Story
A petition from Kyoto and Osaka
The first people to ask the Church to honour the of were Japanese. In an archive at Pastrana in Spain there is a document, dated 26 January 1604, in which Peter Gensuke Kano and eleven other representatives of the faithful of Osaka and petitioned the Pope for their canonisation.Hardly seven years had passed since the crucifixions on the hill of .
This page tells how that request was answered, more than two and a half centuries later, and why the answer came at exactly the moment it did.
The twenty-six
On 5 February 1597, on the orders of , twenty-six Christians were fixed to crosses on the hill of Nishizaka above Nagasaki and killed with spears.They were six Franciscans, three Japanese of the Society of Jesus, among them the preacher , and seventeen lay Christians.Twenty-four of them had been arrested in Kyoto and Osaka, had their ears cut, been paraded through three cities and marched through the winter to Nagasaki; two more who had followed them with provisions were added on the road.Pedro Bautista, a Spanish priest, had come to Japan as an envoy of the governor of the Philippines and had been received by Hideyoshi; Paul Miki, from Tokushima, had studied at the Jesuit .Among the lay martyrs were boys: Thomas Kozaki, who had been baptised with his family after seeing how the Franciscans lived, and Louis Ibaraki, who was twelve.Two Jesuits, Francisco Pasio and , went to meet them at Sonogi on the last day of the road, hoping to hear their confessions; Rodrigues was allowed only to greet and embrace them.The words carved today above their monument, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, are those they are said to have sung as they died.
The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints records them in two groups: Paul Miki, a Jesuit scholastic, with two companions, and Pedro Bautista, a professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor, with twenty-two companions.The Roman Compendium printed for the canonisation counted six from the Discalced Franciscans, three from the Society of Jesus and seventeen from the Third Order of St Francis: the lay martyrs were Franciscan tertiaries.
Beatified, then silence
The cause moved quickly at first. In 1627 Pope Urban VIII allowed Mass and the Office to be celebrated in their honour. The Franciscan archive of the Province of St Gregory of the Philippines and Japan keeps the printed concession for the twenty-three Franciscan martyrs, in Latin, dated 14 September 1627.A French notice printed for the canonisation dates the briefs of beatification to 1627; the Japanese bishops' conference says the twenty-six were beatified "in 1627 and 1629".
Then the road went dark. The bishops' conference explains that the cause, begun so promptly in Europe, was suspended because news from Japan stopped coming once the anti-Christian edicts had driven the missionaries out.For more than two centuries Japan was closed. The Church there had once had its own diocese: in 1588 Pope Sixtus V created the diocese of , today's Ōita, and Bishop Martins, the first bishop actually to arrive, reached Japan in 1596, the year before the martyrdom.Now there was no bishop, no priest and no news. Its Christians, where they survived, kept the faith in hiding.
A door opens
In the nineteenth century the door began to move. Pope Pius IX, concerned for the mission to Japan, entrusted it in 1846 to the , and its priest Théodore-Augustin Forcade was named the first Apostolic Vicar of Japan; unable to enter, he had to stay in Hong Kong.After the treaties of 1858, missionaries could build churches for foreigners in the open ports.Father Prudence Girard landed in Yokohama as chaplain to the French consulate, and on 12 January 1862 the first church of the new mission was dedicated there.
Five months later Rome declared the martyrs saints. The bishops' conference, writing for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, put the two events side by side: in the year that missionaries began to enter Japan again, Pius IX canonised the twenty-six martyrs and appealed to the world to pray for the Christians of Japan.
Pentecost in St Peter's
The ceremony took place on Pentecost Sunday, 8 June 1862.Bishops had come to Rome from many countries; the address they presented to the Pope is headed, in its printed Latin, "the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops present at Rome, on 8 June, Pentecost Sunday", when "Our Most Holy Lord Pius IX" celebrated "the solemn canonisation of the blessed Peter Baptist with twenty-two companions of the Order of Minors of St Francis, and Paul Miki with two others of the Society of Jesus, Martyrs of Japan".An Italian booklet described the decoration of the Vatican Basilica for "the solemn canonisation of twenty-seven blessed".
Twenty-seven, because one more saint was proclaimed that day: Michael de Sanctis (Miguel de los Santos), a Spanish priest of the Trinitarians who had given himself in Valladolid to works of charity and to preaching.
Among the bishops was Forcade himself, the first vicar of Japan, who had never been able to set foot in his mission. The bishops' conference notes that he attended the ceremony "despite the disapproval of the French government".
The next day, 9 June, the Pope spoke to the assembled bishops in consistory. He began with joy at having been able "yesterday" to decree the cult and honours of saints to "twenty-seven most unconquered heroes" of the faith, with the bishops at his side.He then turned at length to the trials of the Church in his own day.The bishops answered with their own address, presented the same day.
A flood of books
Europe greeted the new saints with books. The Laures Bunko at lists a remarkable crop from 1862 alone: Léon Pagès's history of the twenty-six "whose canonisation is to take place at Rome on Pentecost day 1862", Bouix's history in Dutch translation, Chapia's Les martyrs du Japon with an appendix on canonisations, Aussem's Dutch life of St Peter Baptist and his companions, Villefranche's German history, a Spanish sermon and Nenclares's Spanish lives of the Franciscan saints.In England the Franciscan Emmanuel Kenners published The Japanese Martyrs, "a brief sketch of the lives and martyrdom of the saints who were canonized June 8th, 1862".
So, in the same year, the faithful of half a dozen countries read of Nishizaka in their own languages, and were asked to pray for Japan.
A church facing the hill
In Japan, the canonisation shaped a building. Girard sent Father Louis Furet to Nagasaki, where he arrived on 22 January 1863, and Father followed that summer; he spent much of his time searching for the place where the twenty-six had died, which was not yet known.The church they built in the foreign settlement at was finished at the end of 1864 and dedicated on 19 February 1865 as the Church of the Twenty-Six Holy Martyrs of Japan.Petitjean wrote that the golden crosses of its towers could be seen from everywhere in Nagasaki, "facing the Holy Mountain", the martyrs' hill.
A month later, on , a group from the village of came into the church and told Petitjean that they shared his faith.The bishops' conference calls it the discovery of Christians "who had been enduring persecution for 250 years".The church raised to honour the martyrs of 1597 became the place where their spiritual descendants came out of hiding.
What it meant
The bishops' conference also turned its readers' eyes to the Church abroad: 150 years ago, it wrote, the Church in France and other countries prayed together for the Church in a remote island nation in the east, and in answer priests of the Paris Foreign Missions and sisters of several congregations came to Japan while the situation was still severe."The Church in Japan," it concluded, "has been connected to the Church around the world from the outset."
The bishops linked that story to the martyrs who came after. Three years before their letter, Peter and 187 companions had been beatified, and they recalled that "as Blessed Pope John Paul II said during his visit to Japan, the foundation of the Church in Japan is the blood of martyrs."The canonisation of 1862 would not be the last for the martyrs of Japan: in 1987 John Paul II canonised Lorenzo Ruiz and fifteen companions, who had died at Nagasaki in the 1630s.
For the centenary in 1962, the hill of Nishizaka received the monument, museum and memorial church that stand there today.Every 5 February the Church keeps the feast of St Paul Miki and companions; it was on that feast, in 2012, that the bishops issued their anniversary letter.
The petition of 1604 had been answered. And the answer, when it came, arrived just as the doors of Japan were opening again.