Blessed Carlo Spinola SJ

On the morning of 10 September 1622, on the hill outside Nagasaki, a priest bound to a stake looked among the crowd of prisoners waiting to be beheaded. A widow, Isabel Fernandes, saluted him; her husband, Domingos Jorge, had been burned alive three years earlier for giving him shelter. The priest did not see her small son behind her, and called out, "Where is my little Ignatius? What have you done with him?" She lifted the four-year-old in her arms. "See, my dear son, this is Father Charles, who made you a child of God; ask his blessing." The child folded his hands. The priest, unable to lift his bound hands, raised his eyes to heaven and then looked down on the boy with an expression of joy, and the crowd cried out.¹

The priest was Carlo Spinola, of the Society of Jesus. The story is told in the Life of Blessed Charles Spinola by the Jesuit Joseph Broeckaert, published in English in 1868 for his beatification and drawn, Broeckaert says, from the life written by Spinola's kinsman Fabio Ambrogio Spinola.¹What follows is the road that led him to that hill.

He was born at Genoa in 1564, of one of the great families of the Republic, a son of Ottavio Spinola, count of Tassarolo.¹²His uncle, Cardinal Filippo Spinola, was administering the diocese of Nola, near Naples, and the young man's future in the Church seemed assured.¹

Then, Broeckaert writes, news came that changed his life. On 15 July 1583 the Italian Jesuit Rodolfo Acquaviva, of a family as distinguished as the Spinolas, was killed in India in hatred of the faith. "To die for the faith, to shed his blood for Jesus Christ, seemed to him supreme happiness."¹He asked to enter the Society. The Cardinal hesitated and gave evasive replies; the nephew kept writing; and at last, in December 1584, Carlo entered the novitiate at Nola.¹

He studied in Rome under the celebrated mathematician Christopher Clavius, the scholar behind the Gregorian calendar; the Nipponica entry by Isomi Tatsunori notes that Matteo Ricci was his fellow pupil.¹³He was ordained priest at Milan in 1594.²Broeckaert describes him at Milan directing a sodality at the Brera college and working to found a college at Cremona.¹

The road to Japan tested him. The Heibonsha encyclopedia, in the entry by Ide Katsumi, gives the outline: he sailed from Lisbon in 1596, was driven to Brazil, went on by way of Puerto Rico, was captured by an English ship on the way back to Lisbon and released in London. In 1600 he sailed from Lisbon again and, by way of Macao, reached Nagasaki in 1602 (Keichō 7).²

Broeckaert's chapters on these voyages, drawn from Spinola's own letters, are a story of storms, of a ship nearly lost between Brazil and Portugal, and of an English vessel that "bore down" on them.¹On the way he passed the waters where, Broeckaert recalls, the Jesuit Ignatius de Azevedo and his thirty-nine companions had been killed on their way to Brazil in 1570.¹

From Nagasaki he went to Arima.²³Broeckaert writes that documents in the beatification process show that during his years in Japan he baptised with his own hands more than five thousand people.¹

In 1605 he went up to Kyoto, where he served as the procurator, the treasurer, of the Jesuit house.²There, the Nipponica says, while devoting himself to pastoral and charitable work, he set up at the Nanbanji an academy of mathematics and astronomy.³The Digital Daijisen and the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten both record that he taught mathematics and astronomy in Kyoto.⁴Broeckaert adds that he took an active part in the college's astronomical observatory, made missionary journeys out of the city, once nearly drowned when a wretched boat capsized in a river, and suffered from rheumatism afterwards.¹

His favourite work in Kyoto, Broeckaert writes, was a sodality of catechists devoted to works of mercy. It collected alms from wealthier Christians to relieve poor families, care for the sick and save abandoned infants.¹It belongs to the story of the lay confraternities told on our confraternities page, and João Paulo Oliveira e Costa notes that Spinola himself later claimed a part in founding lay confraternities in the Kinai region.⁵

In 1612 he returned to Nagasaki as procurator.²³On 8 November that year he observed an eclipse of the moon at Nagasaki. Ide writes that, combined with the observations of Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits in Macao, his observation established the longitude of Nagasaki, and calls it "the first scientific observation of a lunar eclipse in Japan."²The Nipponica says the same.³Broeckaert, quoting the Jesuit bibliographer Augustin De Backer, notes that the observation was printed in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences in Paris.¹

