A church for Urakami
The Christians of the Urakami villages had their own church, dedicated to St Clare, from 1603, and a resident Jesuit priest from 1607.The priest said Mass and heard confessions, but there were few baptisms, because the villagers still went to the cathedral in Nagasaki for baptism.The church stood about half a league from the city, near the Ōhashi Bridge.
Destroyed with the last churches
Santa Clara survived the destruction of the Nagasaki churches in 1614, but it was pulled down in the second wave ordered by the governor Hasegawa Gonroku from late 1619.A Jesuit letter of 1620 lists it among the last churches destroyed that year.
Remembered by the hidden Christians
More than two centuries after the church was destroyed, the Christians of Urakami still remembered it.On August 30, 1865, two mothers, Clara and Marina, invited the priests to a feast in their hamlet of Kawakami, where, Fr Petitjean noted, a fine church of St Clare had once stood and a few stones of it remained."And it was among these ruins that the Christians still loved to come and pray at night" (translated), especially on the great feasts.In 1867 Fr Laucaigne named his fourth secret chapel in Urakami Sainte-Claire in memory of the old church, whose stair up to its platform could still be seen.On February 27, 1867, 56 people received the sacraments there.When the secret chapels were raided, the first taken at Sainte-Claire was an old man who had already been imprisoned for the faith ten years before.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- When it was destroyed. from late 1619 according to Hesselink, in 1620 according to the letter of Fr Mateus de Couros.
- Where it stood. Hesselink places it near the Ōhashi Bridge, while the accounts of 1865 place its ruins at Kawakami, the hamlet facing the Ōura church; the facts do not say whether these are the same spot.
- Who served it. a Jesuit report of 1612 gives it a resident Jesuit priest from 1607, while Shimizu sets its building in 1603 in the context of Franciscan work from 1594.