Jules-Alphonse Cousin, first bishop of Nagasaki

When Jules-Alphonse Cousin became a bishop in 1885 he chose as his motto a line from the canticle of Zechariah: Illuminare his qui in tenebris, "to give light to those who sit in darkness."¹⁷His arms showed a range of mountains by the sea, with a sun rising above them bearing a small cross.¹The image fits the life. He came to Japan in the first dawn after the long night of persecution, and he spent forty-five years helping that light spread from Ōura to the islands.

He was born on 21 April 1842 at Chambretaud in the Vendée, in the diocese of Luçon, to Christian parents who were humble working people.¹His mother died before he was old enough to remember her tenderness, and his elder sister brought him up. His obituary in the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions Society remembers a quick, restless child: the sight of a friend or the song of a bird was enough to make him forget his lessons and run off to look for nests.¹The parish priest noticed his bright face and his answers at catechism, made him an altar boy and prepared him for the junior seminary at Chavagnes.

There he learned easily, loved music and poetry, and was so much the centre of his class that it was known as "Jules's year."¹His teachers did not always approve of his conduct, the obituary admits, but they judged that his faults came from too much life rather than ill will. At the major seminary of Luçon he quietly discerned a missionary vocation, and to the surprise of those who knew him he asked to enter the seminary of the Missions Étrangères in Paris, which he did on 27 April 1864.¹He left without going home to say goodbye; his old father could not bear the separation and forgave him only late.¹In Paris his cheerfulness won the other students. "If it is true that a sad missionary can only be a sad missionary," a friend wrote, "one could at least be sure that he would not fail on that side."¹

He was ordained priest on 23 December 1865 and sailed for Japan on 14 February 1866, reaching Nagasaki on 7 May, a date he never forgot.¹It was a year after the hidden Christians of Urakami had made themselves known at Ōura (see our page on the discovery of 1865). Looking across at the Urakami valley, he watched its people slip into the mission house each evening, alone or in small groups, and longed for the day he could work among them.¹He studied the language, and by the time Bishop Petitjean returned from his consecration in December he was helping to teach the boys hidden in the house, whom he loved "with all his heart" as the first fruits of a Japanese clergy.¹

In February 1867 Petitjean sent him on a secret journey to the Gotō islands, whose Christians had asked for a priest. He travelled only by night, in Japanese clothes, and stayed fifteen days, saying Mass in islands where, the obituary says, it had not been offered for nearly three centuries, giving the sacraments and visiting the sick by night.¹The next year he made a second visit.¹

Then persecution broke out. The Urakami chapels were raided, the leading Christians arrested, and in 1868 the new government condemned the Christians of Urakami to deportation (see our page on the Urakami Yonban Kuzure).¹³On 20 July 1868 Cousin watched 114 of them taken aboard under armed guard. "We saw them," he wrote. "They could see us, and our hearts understood each other. Their eyes were turned to the cross of the church, which they greeted with a look of farewell."¹

Petitjean would not wait for the persecutors to seize his seminarians. The next day, 21 July, he sent all ten of them, boys already separated from parents gone into exile, to the college of the Paris Foreign Missions at Penang, in the charge of Father Cousin.¹Cousin got them away on a European steamer, changed ships at Shanghai and brought them safely to Malaya. He meant to return at once, but the death of a director kept him at Penang until early 1869.¹

Petitjean then gave him the new post of Osaka. He began in a hovel on the riverbank of the foreign settlement, and built a proper residence in spite of workmen who refused to work for two months and a governor who tried to stop the building.¹To his surprise he learned that some of the Urakami exiles were imprisoned in Osaka itself, and a night visit from one of them told him how they lived and how they were treated.¹When the exiles were dispersed to the provinces, they knew where the cross stood. Slipping away from their guards, or using what little freedom they had, they came to him secretly for the sacraments; "nothing frightened them, neither distance, nor fatigue, nor the dangers of the journey."¹He sent catechists to teach them and books and religious articles to sustain them. In 1872, when the government offered to send home those who showed "repentance," he hurried catechists to warn them against the temptation and to tell them exile would not last much longer.¹When the confessors were finally freed in 1873, he and his confrères at Kobe cared for them on the road and found large boats to carry them back to Nagasaki.¹³

