Two hundred and five martyrs
On July 7, 1867, Pope Pius IX (ピウス9世) declared 205 martyrs of Japan to be Blessed.They had died between May 22, 1617 and September 3, 1632, and they came from every class of society and from all four religious orders then in Japan: the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits and Augustinians.Among them were 21 Dominicans, 18 Franciscans, 5 Augustinians and about 33 members of the Society of Jesus, with many Japanese laypeople beside them.Their deaths fall into 32 separate martyrdoms, and alongside the priests and brothers were tertiaries, catechists, hosts and household servants.
The papal decree on their martyrdom described nobles of royal blood, wealthy matrons, young virgins, old men and children of three and four.Some were burned at a slow fire, some tortured with boiling sulphur water, some frozen in icy pools, and some crucified head down.
The Brief of beatification named as leaders the Dominicans Alfonso Navarrete, Aloysius Flores and Angelo Orsucci; the Franciscans Pedro de Ávila, Pedro de la Asunción and Ricardo de Santa Ana; the Augustinians Pedro de Zúñiga, Hernando de San José and Bartolomé Gutiérrez; the Jesuits Carlo Spinola (カルロ・スピノラ) and Francisco Pacheco; and the laypeople Joaquín Hirayama Díaz (平山常陳) and Lucía de Freitas, with their companions.Among the laity were Gaspar Koteda (籠手田) and Magdalena Kiyota, of the royal houses of Bungo (豊後), Arima (有馬) and Hirado (平戸), and the Korean family of Antonio.
Witnesses in Manila, Macao and Madrid
Because no inquiry could be held in Japan, the evidence for the 205 was gathered abroad, from exiled Japanese and from Portuguese and Spanish merchants.When official accounts of the martyrdom of 1622 reached Rome, the Congregation of Rites had the nuncio at Madrid and the bishop of Macao open a formal inquiry.It gathered its first sworn testimony in the mid-1620s.
Cardinal John Dominic Spinola, bishop of Lucca, took up the cause as a kinsman of the Jesuit martyr.Through the cardinal, Fr Virgilio Cepari SJ became postulator and widened the cause to martyrs of the other orders.In 1627 Pope Urban VIII, at the request of the King of Spain and the procurators of the orders, extended the inquiry to each martyr named in the depositions.Remissorial letters went out that year to the archbishop of Manila and to the bishop of Japan resident at Macao.
In 1628 an apostolic process was drawn up at Madrid before the archbishop of Antioch, then nuncio in Spain and later Pope Innocent X, and the processes held overseas were inserted into it.Further solemn processes followed in 1630 and 1632, in Manila and Macao, with 61 more witnesses.
Over 300 confessors are said to have died from early 1629 to the end of 1632, yet only two more martyrdoms from those years entered the 205, because the processes closed for lack of lawful witnesses.A modern Japanese study points out that the 205 were mostly foreign religious and their helpers, concentrated around Nagasaki (長崎), that the Japanese Church had no part in the process, and that no one who died after 1632 was included.
A cause left unfinished
The first stage of the cause ended in 1687 with a decree that martyrdom was proved on the part of the tyrant, that is, from the persecutors' hatred of the faith.A special congregation had met by leave of Pope Innocent XI in 1677, and early in 1687 the cardinals voted and the decree was approved.
Petitions came from the Republic of Genoa, the kings of Spain and Portugal, Emperor Leopold and Empress Eleonora.The republic's letter to Pope Clement IX of November 22, 1667 recalled that Spinola had entered the Society at Naples at twenty, gone to Japan at thirty-two, and died burned at fifty-eight after four years in prison.
Pope Alexander VIII wished to conclude the cause without a separate examination of miracles, following ancient custom, but he died after a short pontificate before this was done.Benedict XIV later called it a causa celeberrima, a most famous cause, yet it then lay silent for almost two centuries.
Revived after 1862
The canonization in 1862 of the 26 martyrs of 1597 brought the old cause back to life.The vicars apostolic over Japan and the nearby regions reported abundant graces in Japan after that canonization.The postulators general of the four orders, Vincenzo Aquarone OP, Bernardino dalle Grotte di Castro OFM, Nicola Primavera OSA and Giuseppe Boero SJ, asked Pius IX to resume it.
The pope named a special congregation of five cardinals, which met in 1866: Costantino Patrizi, prefect of Rites, with Clarelli, Reissach, Panebianco and Bizzarri.An old question returned before it: whether miracles had to be proved for martyrs whose martyrdom was already clear.
In December 1866, as the French garrison was leaving Rome, Pius IX announced that in July 1867 he would beatify a large number of Japanese martyrs.He timed it with the eighteenth centenary of the death of St Peter, to which he invited all the bishops.
The decrees of 1867
Two decrees and a papal Brief in the spring of 1867 cleared the way for the beatification.On February 26, 1867, after Mass in his private chapel, the pope went to the great hall of the Collegio Romano and published the decree that the martyrdom was proved.The same decree accepted four signs or miracles: the incorrupt bodies and habits of Pedro de la Asunción and Hernando de San José, a manuscript book saved from water, a ship saved from wreck, and the cure of Sister Petronilla Orsini from epilepsy.
