year that Fr. Alessandro Valignano arrived in Kyushu with broad papal authority to remold and revitalize the Church in Japan to suit the unique conditions of the country. Father Ambrósio remained in Kyushu until his death four decades later in a stinking hellhole of a prison where, malnourished, possibly poisoned, and exposed to the elements and the filthy infestations accruing to living trapped in a virtual sewer, he vomited blood, fell into a deathlike state and breathed his last after receiving the Last Rites at the hands of Father Carlo Spinola, who would later be burned alive.
Father Ambrósio Fernandes — from Cardim, Elogios
Father Ambrósio had stayed on in the country after the great expulsion of 1614, knowing full well that his end would be some kind of martyrdom for Christ. Thanks perhaps to a special grace, even in his seeming coma he was able to signal to Father Spinola that he felt sorrow for his sins, at which he received absolution, and he said an audible ‘Yes’ when offered Extreme Unction.
The guards having refused Father Spinola a light by which to administer the Sacrament in the predawn darkness, he managed with the dim glow of an arquebus match, i.e. a rope fuse for igniting a matchlock gun. Curious perhaps that the technology used to light Father Ambrósio’s flight to Heaven had come to Japan in the hands of three Portuguese merchants who, in 1542, landed by chance at Tanegashima Island in a damaged Chinese junk driven by a storm. The news of that new mission field would bring the first three Jesuits to Japan in yet another Chinese junk—Saint Francis Xavier, Father Cosme de Torres, and Brother Juan Fernandez—and, three decades later, in a Portuguese carrack, Father Ambrósio Fernandes of Sisto, Portugal, all bringing the dazzling light of the Gospel to a people starved for light.
This story begins on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 1560, when the town of Laino Borgo in Cosenza, Italy was graced with the birth of a boy of noble blood. Eschewing the life of privilege that could have awaited him, the boy chose instead to serve his God and save the souls of his fellow men in a foreign land.
View of Laino Castello, near Laino Borgo. Photo by Mboesch (Creative Commons. see license link below)
Pietro Paolo Navarro entered the Society of Jesus at Nola (Kingdom of Naples) in 1579, the very year that Father Alessandro Valignano, the great Italian Jesuit, entered Japan at the port of Kuchinotsu to remake the face of her Church and spread its fame across the Catholic world. Father Navarro arrived in Japan in 1586, landing at the port of Hirado along with seven other priests aboard the trading-ship of Domingos Monteiro. Saint Francis Xavier had visited Hirado in 1550, leaving a number of converted souls in his trail of miracles, along with great hopes for the future of the Japanese Church.
First, Father Navarro applied himself assiduously to the study of Japanese. He learned the language quickly and could soon preach powerfully to the Japanese in their own tongue, so he was sent to Iyo in Shikoku to found a new apostolate. Sadly, that was to be short-lived.
On July 24, 1587, the Feast of St. James, the dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi proclaimed a ban on the Catholic Faith and ordered the expulsion of all clergy. Fr. Navarro withdrew from Iyo but stayed on in Japan, moving secretly around the island of Kyushu to serve her orphaned Christians.
By 1596, Father Navarro was pastoring the church of Yamaguchi, famously founded by St. Francis Xavier with an astounding display of courage. In the face of constant threats to his life, the saint had preached the Gospel in the streets of that city, railing against the unspeakable abuses committed by the Buddhist clergy of his day, particularly the “abominable sin” of pederasty so rampant among them. He had preached the same lesson in an audience with the ruler of Yamaguchi, an addicted pederast, while Brother Juan Fernández, his companion and interpreter, trembled for their lives.
Saint Francis Xavier
On February 5, 1597, Hideyoshi crucified the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki in a fit of megalomania. The following year he died in a frenzy, babbling incoherently about “a thousand things out of context” and talking about crowning his little son King of Japan.[1] This dream never saw fruition, nor did Hideyoshi’s command, in his last will and testament, that he be deified after death as Shin-Hachiman, i.e. the New God of War.
