A merchant family in Mexico City
Felipe de Jesús was born Felipe de las Casas in Mexico City, the son of Spanish parents.His father, Alonso de las Casas, came of a family from Illescas, a town between Toledo and Madrid, and his mother, Antonia Martínez, came from Salamanca.The couple married in Seville and then emigrated to New Spain.In Mexico the father prospered as a merchant with business correspondents in Manila, and he served as a Familiar of the Holy Office.
The family was large: the father's will names five other sons and four daughters.Two of the boys later became Augustinian friars.Juan went to the Philippines and was killed there by the arrows of non-Christian natives in 1607.Francisco made his profession in Mexico City on October 4, 1609, and lived to see his brother honoured as a beatus.
The boy studied the rudiments of Latin.An engraved life of the saint, made in Mexico in 1801, shows him studying grammar with the Jesuit Fr Pedro Gutierrez at the Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo.He was remembered as a restless youth.
Two beginnings in the Franciscan life
Felipe first tried religious life as a novice of the Discalced Franciscans at the convent of Santa Bárbara in Puebla, but he did not persevere.He had taken the habit there at sixteen.Leaving the novitiate, he went back to his free and easy life.His disappointed parents sent him to the Philippines with goods and money, to trade in Manila and to grow up.He sailed from Acapulco.The Manila galleon was said to be able to enrich a whole kingdom.
In Manila the young merchant, rich and free, spent his money on pastimes and a loose life.Flatterers helped him waste his fortune, and when they abandoned him he repented.He knocked at the door of the Franciscan convent of Santa María de los Ángeles in Manila and was received into the order a second time.His novice master was Fr Francisco Montilla, whose virtues were later recorded in the Franciscan Martyrology.
The convent's book of professions records that Felipe made his vows on May 22, 1594, before the guardian, Fr Vicente Valero.At his profession he gave up the family surname "de las Casas" and took the name "de Jesús".A novice could choose a new saint's name at profession, but this one chose instead the Holy Name of Jesus itself.
As a young friar he was obedient and poor, kept silence, and attended the Divine Office in choir by day and by night.Above all he worked in the infirmary and put the care of the sick before his own health.It was said that he outdid even the oldest and strictest friars in fasting, choir and penance.
Sent home to be ordained
Felipe's parents wanted their son to come back to Mexico to be ordained a priest, because there was then no bishop in the Philippines.His father won permission from the Franciscan commissary general in Mexico, Fr Pedro de Pila, with the support of two inquisitors of Mexico.When the order reached Manila, the friar was told under obedience to sail on the first galleon.It was not quite three years since his profession.
In 1596 he embarked for New Spain on the galleon San Felipe.On the voyage he gave his own food to the poor ship's boys and stayed calm and cheerful in danger.Instead of reaching Mexico, the ship was driven onto the coast of Japan and wrecked in Tosa.Among the Franciscans aboard he was counted as a choir cleric, travelling with the lay brother Juan Pobre.
The road to Kyoto
After the wreck, Felipe and the lay brother went with the ship's envoys to Osaka, where he stayed at the Franciscan convent of Belén.He had felt unwell on the journey and fell behind the others.Pedro Bautista then called him to Kyoto, where he hoped to be ordained by the bishop of Japan.
He walked from Osaka to Kyoto barefoot and without money, and his only companion was a boy, Thomas Kozaki, later one of the Twenty-Six Martyrs.On the way an innkeeper gave him a meal, which the friar, new to the country, took to be charity given for the love of God.When he could not pay, the man took the small undershirt he wore, even though the boy explained that he was a poor religious.
Arrest and the march to Nagasaki
Felipe was at the Franciscan convent in Kyoto at the beginning of December 1596, when guards were posted around it.He had come there on business, and he was taken as if he were a member of the community.He was not on the list of prisoners, and the Spaniards of the galleon, with their general Landecho, urged that he should be freed.The judges would not spare him, because he had come on the San Felipe.
The accounts of the martyrs remember him as unwilling to be parted from his brothers: "Far be it from me that I should go free, when all my Brethren are in chains".When part of his ear was cut off, he said that even if the tyrant ordered his release he would not accept it.On the last stretch of the road he looked pale and worn out.Shortly before his death he told a Spaniard who met him on the way that he thanked God for numbering him among his martyrs.
First to die
Felipe de Jesús was the first of the Twenty-Six Martyrs to die at Nagasaki on February 5, 1597.On reaching his cross he knelt and embraced it, blessing the lost galleon.He said: "The San Felipe was lost so that Fray Felipe might be won."
His cross stood thirteenth in the row, near the middle of the line.Its seat was fixed too low, so his body sank and the iron ring at his neck began to choke him.The rings on his legs tore the flesh of his shins.He called again and again on the name of Jesus.Seeing his agony, the magistrate had him lanced before he suffocated, and he was pierced with three lances, one in the chest and two in the sides.The last of the martyrs to reach Japan was the first to die.Far away in Mexico, his mother had prepared white vestments for his first Mass.
