Two Marys
Visitors to meet two statues of the Virgin, and they are easy to confuse.
The first is small and indoors, at a side altar. It came from France with the church, and it is the one the villagers asked for on : "Where is the statue of Santa Maria?"It has its own page.
The second greets visitors at the entrance: a white figure at the church gate.Its name, cut into the base, is Nihon no Seibo, "Our Lady of Japan."It is younger by two years, and it exists because of the first.
The statue at the gate is the discovery turned into stone: an offering from people who had hidden their faith for two centuries, made public the moment they could. It is a small monument, and it is easily passed on the way in. It marks the date, in two calendars and two languages, when Japan's hidden Christians came out to meet the Church, and it was the last thing the bishop who received them greeted before he died. A hundred and fifty years on, the date on her base became a feast of Our Lady for the whole of Japan.
A gift "for God and Santa Maria"
After the meeting of March 1865, from Urakami and beyond began to come to Ōura in secret.According to the Church Trust, one group of visitors, from a district it does not name, brought a large sum of money as an offering. and the other priests hesitated to take it. The believers answered, the Trust's account says: "This is not for you. It is for God and for his Mother, Santa Maria. If you use it to adorn the church, we will be content."
Petitjean decided to use the gift to order a statue of the Virgin from France, to stand at the church gate as a memorial of the discovery.The prefecture's English-language feature says the statue was obtained from France in the year after the discovery, paid for by donations collected by the Urakami faithful, and that it is of white marble.(Which community gave the money is therefore stated by one source and left open by the other: in detail.)
2 June 1867
The statue was set up at the gate on 2 June 1867, at the ceremony marking the discovery.On the front of the base is inscribed, in Japanese, "Keiō 1, 3rd month, 17th day / Our Lady of Japan / In memory of the discovery of the faithful." On the back, in Latin: IN MEMORIAM INVENTIONIS CHRISTIANORUM DIE XVII MARTII A.D. MDCCCLXV, "in memory of the finding of the Christians, 17 March 1865."The Latin uses the Western date; the Japanese uses the Japanese calendar for the same day.
The timing is worth noticing. The statue went up about two years and three months after the meeting it commemorates.A few weeks later, in July 1867, officials raided the in Urakami, and the long persecution known as the began.
A bishop's thanksgiving
The man who set the statue up was no longer only the parish priest of Ōura. When Pope Pius IX heard of the discovery, the Paris mission's obituary of Petitjean says, he wept for joy, and on 11 May 1866 he named Petitjean bishop and vicar apostolic of Japan. Petitjean was consecrated at Hong Kong on 21 October 1866.So in June 1867 it was as bishop that he placed Our Lady of Japan before his church and held the great ceremony of thanksgiving for the discovery.
The statue was turned toward the city. A Catholic writer notes that it stands facing the hill of , where the died in 1597, the martyrs to whom Ōura itself is dedicated.From the gate of the martyrs' church, Our Lady looks across the harbour to the place of their death.
The church behind her faces the same way. Because the good land in the foreign settlement was already taken by merchants, Father Louis Furet levelled a steep, rocky, north-facing slope into three terraces to build it, so the front of Ōura looks north, toward the martyrs' hill. The prefecture's heritage writers note that this was probably chance, because the exact place of the martyrdom had not yet been identified when the church was built.Chance or not, the Catholics of Nagasaki have read it as a sign.
From the gate to the door
The statue did not always stand where visitors now meet her. Petitjean first set her up at the gate. After the discovery the church soon became too small for the Christians who came out of hiding, and it was greatly enlarged; the Paris mission's report for 1879 says that the church at Nagasaki "had become very cramped, so it was extended on every side and doubled." During that rebuilding Our Lady of Japan was moved to the main entrance.A recent survey found that the first church was about two thirds the size of the present one, and that the side altar where the discovery took place survives as it was.So the two Marys still keep their old places in the story: the small one indoors where the villagers found her, and the white one at the door, greeting whoever comes in.
Watching the harbour
On the snowy day of the mass exile from Nagasaki, the prefecture's feature recalls, the priests could only look down from the church as the Urakami Christians were loaded onto steamers in the snow; the feature adds that the statue, too, "was looking on," praying for their safe return.That is a writer's image, not a record, but it explains why the statue matters to Nagasaki's Catholics. It stands for both the joy of 1865 and the grief that followed.
The last pilgrimage
Petitjean lived under her gaze for seventeen more years. In his last illness at Ōura, in 1884, Bishop nursed him for more than forty days. One afternoon Petitjean asked to be carried onto the veranda "to greet the holy images." Facing the great cross he had set up in the garden, with the white statue of Our Lady he had placed at the church door on his right, he followed a Pater, an Ave and some invocations, and asked to be taken in. "There," he said, "our little pilgrimage is over."He died on 7 October 1884 and was buried in the sanctuary of Ōura.
A feast for Santa Maria
For a century and a half the Church in Japan kept 17 March, the date cut into the statue's base, as a day of remembrance of the discovery, celebrated by choice where people wished.The bishops asked Rome to make it a feast of the whole Church in Japan under the name of Our Lady. On 28 October 2013 the Congregation for Divine Worship approved "Our Lady of the Discovery of the Japanese Christians" as a feast proper to Japan, to be kept from 17 March 2015, the hundred and fiftieth anniversary.The bishops called the discovery the "starting point" of the revival of the Catholic Church in Japan, proof that the faith had been handed on through more than two hundred and twenty years without priests.
The feast's opening prayer remembers the hidden Christians who "endured cruel persecution and transmitted their faith for seven generations," and asks that their descendants, "through the guidance and intercession of 'Santa Maria'," may be strong in trouble and walk with courage in the way of faith.The villagers' own name for the Virgin, the name they whispered to Petitjean in 1865, is now in the liturgy of the Church.
On 17 March 2015, Masses were said at Ōura from half past six in the morning until seven at night, so that anyone who wished could hear Mass at the place of the discovery. At the special Mass, Pope Francis's envoy, Cardinal Orlando Quevedo of the Philippines, joined Archbishop Takami Mitsuaki of Nagasaki, and a message from the Pope was read in Latin, asking the faithful to remember the history of the Church in Japan, which moves all who hear it, and to let it make their daily faith shine.