The first Japanese bishop, 1927

On October 30, 1927, the feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI consecrated Januarius Hayasaka Kyūnosuke as bishop of Nagasaki in St Peter's Basilica. The co-consecrators were Archbishop Jean-Baptiste-Marie Budes de Guébriant, superior general of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and Archbishop Jean-Baptiste-Alexis Chambon of Tokyo.¹²Hayasaka had been appointed on July 16 (Disputed).¹³He was the first Japanese to be made a bishop, and he was given Nagasaki, the oldest and largest Catholic community in Japan.³

The decision followed a policy Pius XI had set out the year before. In the encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae of February 28, 1926, he told the missions: "Before everything else, We call your attention to the importance of building up a native clergy," and warned that without it the apostolate would become "an obstacle and an impediment to the establishment and organization of the Church in those countries."⁴Its superior general stood beside the Pope at the altar.¹

A German text of the Pope's homily, reproduced by a mission-history blog, shows how he understood the day (Unverified).⁵He said that he seemed to feel "the breath of the spirit of a Saint Francis Xavier", and of "the souls of so many martyrs who shed their blood for their faith in your homeland." He honored all who had worked "since 1889" to form a native clergy. And he praised the hidden Christians in plain words: the heroes of the faith who, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, while missionaries were refused entry to the land, had stayed so firmly true to the Catholic faith "in hiding, without priests."⁵He closed by hoping that the new bishop, "as the first Japanese shoot on a Japanese bishop's chair," would bear fruit, "and that your fruit should remain."⁵

Hayasaka was installed at Nagasaki on April 25, 1928 (Unverified).¹In 1644 Mancio Konishi, the last missionary still at work in Japan, had been martyred.⁶