Story
Mancio Konishi was born in 1600 on Tsushima. He is said to have been the son of Sō Yoshitomo, lord of Tsushima, and of Konishi Maria (Disputed), daughter of the Christian general .After the he was sent into exile at .
There three young Japanese resolved to seek the priesthood in Rome: Blessed , Miguel Minoes and Mancio, then about sixteen. They left Macao in the autumn of 1616 and sailed by way of Malacca to .Kibe then went overland through Persia and Jerusalem, while Minoes and Mancio continued by sea.Kibe, ordained in Rome in 1620,wrote from Lisbon on February 1, 1623, before sailing home, asking a Jesuit in Rome to care for "Mancio Konishi, spiritually and materially."That August Mancio entered the Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Andrea in Rome; the novitiate register lists him as "No. 1191, Konishi Mancio, Japanese, 24 years old," with the clothes he brought.The Society's Roman catalogue of 1627 lists "Fr Miguel Minoes, Fr Mancio Konishi, to Japan."
The voyage was hard. Minoes died of the effects of a storm on the way; Konishi reached Macao, could not enter Japan from there, and went on to . With two other Japanese priests, the Jesuit Paulo Saitō and the Dominican St. Jacobo Kyushei Tomonaga, he sailed in a Chinese junk that wandered for five months before landing in Satsuma in 1632.Tomonaga and Saitō were both captured and killed in the next year.
Konishi went on to the and Osaka region and worked there in secret, at first with Blessed , who was martyred in 1636.When Kibe was martyred in Edo in 1639, Konishi was the last missionary still at work in Japan.For years he went on bringing the sacraments to Christians who had no one else, under constant threat of arrest.
His end is not recorded in detail. A Jesuit, Fr Filippo Marino, who reached Tonkin in 1647, wrote that he had learned that "about three years ago the Japanese priest Mancio Konishi was martyred in the capital."The Japan Tourism Agency chronology records simply: "1644: The missionary Konishi Mansho is martyred in Kyoto."The place of his death is Disputed. Historians write of his "probable death in 1644", after which it is assumed that no ordained priest remained in active ministry in Japan.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Solid: entered the Society in 1623, as the quoted novitiate register shows (Cieslik via st-mary blog; Bernabé).Japanese Wikipedia gives 1624.
- Disputed: ordination, 1627 (Kotobank; Roman catalogue as quoted)or 1629 (Bernabé).
- Disputed: place of death. Osaka, or Kyoto as an alternative (Kotobank); Kyoto (JTA); "the capital" (Marino report); Otowa, former land, or Hida Takayama (Japanese Wikipedia; Gifu parish series).
- Unverified: manner of death, ana-tsurushi (hanging upside down in a pit), from a single recent source.
- Solid: the last missionary still at work in Japan. Sources say last priest in Japan after Kibe's death (Kogensha; Gifu parish series)and "no ordained clergy" after 1644 (Nosco, citing Schütte).Bernabé notes that a few missionaries entered later but were captured.
- Disputed: parentage. "Said to be" (Kotobank).The Gifu series names his mother ; Kotobank and the st-mary blog say Maria.
- Macao departure: autumn 1616 (Gonoi 2016 pp. 31 to 32; Oita Diocese leaflet 2020, Goa about May 1617). The spring 1618 date of the Tokyo Archdiocese page and Takagi cannot be right: the Holy Sepulchre pilgrim register lists Kibe in Jerusalem on April 2, 1618 (Sakurai 2024 p. 26, citing Navis peregrinorum).