Father Navarro professed his four solemn Jesuit vows at Nagasaki in 1601. It seemed a time of great promise for the Japanese Church: Hideyoshi was dead, and his successor, the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, seemed anything but hostile to the Catholic mission. Dutch and English protestants, bitter enemies of everything Catholic, had arrived in Japan in 1600, however, and their calumnies were quick to find the Shogun’s ear. In 1612, things came to a head when the Catholic lord of Arima got duped into bribing a shogunal official for a phony promise to enlarge the Arima domain. Both schemer and victim were Catholic; this infuriated the Shogun, who banned the Faith in all shogunal territories. The ban would extend to all Japan in 1614.
1617 was a year replete with the shedding of Christian blood on Japanese soil. We find Father Navarro in the domain of Bungo, where, given the frantic hunt to round up and exterminate Catholic missionaries, he was forced to hide for some days on end in a hole he had dug. There, having no help from his fellow man, he turned to God, who not only sustained him, but gave him strength to ‘return to his work with ardor’ once the danger had passed. He went about disguised as a baggage-porter, wearing a straw hat under which he could presumably hide his face in shadow.[2]
In May of 1619, Fr. Navarro was given responsibility for all of the Shimabara Peninsula (Arima) and the far flung Amakusa Islands to the south, among the most fervently-Catholic regions of all Japan. He must have foreseen his end, for, come Advent of 1621, he made a general confession to the Jesuit Provincial at Kazusa in southern Arima. He sailed northward from there to the hot-springs town of Obama and, two days later, passed by night to the village of Hachirao, where he went on retreat to do the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. He had intended to then celebrate the Nativity at the old Catholic castle-town of Arima, but the locals wrote him urging him to stay away for fear of the daimyo’s spies. He thus celebrated Christmas at Hachirao and afterwards set out for Arima in the night, a risky journey, for he had to take the main road in bright moonlight. He was readily spotted by a servant of the daimyo’s, who grabbed him by the robe; the priest submitted without protest.
Matsukura Shigemasa, the daimyo of Arima, was as yet no enemy of the Christians. He had taken over the domain from Arima Naozumi, an apostate who had failed in his promise to the Shogun to purge his ancestral religion from the land. Matsukura put Fr. Navarro under house arrest but gave him the privilege of receiving visitors, saying Mass and hearing confessions. In the meantime, he strove to get shogunal permission to merely deport the well-beloved priest to Macao rather than burn him alive as the Shogun’s law demanded, often summoning him to his fortress, Shimabara Castle, to question him about the Catholic Faith.[3] Father Navarro’s answers clearly moved Matsukura profoundly, for at their final meeting, he, the lord of the castle, escorted the priest of that banned ‘foreign’ religion outside, fell to his knees, put his palms to the earth, and bowed his head to the ground—a gesture that could have cost him his life.
Shimabara Castle. Photo by Luke O’Hara
The Shogun’s answer—death by fire—arrived on the eve of the Feast of All Saints. On the morning of 1 November, 1622, Father Navarro said Mass “with an abundance of tears,” apparently informed by the Spirit that this was his last day in this Vale of Tears, for he had not yet been told of his death sentence. Matsukura gave him the word two hours before noon.
Father Navarro “put his chaplet around his neck to prepare himself for the final combat” and stepped outside into a windy autumn day.[4] He would be burned along with three companions—Jesuit brothers Dennis Fujishima, 38, and Pedro Onizuka, 18; and layman Clemente Kyuemon— none of whom could keep up with 64-year-old Fr. Navarro in his zeal to reach the site of his holocaust. The condemned Christians were accompanied by fifty armed soldiers to the execution-ground outside the gate of the city, all of them presumably sprinting to keep up with that old Italian priest burning with an unquenchable love of the Lord he would soon meet face to face.