On April 13, 1867, a general congregation at the Vatican voted unanimously that the beatification could safely proceed.Pius IX waited to pray, then on the feast of St Catherine of Siena went to the Augustinian convent and declared in its Biblioteca Angelica that the cause could safely go forward.That decree is dated April 30, 1867.It explained the choice of the Augustinian house by the many martyrs who had embraced that order's way of life.The feast was chosen because St Catherine was the one "whose footsteps many unconquered women among the Japanese martyrs trod in the path of virtue" (translated).
The Brief of beatification is dated at St Peter's on May 7, 1867, in the twenty-first year of the pontificate.It recalled that over a thousand were counted as having died for the faith in that long struggle, but that inquiry had been possible only at Madrid, Manila and Macao, which proved the martyrdom of 205.The martyrs could now be called Blessed and their relics shown for veneration, though not in solemn processions, with a yearly Office and Mass in the houses and churches of the four orders.The Brief also expressed the hope that God would reopen Japan, closed for so many years, to the preachers of the Gospel.
The day in St Peter's
The solemn beatification took place in Rome on July 7, 1867, when Carlo Spinola was placed among the Blessed with 204 other martyrs.The ceremony fell during the eighteenth centenary of St Peter's martyrdom and was witnessed by about five hundred bishops and thousands of the faithful from all parts of the world.A painting of the martyrs was used in the ceremony and shown in the basilica.
The Brief allowed the four orders to hold solemn celebrations in their own churches within a year of the ceremony in St Peter's, on days set by the local bishops.The postulator Giuseppe Boero also compiled an account of their deaths for the beatification.
Echoes in Japan and Mexico
In Japan, the missionaries hoped the beatification would bring tolerance, but persecution followed instead.A blow fell on them just after they had celebrated the feast of the 205 for the first time, the year after the beatification in Rome.Those who had worked for the cause saw the canonization of 1862 and the beatification of 1867, coming within so few years, as a sign of Providence and a hope that Japan would reopen to the Gospel.
The event was also felt in Mexico.A Discalced Carmelite friar from that country translated the postulator's account into Spanish from its French version.He believed the beatification had special importance for his homeland, which in earlier times had fitted out ships in its Pacific ports to carry missionaries to Asia.He counted fifteen of the new Blessed as sons of Mexico: Bartolomé Gutiérrez, an Augustinian, and Bartolomé Laurel, a Franciscan, were born there, and the other thirteen were born in Europe but lived and worked in the country.The Augustinian, born in September 1580 of noble and wealthy parents, took the habit at sixteen and worked in Japan for eighteen years.Laurel professed as a Franciscan in Mexico, followed Fr Francisco de Santa María to Manila and beyond, and was burned at Nagasaki on August 17, 1627.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The number of Jesuits among the 205 is given as 33 in the 1868 English account and in Boero's catalogue, but as 34 elsewhere in the same English account; Profillet counts 13 Jesuit priests, 12 Dominican priests, 10 Franciscan priests, 5 Augustinian priests and one Japanese secular priest.
- The date of the decree on martyrdom under Innocent XI varies. voted on January 25, 1687 and approved on February 3, 1687 in the Latin decree; January 23, 1687 in the Italian version of the 1867 decree; and February 5, 1676 in the narrative of the Mexican Spanish edition of Boero, which its own Latin appendix contradicts.
- Innocent XI's special congregation is dated March 20, 1677 in the Latin Brief but March 30, 1677 in its Italian version.
- The remissorial letters are dated November 20, 1627 in the 1867 decree, while Pagès gives September 18, 1627.
- The processes of 1630 and 1632 are counted as one in Manila and three in Macao, but the Italian version of the 1867 decree counts one in Manila and two in Macao.
- The early inquiry is described as producing 32 depositions in 1625, or as two processes of 1624 and 1625 with 33 witnesses; the witnesses found outside Japan are put at more than seventy in the Italian edition of Boero and more than eighty in the Spanish one.
- The Brief is dated May 7, 1867 and the solemn beatification took place on July 7, 1867; Spae gives May 7, 1867 as the date the martyrs were raised to the altars.
- Tronu, citing the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, gives the martyrs' deaths as 1597 to 1637 and says 166 of them were from Nagasaki, while the Brief and the 1868 English account give 1617 to 1632.
- Stober presents 205 as the total number martyred in the early 1600s, whereas the Brief says over a thousand were recorded and 205 is the number beatified.
- The catalogue in the Spanish edition dates the first martyrdom to May 23, 1617, against May 22, 1617 in the text.
- Pagès lists Paul Nangaichi, Diogo Chimura and Domingos Tamba as doubtful martyrs who were not kept in the final process and so were not among the 205.
- Wilberforce's list of beatified Dominicans dates Orfanel to 1662, an evident misprint for 1622.