The bodies hung on their crosses for more than two months.One night in April 1597 two Augustinian friars, Mateo de Mendoza and Diego de Guevara, took the young friar's body, put it in a chest and carried it to their convent in Manila.One of them had been his confessor, and the body's present whereabouts are unknown.Devotion divided his remains into small relics, and traces of his blood stayed in Manila while pieces of his body went to Mexico.
Patron of Mexico City
After the beatification, Mexico City took Felipe as its own patron.On January 12, 1629, the city council voted him patron of the city with a yearly feast.The new honours were celebrated on February 5, 1629, in the presence of the viceroy, the Marquis of Cerralvo, and Archbishop Francisco Manso.A procession carried the saint's image to the cathedral on silver litters paid for by the silversmiths' guild.
His mother, Antonia Martínez, was still alive and walked in the procession at the viceroy's right hand.Once wealthy, the family had fallen into poverty, and the city council gave her maintenance and a house.In her will she named the martyr first among her children and called him a native of the city.She died about twenty days after the celebration.According to tradition, her son appeared at her deathbed to help her die well.
February 5 became a holy day of obligation in Mexico City, kept with Vespers, Mass and sermon in the cathedral before the viceroy, the archbishop, the city and the religious orders.The cathedral gave him the first of its side chapels, with a full-size carved image of him crucified with the iron rings, as at Nagasaki.Relics were kept in and around Mexico City, among them a thumb at the convent of San Jerónimo and a cloth soaked in his blood at the sanctuary of Our Lady of los Remedios.
In 1666 six Capuchin nuns from Toledo opened a convent dedicated to San Felipe de Jesús in houses given by Simón de Haro and his wife, Isabel de la Barrera.Its church stood until 1861, when it was pulled down under the Reform laws.In Mexico he was hailed as the creole protomartyr.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birthplace. his mother's will calls him a native of Mexico City, and the cathedral font bears the same claim, but some said he was born in 1572 at Chilapa, where his father was corregidor (Boero 1869 translator's appendix).
- Birth year. Medina searched the baptismal books of Mexico City's three Spanish parishes for 1570 to 1589 and found no entry; he thought the books were lost after the flood of 1580.Yuuki gives "probably May 1572".A plate caption in Montes de Oca's 1801 picture-life gives a baptism on May 1, 1575, by conjecture.A cathedral entry of May 11, 1586, for a foundling named Felipe was once taken to be his, but Medina and Archbishop Payo Enríquez de Rivera rejected it.
- Age at death. Bouix says 23, Yuuki 24, a 1597 relation by Fr Pedro de Alcántara 25, and Medina 26 to 30 by conjecture.
- Father's name. Medina and Boero give Alonso de las Casas; Yuuki gives Antonio.
- Date of profession. Medina and Yuuki cite the convent register for May 22, 1594; Boero's translator gives May 20, 1591.
- Where he was sent to trade. Kenners, Bouix and Charlevoix say "China"; most accounts say Manila.
- Soldier. Fr Martín del Castillo's approbation says he had been a soldier, and Medina's own summary says he went to Manila enlisted as one, though Medina admits the Lives do not say so.
- Silversmith. some biographers and preachers say he worked as a silversmith; Medina doubts it.
- Eldest child. Medina thought he was probably the eldest of the children, but was not certain.
- Choosing martyrdom. later accounts say he refused freedom.Pedro Bautista's own Christmas letter says he wanted to leave with the general but could not unless it was arranged with Chōsokabe, and Yuuki says he was imprisoned when he asked to return to Manila with Landecho.
- Holy orders. preachers and a cathedral painting called him a deacon, and du Monstier's Martyrologium Franciscanum (1638) called him a priest, which Medina blames on a copyist.Fernández and Bolland list him as an acolyte; Medina concluded he was neither deacon nor subdeacon, though he may have had the minor orders.
- The "flight" story. verses printed in Mexico after the beatification said he fled from prison out of fear, with St Agatha appearing to strengthen him.Medina found no support in the early writers and thought the story came from confusion with Fr Jerónimo de Jesús, who hid on his superior's orders.
- Number of lances. most accounts give three, but Kenners says each martyr had two executioners and two lances.Medina thought the third lance was used to hold the sagging body up.
- Position of his cross. thirteenth counting from the east, as Fr Frois has it, or fourteenth counting from the west.
- Meeting the bishop. Bouix and Solier say he went to Kyoto to be ordained by the bishop of Japan, but Medina doubts he ever met Bishop Martins.
- Beatification year. a plate caption places it in 1627, while Medina links it to the 1629 celebration in Mexico.
- His mother's death. the day in February 1629 is unclear in the source text.
- Capuchin church. Boero's translator gives its dedication as June 11, 1673; Medina says the dedication began on June 10 with an octave.