Reaching his appointed stake, he took off his hat and bowed to it before the guards tied him to the instrument of his death as they would the three others. When Matsukura arrived, the firewood was lit, and a gust of wind engulfed Fr. Navarro’s mantle in flame, yet he used all his strength to encourage his companions to hold on for the crown of glory. When his ropes had burnt away, he fell onto his side shouting, “Jesus! Mary!” These holy names he shouted to his last breath, with the hair-shirt he had worn for penance clinging to his skin, revealed under his burnt-away mantle. His three companions, too, held on to the end, all worthy sons of St. Francis Xavier.
Fr. Navarro in the flames. Note his hair-shirt. (from Cardim, Elogios)
In 1623 a new Shogun took over: Tokugawa Iemitsu—sadist, pederast, and such an enemy of Christ that it seemed he was possessed by a demon. Matsukura Shigemasa he soon won to his side, turning him into a persecutor who tortured his Catholic subjects by mutilation, branding, and boiling them in the hot sulfur springs atop Mount Unzen.
Matsukura fell mortally ill in 1630 and summoned 200 apothecaries to bring their cures to Shimabara Castle. In a panic he took all their concoctions together, creating a brew that boiled noxious in his stomach and drove him to a frenzy in which he hallucinated demons from hell. Or were they hallucinations? For stones came flying from out of nowhere in the corridors of Shimabara Castle, and ‘long, supernatural howls’ resounded within its walls.[5]
Mephistopheles flying over Wittenberg, in a lithograph by Eugène Delacroix (Public Domain)
On 19 December, Matsukura fled to the hot-springs town of Obama, where he slipped into a bath whose water his servants had tested and found merely tepid. Yet their raving master felt himself burning, and he thought that the fire inside him could devour his surroundings. This was his final frenzy.[6] The mountain atop which he had tortured and killed so many Christians in boiling sulfur-springs towered over his bath-house; perhaps as he died he was hearing the voices and seeing the faces of the martyrs he had murdered.
I wonder if he saw the face of Father Pietro Paolo Navarro looking benignly down at him as he bowed his forehead to the earth to do the priest reverence on that bygone day at Shimabara Castle? Or did he see him wrapped in flames, cheering on his companions in martyrdom? Either memory, with a wriggle of repentance, might have saved poor Matsukura Shigemasa’s soul.
In October 1619, the Shogun Hidetada had just left Kyoto, the Emperor’s capital, when he was jolted by the news that the city’s jail held a great many Christians. Hidetada ordered that they all be burned alive, regardless of age, station or sex.
Kyoto had been visited by St. Francis Xavier back in January 1551. Hoping to meet and convert the Emperor, Padre Francisco had made a long, grueling winter’s trek much the length of Japan only to find that, without fine silk on his back and rich gifts in hand, he could not set foot inside the Imperial Palace. His empty hands and ragged clothes earned him only disdain from the palace guard.
His fellow Jesuits would soon return to plant Gospel seeds in that town, though — seeds that would find good soil in many a noble heart.
Thus, come Christmastide of 1618, the Feast of the Nativity was celebrated with all due devotion and solemnity by Kyoto’s Catholics — despite the fact that Hidetada’s father, Ieyasu, had banned the Faith in 1614 and Hidetada, now in command, was bent on expunging it with hellfire.
Outraged, some local pagans assailed the governor with complaints that the Christians neither feared the lord of all Japan nor respected his (murderous) laws.
At first, Kyoto’s governor, Itakura Katsushige, gave little credit to those complaints, for he knew his Christians to be model citizens. His son, however, fresh from the shogun’s court, warned of Hidetada’s wrath should he hear of Itakura’s leniency. Thus began a roundup of Christians in Daiusu-cho, a district known for its Catholic artisans and samurai.
Thirty-six of them were rousted out of their homes, strung together on one long rope, and dragged like dumb animals through the streets to Kyoto’s jail — a rank, pestilential hell like all Japanese prisons of the day, merely a holding pen for those condemned to die.
Meanwhile, on July 8, Hidetada arrived for a three-month stay at his villa on the outskirts of Kyoto, and the anti-Christian frenzy heightened. Edicts against harboring Christians were posted, and the jail soon held 52 Catholics.
