Story
Returning a visit
When John Paul II stepped out at St Mary's Cathedral in Tokyo on the afternoon of 23 February 1981, he chose to begin with history. "Since the Tenshō boy envoys," he said, "many Japanese have visited the popes and me. Now, with gratitude, I want to return that visit."Four boys from the had knelt before in 1585.Almost four centuries later, a pope came to them.
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, which keeps the record of the journey, calls it the first visit to Japan by a pope, and says that his words in Tokyo, Hiroshima and deeply moved not only Catholics but many people in Japan; above all the "Peace Appeal" he addressed to the whole world from Hiroshima, which showed his mission as a pilgrim of peace.
A pilgrim of peace
He came, he said on arrival, "as a pilgrim of peace", with a message of friendship and respect for every Japanese person.He greeted the Emperor and the government and the representatives of Japan's religions, and then turned to the Catholics: he honoured, he said, "your deep faith, shown over generations by good works and the witness of martyrdom." Only days before, in , martyrs had been beatified, many of them Japanese; "Blessed Tomonaga and his companions" had brought honour to Japan.
The bishops' chronology then lists a crowded first evening: a meeting with the clergy, a visit at the Catholic Center to Brother Zeno, the Conventual Franciscan from Poland like the Pope himself, a meeting of lay representatives, and an evening with the bishops.
Tokyo, in the rain
On 24 February he met Christians of other churches and leaders of other religions, and was received by the Emperor at the Imperial Palace for forty-five minutes; in the afternoon he met Prime Minister Suzuki Zenkō.At 3.15 p.m. he celebrated Mass at Kōrakuen Stadium. Despite the rain, the bishops record, 36,000 people came from all over Japan; he preached in Japanese."Peace I leave with you," he began, "my peace I give to you", and he spoke of how the sign of peace at every Mass goes out in a great wave to families, nations and all humanity.That evening 6,000 young people filled the Nippon Budōkan.He told them he loved to talk with the young wherever he went, about what we live for and where we are going; that progress alone could not satisfy the human heart or bring it peace; and that they should open their hearts to the poor, the hungry, the sick and the excluded, wherever they were, because they were their brothers and sisters. There were still bridges to build, he said: bridges of friendship and brotherhood, of justice, love and peace.He ended the day with the diplomatic corps.
Hiroshima
At 7.20 on the morning of the 25th he visited , which the bishops note he had himself asked to see.The rector, Father Joseph Pittau, greeted him as the Pope's own university, founded at the order of St Pius X, who in 1906 asked the Jesuits for a college in Tokyo, fulfilling 's dream of a Catholic university in Japan's capital.The Pope joked about a lecture at seven in the morning and students who had risen at six, and said that before 1978 he had two wishes connected with Japan: to go to the land of , and to come to Sophia.Then he flew to Hiroshima.At the cenotaph in the Peace Memorial Park, before some 25,000 people, he gave his Peace Appeal.
"War is the work of man. War is destruction of human life. War is death."Nowhere, he went on, did these truths impose themselves more forcefully than in Hiroshima, at the Peace Memorial; Hiroshima and Nagasaki would always be joined as the only cities in the world that had borne the ill fortune of being a reminder of what man can destroy.Then came the sentence he repeated at the head of each part of the appeal: "To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future.""To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace."
He met the press, visited the museum, gave a lecture on "technology, society and peace" to scientists and scholars at an event of the United Nations University and the city, and visited the Catholic Memorial Cathedral for World Peace before flying on to Nagasaki.
Fifteen priests in Urakami
He landed at Nagasaki at 5.10 that evening in falling snow, and at six he celebrated Mass in , ordaining fifteen men to the priesthood.He called the ceremony the summit of his apostolic journey, because the successor of Peter was ordaining priests in one of the places farthest from his see of Rome, and so giving living witness to the universality of his mission.He told them that he was glad to speak in Nagasaki, "a city whose history is marked by glory and tragedy", to the descendants and heirs of people who had overcome tragedy and won glory.
The cathedral had been rebuilt after its destruction by the atomic bomb in 1945 (see The Atomic Bomb and Urakami, 9 August 1945).
The martyrs' Mass in the snow
On the morning of 26 February he celebrated the Mass in memory of the martyrs at the municipal Matsuyama stadium in Nagasaki, before 57,000 people, and baptised the new Christians.(The chronology says 76 baptisms, the homily page 75.)
His homily began with the hill nearby. , he said, which the first Christians of Japan called the "holy hill" or "hill of the martyrs", "we could also call Nagasaki's Mount of Beatitudes."Around the cross there he saw the twenty-six holy protomartyrs, the 205 martyrs beatified by Pius IX and more than four thousand companions whose martyrdom was documented, and now the sixteen just beatified in Manila, who had died at Nishizaka in 1633, 1634 and 1637.He quoted the Dominican Giordano Ansalone before his judges: "the reason that unites us is the love that He and I have for you."They came from five nations: nine Japanese from Kyushu and , four Spaniards, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Filipino.
Then he spoke of the . He had come, he said, a century after Japan reopened its doors to the Christian message, as a pilgrim. The faithful of a hundred years before, whose ancestors had kept the martyrs' faith in secret for two centuries, had meditated on the Gospel through the mysteries of the Rosary and had known that far away there was someone called the "Papa". "Today the Papa has come," he said, to honour the tradition of the Nagasaki faithful and to tell their descendants directly that he loved them in the heart of Jesus Christ.
On the hill
That afternoon, at 3.20, he stood before the monument of the at Nishizaka and visited the museum.He wished, he said, to be one more of the many pilgrims to this hill, where so many Christians had offered their lives. "Christians died in Nagasaki, but the Church in Nagasaki did not die." It had had to hide, but the teaching of Christ was passed from parents to children, waiting for the day the Church could be seen again.He prayed that the monument would go on speaking to the whole world about love and about Christ.
He went on to .
Kolbe's friary and the hill of grace
At 4.35 he reached the Conventual Franciscan friary at Hongōchi, founded by his fellow Pole Maximilian Kolbe.To visit it, he said, had long been his special wish. He linked the martyrs he had honoured that afternoon with this "modern martyr" of love for one's neighbour, who had given his life at Auschwitz for a married man, the father of two children, and said that there was no contradiction in Kolbe's life, only the same love under different circumstances.Nagasaki remembers that he was moved to tears by Kolbe's relics.The next year he would canonise Kolbe.
His last call was at Megumi no Oka, the home for atomic bomb survivors run by the at Mitsuyama, in powdery snow."I could not leave the city of Nagasaki without coming to Megumi no Oka," he said. The survivors' lives were themselves "the most convincing appeal" against war and for peace.He remembered with gratitude the founder, Sister Magdalena Esumi, who had died two months before.
Farewell
That night, at the Catholic Center in Nagasaki, he said goodbye. He thanked the Emperor, the government, the bishops and the people, and asked the Catholics of Japan to keep "the ideals of St Francis Xavier, who brought the spirit of Christian love and service to this country."At ten o'clock his plane left for Anchorage.
Thirty-one years later, in 2012, the bishops would recall the words he left them: "the foundation of the Church in Japan is the blood of martyrs."