Priests sent to build local Churches
When the of walked into in 1865, the priest who met them belonged to a society founded two centuries earlier with one clear purpose: to plant Churches in Asia that could stand on their own, with their own clergy.
The Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris grew out of Rome's concern for Asia in the seventeenth century. After the persecutions in Japan from 1595 and the banning Christianity, the Holy See had become critical of the old missionary system run under the patronage of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, and regretted especially the lack of a native clergy.In 1658 three French priests, François Pallu, Pierre Lambert de la Motte and Ignace Cotolendi (Disputed: 1658 or 1660), were named the first vicars apostolic for Asia.In 1659 Propaganda Fide gave them instructions that are still quoted (Disputed: IRFA attributes them to its secretary Francesco Ingoli): do not try to persuade these peoples to change their rites, customs and manners unless they are plainly contrary to religion and morals. "What could be more absurd than to carry France, Spain, Italy or some other country of Europe into China?"Their aims were clear: to form a local clergy, to adapt to the customs of the country, to stay out of politics, and to refer every important decision to Rome.
In 1663 the seminary opened in the rue du Bac in Paris, with letters patent from Louis XIV; the Society was formally approved on August 10, 1664.The house at 128 rue du Bac has been its mother house ever since.
Japan entrusted to Paris
In the nineteenth century the popes gave the Society one mission field after another. Pope Gregory XVI entrusted Korea and Japan to it in 1831 (Disputed).Japan was still closed, so the Society's priests waited at its edge, on the Ryukyu Islands. Fr Théodore-Augustin Forcade began a two-year stay there in 1844; in 1855 the Society managed to send priests again, and from then until October 1862 five missionaries lived there in turn, two or three at a time, at Ameku and then Kume (now part of Naha). In all, eight French priests of the Society stayed in the kingdom in those decades.Among them were Prudence Girard, Eugène-Emmanuel Mermet-Cachon, and .
When the treaty ports opened in 1859, Girard went to Japan as interpreter to the French consul general and built a church in Yokohama in 1862. In 1863 Furet came to , followed by Petitjean, and together they built Oura, consecrated in February 1865.The Society had primary responsibility for Japan, and that until the Spanish Dominicans arrived in 1904 every Catholic group that came was French in origin.Petitjean was made vicar apostolic of Japan in 1866; Japan was then divided into two vicariates apostolic (1876), three (1888), and in 1891 into four dioceses.
What they did
Petitjean heard the words "All of us here have the same heart as you"., Poirier and , who went into the dysentery villages of 1874 and organized the nursing.De Rotz, under whose direction and her companions began their community of women.Pelu at , Matrat at Himosashi and .Many of them were also builders: missionaries skilled in architecture, such as de Rotz in Urakami and and Pelu in the , passed their techniques on to Japanese builders like the Kawahara family of Sotome and , who went on to design and build more than thirty churches.
And they kept faith with the Society's founding aim. Priority was given to forming a Japanese clergy: twenty-three priests were ordained between 1882 and 1894, after fifteen years of training and a year of work as catechists.Among the sons of the Urakami exiles who became priests was Iwanaga Sanjirō, son of the last baptizer of Urakami.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Disputed: year Japan was entrusted to the MEP, 1831 (IRFA history, with Korea; also the Académie des sciences d'outre-mer paper)or 1838 (Japan Tourism Agency panel).
- Solid: founding year, which IRFA gives as a sequence: 1658 (vicars apostolic), "founded in 1660", 1663 (seminary) and 1664 (approval).