Apparently, Hidetada, at leisure in his walled retreat, was unaware of all this until he started back for Edo (now Tokyo), but when he heard the jail was full of Catholics, the death sentence exploded out of him.
On the morning of Oct. 7, the 52 were led out into the sunshine and loaded onto nine wagons to be paraded through the city as a terror to would-be Christians before their immolation.
The men and youths went in the foremost and hindmost wagons, while in the middle rode the women and small children. A crier led the parade proclaiming Hidetada’s decree:
The shogun … wills that these people be burnt alive because they are Christians. And Hidetada’s will would indeed be done, but it would redound to the horror and admiration of all Kyoto and the glory of the Almighty.
For “a great multitude of people” lined the streets to watch the unfolding atrocity, and the martyrs echoed the shogun’s charge with, “It’s true! We die for Jesus! Blessed be Jesus!”
Perhaps it was Itakura’s high regard for the Christians that guided his discharge of the shogun’s orders. In executions by fire, the Japanese normally tied the condemned to simple stakes, but in this October holocaust, Itakura’s men had set up crosses, not stakes, on the dry riverbed at Rokujo-ga-hara — 27 crosses “so artfully finished and polished that it seemed they ought rather to be adored by the Christians than serve as instruments to put them to death.”
The prisoners were tied, not nailed, to the crosses two by two — men with men on the left, women with women on the right. And in the middle of the row of crosses, mothers were crucified with their small children.
Thus, Magdalena had her 2-year-old daughter, Reina, in her arms. Maria held Monica, age 4. Mencia held Lucia, age 3. Marta held Benito, age 2. Rufina held her precious 8-year-old Marta, who was blind. Tecla, who was about to give birth to her sixth child, was crucified with 4-year-old Lucia in her arms, Thomas, age 12, on her right, and Francisco, 9, on her left — five on one cross. Her other children, 13-year-old Catarina and Pedro, 6, hung on the next cross.
Contrary to the usual custom, “slow fire,” Itakura ordered an abundance of firewood to be piled up around the crosses so as not to draw out the martyrs’ agonies.
Evening came. The wood was lit. Flames erupted around the Christians on their crosses.
Mothers with little ones in their arms caressed their faces to soothe their pain. Cries of “Jesus!” resounded from the inferno. Gasps of horror from the crowd mixed with hoots from the executioners.
Catarina cried to her mother on the next cross, “Mama, I can’t see anything.”
“Call to Jesus and Mary, my beloved,” Tecla answered as she held Lucia on her swollen belly. “We’ll see them soon in Paradise.”
Richard Cocks, an English Protestant who witnessed this holocaust, wrote:
“I saw fifty-five martyred at Miyako [Kyoto], at one time when I was there, because they wold not forsake their Christian Faith, & amongst them were little Children of five or sixe yeeres old burned in their mothers armes, Crying out, Jesus recive their soules.”
For seven days, Itakura’s men guarded the martyrs’ charred remains lest local Christians steal away with them for proper burial and veneration. Historian François Solier reports that a large, resplendent comet appeared that first night and a great light shone in that same patch of sky the next night. Another historian records “supernatural fires” on high.
Perhaps Itakura’s men stood guard with eyes uplifted, wondering and perplexed at those signs in the heavens. Signs, no doubt, that Christ himself had been there among the martyrs, the Conqueror of Death claiming victory from those hellish flames.
This article by Luke O’Hara appeared in the National Catholic Register.
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 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.
Statue of Father Julian Nakaura in his old age in the courtyard of the Shimabara Catholic Church
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 twofold: 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–Arima Harunobu and Otomo Sorin. The mission was prepared immediately.
For the four young ambassadors—Julian, Mancio, Martin and Miguel—the journey was no pleasure-cruise. On the second leg—the voyage to India—some of the sailors died of fever; it nearly killed one of the four ambassadors, too. They narrowly escaped shipwreck passing through the Singapore Strait; they spent a night cocooned in blankets tied to poles, being carried by porters through an Indian jungle, to be confronted in a clearing by a furious swordsman growling in a language none of their party understood, and all of them unarmed.
