Brother Juan Fernández SJ

Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian whose Histoire du christianisme au Japon was first published in 1715, tells a story from the streets of Yamaguchi in 1551. Brother Juan Fernández was preaching in a public square when a man from the crowd came up as if to say something to him. Fernández stopped and turned towards him, and the man spat in his face. A few people laughed; most of the crowd was angry. Fernández wiped his face without seeming moved and went on with his sermon as if nothing had happened. "The foolish joy of some and the anger of others," Charlevoix writes, "turned into admiration," and when the sermon was over people went away more convinced by his example than by all his arguments.¹

A young scholar, said to be the ablest man in Yamaguchi, was so struck by what he saw that he asked for baptism the next day, and his conversion led to many more.¹Charlevoix adds that among those who followed was a young man of twenty-five, whom Xavier baptised as Laurent and soon received into the Society.¹The Japanese dictionaries say that Lourenço, the former biwa player who became the first Japanese Jesuit brother, was born in 1526 and baptised by Xavier at Yamaguchi in 1551.¹¹Charlevoix's Laurent appears to be the same man, though his description of him differs (Disputed); our page on Lourenço tells his story.¹²¹¹

That is the thread of this page. Juan Fernández was not a priest and never studied theology. He was the man who spoke for the mission when no one else could, and who kept speaking when he was insulted.

He was born at Córdoba in Andalusia, the son of a rich merchant, and he traded in silk at Lisbon.¹³Nipponica's Isomi Tatsunori says he joined the Society of Jesus in 1547 after witnessing the discipline of penance in a Jesuit house.³Charlevoix tells it more fully: by chance he saw members of a confraternity at their penitential exercise in a hidden chapel of the Jesuits, and was so moved that he went at once to the provincial and asked to be admitted.¹

In 1548, Nipponica says, he sailed for India as a lay brother.³At Goa Xavier noticed him. Charlevoix writes that the saint found in the unlettered young man a rare good sense and a gift for languages, and gave him part of the care of the three Japanese who had come with Anjirō, so that Fernández began to learn Japanese before he ever left India.¹On Palm Sunday 1549 the party sailed: Xavier, Father Cosme de Torres, Brother Juan Fernández, three Japanese Christians and two servants.⁴

They landed at Kagoshima on 15 August 1549.⁴⁵Through the winter Xavier, Torres and Fernández studied Japanese, and with Paulo's help Xavier put together an account of the faith in Japanese written in Latin letters.⁵When the welcome in Kagoshima ended in 1550 and they went north to Hirado, the Portuguese merchants there received them with honour; and Brother Fernández, Schurhammer writes, "who was already able to speak Japanese quite fluently, succeeded in a few days in converting about a hundred inhabitants."⁶

From Hirado Xavier went on with Fernández and the Japanese Christian Bernardo towards the capital.⁶At Yamaguchi they preached in the streets twice a day, Fernández reading aloud the articles of faith from the book made at Kagoshima.⁶Prominent citizens invited the "bonzes of Tenjiku" into their houses, and when anyone spoke to them with contempt, Xavier told Fernández to answer in the same firm way. It seemed to the brother that Xavier was seeking martyrdom, but Xavier told him: "There is in you nothing which you must so fight against as the fear of death."⁶

When the lord of Yamaguchi, Ōuchi Yoshitaka, received them, it was Fernández who read the articles of faith to him, for more than an hour.⁶The audience ended badly, because the book's plain condemnation of the vices of the age offended the lord, and Fernández saw his face go white.⁶Eight days before Christmas 1550 Xavier, Fernández and Bernardo set out through deep snow for the capital. At Kyoto the porter at the palace asked for their presents, and after eleven days they left without an audience.⁶

Back in Yamaguchi in 1551, Xavier, now in fine clothes and bearing gifts as an envoy, was well received; he and Fernández went through the streets correcting the one mistake that mattered most, crying "Do not pray to Dainichi!", and from then on Xavier used the Latin word "Deus" for God.⁶When Xavier left for Bungo he called Torres to Yamaguchi, and the two companions stayed there together.⁴⁶

Later that year Yamaguchi was seized by rebels; Ōuchi Yoshitaka fled and killed himself. Letters from Torres and Fernández told Xavier that the missionaries had been hunted everywhere, blamed for the anger of the gods, and had escaped only "through a miracle." Schurhammer says they found refuge with a pagan nobleman, Naitō, first in a monastery he owned and then in his own house, and that no Christian of Yamaguchi lost his life.⁶⁴

Charlevoix tells of a second danger, in Bungo, where a revolt left the young lord Ōtomo Yoshishige shut up and almost besieged in his palace. Fernández, he says, judging that the greatest service he could do was to tell the lord how things stood, passed through the rebel troops, entered the palace and gave him the news; afterwards the lord said that he had put his trust in the God whom Xavier had preached, as Fernández had urged him.¹(Charlevoix gives no year, and the episode is Unverified.)

Fernández went on to work in Yamaguchi, Bungo, Hirado, Yokoseura and Kashima in Hizen, Nipponica says, chiefly around Hirado.³Through all those years, when the priests could not yet preach in Japanese, it was often his voice that carried the faith. Charlevoix records that in Bungo, when the lord took the visiting Father Nunes into his cabinet for two hours, the priest spoke to him "by the mouth of Fernández."¹Charlevoix says that Fernández came to speak Japanese with an ease and elegance that few natives reached, so that people came to hear him out of curiosity.¹

His Japanese was his great gift to those who came after him. In 1563, after the loss of Yokoseura, he and the newly arrived Luís Fróis withdrew to the island of Takushima near Hirado, where all 350 people were Catholics under Antonio Koteda. There the house and church burned, and with them, our page on Fróis records, Fernández's sermons of many years. They started again: in eight months the two of them composed a short Japanese grammar and two dictionaries, Japanese to Portuguese and Portuguese to Japanese.⁷Kōdansha's biographical dictionary adds that he translated religious books.⁸

Some years before his death, Charlevoix says, Fernández was sent back to Hirado, where the lord was still unfriendly to the faith, and there he worked with the Christian lord Antonio Koteda among the islands of Takushima and Ikitsuki.¹A Portuguese who visited Hirado wrote that at the sight of its Christians he felt that he himself was hardly a Christian; that to see them at prayer one would take them for contemplatives; and that there were no religious in the Church whom they did not surpass in fasting and penance.¹Charlevoix adds that the Church of Hirado, so fervent, was also the first to be persecuted.¹

He died at Hirado, of exhaustion from his labours, Charlevoix says.¹Kōdansha gives the date as the twentieth day of the fifth month of Eiroku 10, aged forty-one.⁸The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's calendar database gives that day as 26 June 1567 by the Julian calendar.⁹

Xavier said it most plainly. On his return to India, Schurhammer records, he told Father Gaspar Barzaeus, the new rector at Goa: "John Fernandez is so virtuous and industrious that you will have to strain yourself if you wish to equal him."⁶And Cosme de Torres, who shared the danger at Yamaguchi with him, used to say, according to Charlevoix, that if Japan owed it to Xavier that it had received the faith, it owed it to Fernández that it had not lost it after the saint had gone.¹⁴