Ordinary people, called by name
At noon on Monday 24 November 2008, in a baseball stadium in the district of , a cardinal sent from Rome read a letter from Pope Benedict XVI in Latin and declared 188 Japanese men, women and children "Blessed".It was the first beatification ceremony ever held on Japanese soil.The people it honoured had died between 1603 and 1639, under the Tokugawa ban on Christianity, in places as far apart as Yonezawa in the snowy north and in the far south.
The bishops of Japan were careful to say who these people were. Of the 188, four were priests and one was a religious brother; the other 183 were lay men and women: samurai, farmers, fishermen, catechists, whole families.The committee that prepared the cause put it plainly. Most of them, it wrote, would probably have lived quiet lives as ordinary people and vanished from history if there had been no ban and no persecution. They did not act as heroes or victors. They were simply people who had come to know God very closely.That is the thread of this story: a Church that remembered its humblest members by name, and four centuries later gathered to say those names aloud.
A long road to a short ceremony
The cause was opened formally in 1981, by decision of the general assembly of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, shortly after Pope John Paul II's visit to Japan that year.It took a quarter of a century. In 2007 the theological commission of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the beatification, and on 1 June 2007, at 2 pm in Rome (9 pm in Japan), Pope Benedict XVI gave his formal approval.The Japanese bishops noted that this would be the first time a beatification ceremony itself took place in Japan, and expected its influence to be large, inside and outside the Church.
On 8 September 2008 the bishops' conference announced the venue: the Nagasaki Prefectural Baseball Stadium, known as Big N Stadium, at 2-5 Matsuyama-machi.They chose it, they said, because it could hold about 30,000 people and was easy to reach, since many pilgrims were expected from Japan, from the rest of Asia and from around the world.The stadium stands in Urakami, the valley of Nagasaki's old Christian villages, where the exploded in 1945. On the coordinates in our Atlas log, the stadium lies about 380 metres from the Hypocenter Monument in the same district of Matsuyama-machi.The bishops never claimed the site for its symbolism; their stated reasons were capacity and access.But a reader who knows Urakami will feel the weight of the place.
On Sunday 23 November, the eve of the ceremony, Pope Benedict spoke of it after the Angelus in St Peter's Square. In Italian he told the crowd that 188 martyrs, "all Japanese men and women killed in the first part of the 17th century", would be beatified in Nagasaki the next day, and assured them of his "spiritual closeness". Then he added in English: "Let us also rejoice in anticipation with our brothers and sisters in Japan, who celebrate tomorrow in Nagasaki the beatification of the Venerable Servants of God Peter Kasui and his 187 companion martyrs. May their victory in Christ over sin and death fill us all with hope and courage!"The Holy See's liturgical office had already listed the rite for "lunedì 24 novembre 2008, a Nagasaki (Giappone) nel 'Nagasaki Big N. Stadium', alle ore 12".
The day itself
The Pope's representative was Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.He read the papal letter and proclaimed, in Latin, that by apostolic authority the martyrs were added to the ranks of the blessed.As the faithful prayed and sang, a portrait of the martyrs eight metres tall and six metres wide was unveiled, and 188 doves were released, one for each martyr.
The homily was given by Cardinal Seiichi Shirayanagi, then 80 years old. He explained the traditional Catholic meaning of martyrdom and told the stories of the new Blessed. Then he turned to modern Japan, where more than 30,000 people a year were taking their own lives, and said that the martyrs were crying out to the living to think deeply about the basic questions: what it means to live and to die, what a human being lives for, whether the purpose of life and the meaning of suffering can be found. He ended with an encouragement: God and the martyrs are calling to us, "怖れるな" ("Do not be afraid").Cardinal Saraiva Martins praised the new Blessed as "a trustworthy starting point and a public witness of faith" in a world anxious about its future, and entrusted those who ask their intercession to the protection of Mary, Queen of Martyrs.
The bishops' conference later reported more than 30,000 participants and more than 3,000 volunteers.The number of people who asked to attend had been several times the first estimate, so the organisers had to build the venue outdoors at greater cost than planned. Donations from the faithful covered the whole: 132,191,408 yen given against 128,767,229 yen spent, with the small surplus kept for the future work of the committee for causes of saints.Christian Today noted that with these 188, Japan's Blessed numbered 393, adding to the 205 martyrs beatified in 1867.