But when the four adolescents from Kyushu hit Lisbon in August of 1584, they were the hottest personalities in Catholic Europe. Like the Beatles on tour they were awaited at the docks by an adoring mob; their guardians kept them on board ship until evening so they could be slipped ashore discreetly. From Lisbon to Rome and back again, honor guards, trumpet fanfares and cannon and mortar salutes would greet them in town after town.
They were received in private audience by Philip II, King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Flanders and much of the Americas. He gave each of them a hug: these boys had sailed halfway round the world braving mortal dangers for the sake of God’s Church. Pope Gregory XIII also greeted them with hugs, had them to dinners in his private quarters and sent messengers to inquire about their welfare three times a day.
Gregory fell ill during their stay and suddenly found himself nearing death. Having received the Last Rites he asked about Julian, who had come down with a fever some days before, and hearing that the boy had recovered, was relieved; Gregory XIII died two hours later. Sixtus V succeeded him; the four boys were seated around the new Pontiff at his coronation.
But when the four—now young men—disembarked at Nagasaki in 1590, they were coming back to a Japan very different from the one they had left eight and a half years earlier. That Japan had been made up of largely-independent feudal states, their own lords all ardent Catholics; in the new Japan all was under the heel of one man, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had banned the Christian religion in 1587 and ordered all the priests out; most had gone underground instead. This was the beginning of three centuries of persecution—the grisliest persecution Christianity has ever seen, anywhere.
Arima Harunobu, the lord of Arima, had bravely invited the Jesuits of Nagasaki into his domain after Hideyoshi’s crackdown, but his castle-town of Arima was becoming an ever-more-risky place for a Jesuit school, so they moved the Seminario first to another town in his domain, and then out of Arima entirely, deep into the interior of Amakusa-shimo Island, to the south. While at Rome the boys had asked for admission to the Society of Jesus; they finally entered on July 25, 1591, and after two more years of schooling, made the Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. During their novitiate, Hideyoshi’s spies would sometimes come sniffing round; the four would then disperse and become refugees, holing up in farmers’ huts in the backwoods. This too was training for a darker time to come.
On February 5, 1597, Hideyoshi had twenty-six Franciscans, Jesuits and lay Catholics crucified in Nagasaki for the crime of being Christian; only his providential death in 1598 gave the Japanese Church a breathing-space, as well as the larger world: his planned invasion of China would be cancelled, and Japanese forces were withdrawn from Korea. The future began to look promising again for the Japanese Church; but the Tokugawa Shoguns who succeeded Hideyoshi saw to it that being Catholic in Japan would become, instead, an ever-surer sentence of death. In 1612 Tokugawa Ieyasu promulgated his first edict against Christianity. Arima Harunobu was executed that year, and the Arima domain—long Japan’s Catholic haven—became a testing-ground for the Shogunate’s plan to exterminate the Faith.
Julian had been ordained a priest in 1608 and was one of those who went underground when all religious were ordered deported to Manila or Macao in 1614. For some years his base was the port-town of Kuchinotsu at the southern tip of Arima; he probably kept a boat tied up in the harbor for quick escapes to the Amakusa Islands, southward across the Hayasaki Strait. In 1622 Julian wrote a letter to Father Nuño Mascarenhas, S.J., whom he had met in Rome on his mission to the Pope more than three decades earlier. It gives a hint of the sort of life he was living in Kuchinotsu:
Still the persecution continues unabated; because of it we cannot take a minute’s rest. I cannot even calmly finish writing this letter to Your Excellency. That is because, news having arrived that the lord of this domain has begun a new, special persecution, a believer has come to tell me that I am to be moved to a safer place. The [feudal] lord hopes to uproot the teaching of the Gospel from this domain and see to it that not even one person remains who maintains the Faith and thus violates the command of the Tenka—the ruler of all Japan.
The “special persecution” had already killed twenty-one believers in Kuchinotsu; but Julian adds, “Thanks to the Grace of God, I still have sufficient health and strength of spirit to shepherd the Christian charges of the Society of Jesus.” He signs the letter, “Worthless servant / Julian Nakaura.”
