Life
Diogo Yūki came from a samurai family of Tokushima, in Shikoku. The Society of Jesus's biography makes his father a younger brother of the Ashikaga shogun, the line that ruled before .He entered the Jesuit seminary as a boy and, after some ten years of study, joined the Society of Jesus in 1597.
In 1617 he reportedly reached the Christians exiled as far north as Tsugaru, travelling in lay dress and taking the sacraments to them.At guarded mountain passes he concealed his chalice and paten from inspection.
In 1621 he carried news of the jubilee through Ōmi, Mino, Owari, Ise, Kii and Awa.The next year he visited the six provinces of the Gokinai and won about seventy converts.He also carried the jubilee message to Suruga and as far as Edo.
He wrote from Kyoto about the arrests of the missionaries Pacheco, Zola and Torres.His letter to the Jesuit general of December 18, 1625, has been preserved in facsimile.
At his examination the officer Kurōbei, sent by the Nagasaki governors, heard him say that he had survived in forests and caves on herbs and roots so that Christians would not be punished for sheltering him.His companion was the catechist Michael Sōan.
He studied theology at from 1601 to 1604 but came back unordained.In Japan he worked in the central provinces, where the Jesuits remember him as an able and fruitful missionary; he also went to Shikoku, preached to his Ashikaga relatives and baptized several of them.In 1612 he went to to be ordained, but the bishop who was to ordain him fell ill and died.
The sent the missionaries and leading Christians abroad. Yūki went into exile in with the Christian lord Blessed , and about a year later he was ordained a priest in the Philippines.In 1616 he slipped back into Japan and was sent to the Christians of central Japan, where he worked for the next twenty years.In 1619 he and Fr. Bento Fernandes cared for the 52 martyrs of , buried their bodies and wrote the record of their deaths.In 1631 chose the Sendai domain for his own work because Yūki, then working in the Kyoto and Osaka area, had told him about the Christians there.Under the shogun 's persecution Yūki became the only priest left to the Christians of the region,and he is remembered as the last missionary of Osaka.His catechist Soan went with him everywhere.
In 1636 he was caught, in the mountains of Shikoku (sources differ).At Osaka his interrogators pressed him to name the people who had sheltered him. He kept answering that no one had given him lodging and that he had lived in the hills and fields on what he could find. He was so thin and weak that they believed him, and none of his helpers was made to suffer with him.He was condemned to the pit and died at Osaka on February 25, 1636.Soan, who had shared all his journeys, stayed with him to the end and died at his side.
He was beatified in Nagasaki on November 24, 2008, as one of the four Jesuits among the .
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Entry into the Jesuits. The Society's biography says 1597; an earlier, unattributed account says 1595, at Amakusa.
- Disputed: year and place of capture. The Society's biography says 1636, in the mountains of Shikoku; the CBCJ says he was caught "in the mountains of Ōsaka" (大坂の山中); the earlier account says 1635, at Ōsaka-tōge in Awa.
- Solid: day of death. The CBCJ list of the 188 (no. 186) gives February 25, 1636, as does the heading of the Society's biography; that biography's text gives February 26 as the day he was condemned.
- Unverified: details from the earlier account that no opened source confirms: the Takatsuki seminary in 1586; the Fushimi church in 1607; preaching to Hachisuka Iemasa and Ashikaga Yoshitane by name (the Society's biography says only "his Ashikaga relatives"); and his dying "three days later".
- Unverified: birthplace Kawachi. The Society's biography gives Tokushima, in Awa.
- The place of death is given as Osaka, Nagasaki or Ōmura, even though the date February 25, 1636, is widely repeated.
- Sources variously give entry into the Society in 1594, 1595 or 1597.
- Some accounts date his arrest to 1635 rather than 1636.