Osaka was slow ground. He taught French at the government college, and once gave his lesson in the presence of the Emperor, glad to represent the Christian faith on such an occasion.¹On 17 March 1878 he laid the first stone of the church of the Immaculate Conception, opened the next year before two hundred Christians and an official representative of the governor; he rejoiced that the faithful who a few years earlier had come to him in hiding, at the risk of their lives, could now attend a public feast.¹He founded the Christian community of Kishiwada and held its scattered families together with a Rosary confraternity.¹In 1882 three of the ten boys he had taken to Penang were ordained priests, and he was there. "It is the grace of God that has done everything," he wrote, "but it must have found faithful cooperators, first in the Christians who stayed faithful through so many trials, and also in the preachers God sent them."¹

On 6 October 1884 he reached Nagasaki; the next day he closed the eyes of the dying Petitjean.¹Bishop Laucaigne died in January 1885 (see our page on Laucaigne).¹⁴On 16 June 1885 Cousin was named titular bishop of Acmonia and vicar apostolic of Southern Japan, and he was consecrated at Osaka on 21 September 1885.¹When the vicariate was divided, he could have kept Osaka, which he loved; he chose Nagasaki, where the Christian communities still had to be raised from the ruins of persecution.¹

The next years brought joys he had hardly dared hope for. In 1889 the Meiji Constitution recognised freedom of religion, and in March 1890 the bishops of Japan met in synod at Nagasaki for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of the Christians. "Our Church has just celebrated its silver wedding," he wrote; "I do not know whether anyone was ever given a more beautiful and moving one."¹In 1891 the Pope established the hierarchy in Japan, and on 4 October, feast of the Holy Rosary, Cousin took possession of his see as the first bishop of Nagasaki.¹

For the third centenary of the Twenty-Six Martyrs in 1897 a church dedicated to Our Lady of the Martyrs rose at the foot of the hill of martyrdom, and on 8 September Cousin blessed it, before bishops from the other dioceses and the Japanese authorities, whose "benevolent concourse," he wrote, "underlined the triumph of Christianity."¹⁵Nagasaki today knows it as Nakamachi Church; the city credits its building to Fr Shimauchi Yōsuke, with designs by Fr Papinot, while the obituary says Cousin oversaw the works himself (see Disputed).¹⁵It was Cousin, too, who heard Father Fraineau's plans for a great church at Urakami and asked, the parish history says, where the money would come from.⁶

His obituary sums up his years in figures. He found eight Japanese priests and ordained forty. He found one centre of evangelisation and founded thirty-five; he established thirty-eight Christian communities, blessed fifty churches and chapels and twenty-five cemeteries, and opened the islands of Ōshima to the faith, where eleven Christian communities were flourishing by his death.¹Religious congregations multiplied under him, with schools, a dispensary and a leper hospital.¹But "the work to which Bishop Cousin gave the greater part of his heart," the obituary says, was the native clergy: he followed his seminarians at study, at recreation and in church, knew each one, and went on caring for them after ordination.¹His Japanese books, a summary of the Old and New Testaments, an introduction to Christian doctrine and a book of daily prayers, served the same flock.¹

His health failed in the summer of 1911. Father de Rotz, himself barely recovered, came to nurse him.¹²On 17 September he asked for Viaticum, made his profession of faith, and said clearly: "Tell all the missionaries, all the priests, all the seminarians, and all the Christians, that I give them my best blessing and ask them to pray for me."¹He died on the morning of 18 September 1911. On 21 September, the twenty-sixth anniversary of his consecration, the governor and consuls attended his funeral, and in unbroken rain several thousand Christians walked with their shepherd to the Urakami cemetery he had himself prepared for the missionaries and Japanese priests of Japan.¹