Strength of spirit and body he would need, and in superhuman abundance. The Shogun’s police wanted broken clerics to parade in front of the Christians of Nagasaki, Arima, Omura, and the other stubborn Catholic holdouts: they hoped to start a landslide of apostasies that would empty Japan of Catholics.
This was their method of persuasion: they would coil their victim tightly in rope from the feet up to the chest, his hands tied 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.”
On the Eighteenth of October, 1633, Julian faced the test. He had been in prison for almost a year awaiting his turn as his fellow-servants of God were taken away to the pits, dug where the Twenty-Six Martyrs had been crucified thirty-six years before. On that autumn morning, he was herded with seven other men—Jesuits and Dominicans—up the hill called Nishi-zaka to the execution-ground overlooking Nagasaki Bay. Julian was about sixty-five years old and no longer robust: he had largely lost the use of his feet, and the climb was a struggle for him; but on arriving, he faced his executioners and shouted, “I am Father Nakaura, who went to Rome.” He was determined to die; he had shoved the fact into their faces, a challenge to do their worst. They would.
One of Julian’s brethren broke down: Christovaõ Ferreira, the Jesuit Provincial, gave the signal of surrender after five or six hours of the pit. The executioners came and told Julian. Ferreira was his superior: if he had apostatized, why not just give in? Julian didn’t flinch: he was there to die. He endured the unendurable, and he no doubt prayed. Perhaps he remembered that day in Rome when, as a teenage boy, his heart bursting with hope, he had ignored strict orders to stay in bed and, despite a high fever, insisted on joining the other three boy-ambassadors for their first audience with the Pope. If only he could have His Holiness’s blessing, he told them, he would get well, and he refused to be restrained by either his anxious doctors or all the Jesuits in Rome. He did take his place in the ambassadorial party and, shivering, marched forward and knelt before the Pope. Gregory XIII conferred his blessing on faithful Julian and ordered him back to bed immediately. This voice the boy obeyed.
In the pit atop Nishi-zaka, that sacred slope overlooking Nagasaki Bay, Julian hung on to the end. God took him home on the Twenty-first of October in the Year of Our Lord 1633. No “Worthless Servant” he.
(Blessed Julian Nakaura was beatified on November 24, 2008; he is counted among the 188 Blesseds known as Peter Kibe Kasui and 187 Companions, Martyrs.)
Text and Photo Copyright 2005/2012 by Luke O’Hara
(A version of this story first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor.)
“Behold the faith of Arima’s Christians. For the honor and glory of the Lord and as a testimony to our faith we now die, knowing that there is no salvation other than through Jesus Christ.”
Anonymous, “The Christian Martyrs of Japan,” 17th century (photo: Public Domain)
In 1613, the castle-town of Arima in southwestern Japan held a remarkable procession on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, one surely witnessed in breathless silence by all the host of Heaven.
Arima was the seat of a fervently Catholic domain whose fervor was fueled and stoked by her stalwart confraternities. Now, in 1613, that fervor was needed more than ever, for Arima Naozumi, Arima’s feudal lord, had expelled all Catholic clergy from his domain as a sop to the lord of all Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was bent on expunging the Faith from his domains — and Arima was in his sights. Ieyasu ordered Naozumi to purge his forefathers’ faith from Arima or lose his lordship of it and all the perks he was accustomed to.
Arima Naozumi, christened “Miguel,” was a third-generation Catholic. In 1612, Ieyasu had given him lordship over Arima after Naozumi connived with his illicit wife to depose his father and procure his execution. The wife, a ward of Ieyasu’s who despised Christ, had been the ruler’s ‘gift’ shoved down Naozumi’s throat in a deal signed with his own apostasy and sealed with divorce from his licit, Catholic wife, who now lived imprisoned in a hut somewhere in a mountain wood.
As if to numb his conscience, Naozumi had already slaughtered his little half-brothers, pious Catholics, ages 6 and 8 — like Herod, he feared these innocents as rivals to his rule.
