A road to forgiveness when no priest could come
The Catholic Church teaches that a sinner is reconciled to God through contrition, confession to a priest, and satisfaction. Contrition comes first: sorrow for sin out of love for God, which the Church calls perfect contrition.In Portuguese the word is contrição; the Christians of sixteenth-century Japan said .
When 's threatened to leave Japan without priests, the question became urgent: how could the faithful be forgiven if there was no one to hear their confession? The Jesuit vice-provincial Pedro Gómez had written in 1597 that missionaries should teach the way of perfect contrition everywhere, and use "this heavenly medicine" freely, since a priest would so often be absent.A directive from the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, which reached Japan in 1598, set out a new direction: where confession was impossible, perfect contrition should still be made.On that basis a short book was prepared, Konchirisan no ryaku ("A summary of contrition"). Bishop Luís de Cerqueira, the Jesuit bishop of Japan, approved it and had it printed in in 1603; Gómez is thought to have had a large part in it.The book explains its own purpose: there will be times when no father is present, or when his language cannot yet be understood, or when confession is wished for but cannot be had, and "for such times this road of konchirisan has been laid down."
It became one of the supports of the hidden Church.Not one printed copy of the 1603 book survives; every known copy is a handwritten one, copied out in secret.Manuscripts were kept among the of the , and Nagasaki lineage: at , in the Sotome museum, in the Tenri library, and in the archives of the ; Urakawa Wasaburō printed one in full.A copy was handed down at Shitsu in Sotome.Scholars note that the and communities did not receive it, and that this may be one reason their tradition developed differently.
The prayer in the book, the Konchirisan no , was learned by heart.In it was prayed at the most painful moment of all. The parish history remembers the headman's house, later bought for the first church, as the unforgettable place where the villagers trod on the (sacred images trodden on to prove one was not a Christian) against their will while reciting "the orasho of konchirisan", the prayer of contrition.The historian Kikuchi Noritaka sums up its place: it was the support of the hidden Christians' hearts through the long time without priests, and one of the forces behind the revival of the faith in the modern era.