Who the 188 were
The list is led by Fr Peter Kasui Kibe (1587 to 1639), the man from the Kunisaki peninsula in Bungo who walked across Asia to Rome, was ordained there in 1620, came home to serve persecuted Christians, and died in Edo in 1639.His own story has its own page on this site. Beside him stand Fr , one of the boy envoys of the who had met Pope , and Fr Diogo Yuki Ryosetsu, remembered as the last missionary of Osaka.
But most of the list is made of lay people, and the bishops' committee wrote short lives of them, group by group, so that Catholics would know them before the ceremony.A few of those lives show the whole.
In Yonezawa, on 12 January 1629, 53 believers died in the snow at three places, Kitayamabara, Nukayama and Shindogadai. Most were samurai families, with their servants and the farmers of their lands; the youngest was a one-year-old child and the oldest were elderly couples. For about fifteen years, with one exception, no missionary had lived in Yonezawa. The faith there was kept by the lay people themselves, led by Louis Amakasu Uemon, a retainer of the Uesugi house who had been baptised in Edo by Fr Luis Sotelo, and who taught the faith to his own sons and to other samurai families. The committee called it "a community of faith made by the hands of the faithful". In 1927 the Church acquired the execution ground, and in 1929, the three hundredth anniversary, set up a stone cross there with life-sized figures of Christ, Mary and St John.
On , Gaspar Nishi Genka, baptised as a two-year-old in 1558, gave up his post as a steward when the Christian lords of the island left in 1599, and stayed on with his wife Ursula as a catechist. He was beheaded on 14 November 1609 at Kurose no Tsuji, the crossroads where Fr was said to have raised a great cross in 1563; Ursula and their eldest son John died at about the same time. Their son Thomas, a priest, was martyred in Nagasaki in 1634 and canonised in 1987. The of kept watch over the family's graves all through the closed centuries, and in 1993 a large cross was raised again beside them.
Diego Kagayama Hayato, born in 1566 in Takatsuki castle, served and then Hosokawa Tadaoki, rising to chief retainer at Kokura while living openly as a Christian. He was beheaded outside Kokura on 15 October 1619. His daughter Miya, her husband Ogasawara Genya, their nine children and four servants died together in Kumamoto on 30 January 1636. The letters they wrote to relatives and friends before they died still survive, and every year a memorial Mass is held beside their grave on Hanaokayama.
In Nagasaki on 28 July 1633, Michael Yakuya, the last head of the city's Misericordia , climbed the steps to singing "Praise the Lord, all you nations". The placard carried before him gave his crime: he had collected alms and used them to help martyrs' widows and orphans and the missionaries. He died in the flames. With him went the Jesuit brother Nicholas Fukunaga Keian, the first missionary to suffer the pit (anatsurushi). Asked whether he had any regret, he answered that he regretted only that he had not made all the Japanese, the shogun first of all, into Christians. The last words anyone heard from him were the Litany of Loreto.
The same pit received Fr Julian Nakaura on 18 October 1633, with seven others. One of them, Fr , gave way; the rest gave their lives. Julian died on 21 October. His last recorded words were "This great suffering is for the love of God."
What the Church remembers
The 188 now have a feast day in Japan, 1 July, with their own texts for Mass and for the Liturgy of the Hours.The second reading for that day is from Fr Kibe's letter from Lubang island, describing his long attempt to reach Japan; the Church gave it the heading "the wind of God's grace blows; trusting in it, we raise the sail" (神の恵みの風が吹き、それに信頼して帆を張る).In June 2008 the bishops approved a prayer for the canonisation of the martyrs, which asks that the witness of Peter Kibe and the 187 "may become the hope of all people living in the world".
The bishops also explained why they wanted the beatification. It was, they wrote, a chance to remember many forebears who staked their lives for the basic human right of freedom of religion, not as a political movement against the state, but purely from the standpoint of believers.After the ceremony they wrote that beatification was achieved, and a new road toward canonisation now began.
That is perhaps the best way to read the day in Urakami. The martyrs of the seventeenth century were mostly people history would have forgotten: a man who ran a charity for widows and orphans, a catechist couple on an island, a samurai's family under house arrest, a one-year-old child in the snow. Japanese Christians kept their names through the centuries of hiding. In 2008, in a city that had known both persecution and the bomb, the whole Church stood up and said those names in public.