Now, though, Naozumi had Ieyasu’s own hound at his heels — Hasegawa Sahioye, Governor of Nagasaki — who was threatening to denounce him if he didn’t force apostasy on eight of his prominent Catholic samurai or produce some blackened corpses as real proof of his fealty.
Thus, on Sept. 30, Naozumi called the eight into his mountaintop castle to show them Hasegawa’s threatening letters and plead for some merely-symbolic sign of apostasy — he didn’t care, he assured them, what they went on believing in their hearts. All eight demurred.
On Oct. 1 he called them in one by one and begged their cooperation: his domain was at stake, not to mention their own lives and those of their families. He reminded them that St. Peter had denied Christ three times and yet had been forgiven.
Five of them gave in, agreeing to invoke Amida Buddha with a Buddhist chant.
Yet three stood firm: Adrian Takahashi Mondo, Leo Taketomi Kan’emon, and Leo Hayashida Sukuemon.
Naozumi sent to Nagasaki for instructions. Hasegawa’s answer came back on Oct. 5: burn them alive, along with their wives and children. That afternoon, eight were taken to a house where they would be imprisoned awaiting death: Adrian Takahashi with his wife Joanna; Leo Taketomi with his son Paulo; and Leo Hayashida with his wife Marta, their 18-year-old daughter Magdalena (a consecrated virgin), and their son Diego, 11 years old. (Leo Taketomi’s wife, Monica, and their 9-year-old daughter were excluded, despite their pleas to join the martyrs.)
That night the Catholics of Arima began to gather in their thousands, surrounding the prison with rosaries and candles in hand. To Naozumi, looking down from his fortress on high, it must have been an unsettling scene, as if that infinite array of stars that God had shown Abraham were turned topsy-turvy, shining up at him with indomitable faith.
By the morning of Oct. 7, the crowd had grown to 20,000 souls or more.
Oct. 7, 1613, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary — the eight appointed martyrs marched out into the sunshine bedecked in the kimono of the Confraternity of the Rosary, flanked by Marians with lit candle in one hand and rosary in the other. They headed for the shore of the Ariakè Sea, where a wooden structure awaited them. The crowd of 20,000 marched along, carrying their rosaries.
At one point they had to cross muddy ground. A certain man offered to ferry young Diego across on his back. The boy refused, saying, “Christ Our Lord didn’t ride on horseback or in a palanquin to the torture of the Cross.” He then assured the man of his hope in “certain and secure rest.” Unable to restrain his tears, the man picked up the boy and carried him.
At the execution-ground stood a house of sorts with eight wooden columns in the center surrounded by branches and kindling. A stockade ringed its perimeter.
Leo Taketomi climbed onto a pile of firewood to address the thousands awaiting the holocaust. Many of his words were drowned out by the noise of the crowd, but his speech went something like this:
“Behold the faith of Arima’s Christians: for the honor and glory of the Lord and as a testimony to our faith we now die, knowing that there is no salvation other than through Jesus Christ, and that this present life is of little account. All of you also know this, as you have come here with such fervor. My brethren, my parting hope is that you preserve your faith unshaken to the very end, not sparing your own lives.”
Leo stepped down; the Eight were tied to their stakes; the firewood was lit. As a storm of flames erupted around the martyrs, the chief of a confraternity held up a picture of Christ’s scourging to strengthen them. The crowd sang the Credo, the Our Father, and the Ave Maria as the fire raged.
Diego’s ropes were the first to burn away: he ran to his mother, shouting three times, “Zézusu! Maria!”
“Look up at Heaven, my son,” she said, and the boy fell dead. Next, his sister Magdalena found her arms free of the burning ropes: she reached down to pick up some flaming embers and held them above her head as if to venerate the fire that would send her home. At this, the gasping crowd made the sign of the cross. Finally, Leo Hayashida boomed the name of Jesus through the flames; his shout shook the crowd as a whirlwind of fire devoured all the holy martyrs.
To send them home.
This article appeared in the National Catholic Register.
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 nevertheless.
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.