When the missionaries were expelled in 1614, Spinola stayed in Nagasaki.⁴The Nipponica writes that under persecution he preached to non-Christians and baptised them.³Broeckaert describes his last refuge: falling ill, he moved to the house of a poor Portuguese, Domingos Jorge.¹

On the eve of St Lucy, 13 December 1618, he was to move again. A missionary came to see him, and his host's wife, Isabel, asked for Holy Communion the next morning. His friends advised him to wait a few more hours; he would say Mass before daybreak and leave in secret. Towards midnight, Broeckaert writes, he woke to what he thought were thieves breaking down the doors.¹Spinola, his companion Brother Ambrósio Fernandes, and his host were taken.¹⁶Our The Great Genna Martyrdom, Nagasaki, 10 September 1622 page quotes Spinola's own letter: he was taken at midnight on the night beginning 14 December 1618.⁶

The prisoners were taken to Ōmura.¹²Spinola described the prison in a letter Broeckaert prints. Until late July 1619 he and his companions were kept in a thatched cottage surrounded by palisades and guards; then they were driven into "this more confined prison, twenty-four palms long by sixteen wide, just recently built, like a birdcage, of thick square posts, open to the wind and rain, but safe under God's protection."¹Brother Ambrósio died there "of cold and misery" on 7 January 1620.¹Domingos Jorge was burned alive on 15 November 1619 for having sheltered him.¹

Spinola stayed in Suzuta almost four years.¹²Broeckaert calls it "that slow martyrdom of four years."¹On 28 February 1621 he wrote from the cage to a kinsman, the new count of Tassarolo: "I have suffered much from the cramped space and want of food. Twice have I been seriously ill, and I often thought I should die of exhaustion, but God has preserved my life to enable me to suffer more for his service." At first, he wrote, it was said that they would be banished to China or the Philippines, but since the new prison was built their persecutors said they would be killed by long imprisonment. He saw it otherwise: "Who knows but that the emperor seeing that, instead of wasting away, we are alive and happy, and that this prison of ours inflames all Japan, as with a thousand sermons, will order us to execution?" Meanwhile, he wrote, by night and day they strengthened their souls with exercises of piety and penance.¹Soon afterwards, Broeckaert adds, the Japanese Jesuit Sebastião Kimura joined them, and four Japanese fellow prisoners, moved by what they saw, asked to enter the Society; three more followed, and they made their novitiate in the cage under Spinola's direction.¹

On 9 September 1622 the prisoners were taken from Suzuta to Nagasaki.⁶The next day fifty-five Christians died together: twenty-five burned and thirty beheaded.⁶When Spinola reached his stake, the Life says, he knelt and kissed it, and then intoned the psalm Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, which his companions and the Christians around took up.¹⁶

The beheadings came first, and among them Isabel Fernandes and little Ignatius, who bowed his head without fear.¹Then the fires were lit and kept low. Spinola, whose stake was next to that of the Japanese widow Lucia de Freitas, gave her absolution. Fearing above all that some of his companions might give way, he said to the executioners, "Be not astonished if you perceive any weakness. We are not made of iron, our bodies are mortal, sensible to pain. Still I trust that God will give us strength to suffer courageously for his glory."¹Weakened by four years in prison, he was the first to die. Sparks set his habit alight, and, Broeckaert writes, "he collected himself, and calmly raising his eyes to heaven, offered to God the sacrifice of his life."¹

On 7 July 1867 Pius IX beatified Carlo Spinola with 205 martyrs of Japan, among them Isabel Fernandes, her son Ignatius and Domingos Jorge.¹²⁶The Nipponica calls him a "blessed martyr."³

He had come to Japan as a man of science, the pupil of Clavius, and left in the records of the Paris Academy the first measured eclipse observed in Japan. But the thing he cared for most, his biographer says, was the faith of people like the four-year-old Ignatius, whom he had baptised in a hiding place in Nagasaki, and who knelt for his blessing on the last morning of both their lives.¹