Story
The father who stayed
Of all the early missionaries of Japan, the Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik wrote, "unquestionably the most popular" was Father Organtino.He knew the language and customs of the country better than most, he "won the affection of the people he dealt with to an unusual degree," and "his memory survived among the people long after the missions had been destroyed."Even the anti-Christian books of the Edo period kept his name, as "Urugan Bateren," Father Urugan.His story is the story of a man who came to Japan to stay, and did.
From Val Sabbia to Goa
Organtino was born in 1533 at Casto in the Val Sabbia, one of the valleys of the province of Brescia in northern Italy.(The New Catholic Encyclopedia gives 1532; see Disputed.)His father's family was the Gnecchi and his mother's the Soldi. The Jesuit historian Pierre-François- de Charlevoix, writing in the eighteenth century from the Society's records, tells that his mother, while carrying him, said that she bore a martyr, or at least an apostle who would live all his life in danger of shedding his blood for the faith; and that as a boy he would cry out, "Oh, how happy I would be if I could die for Jesus Christ at the hands of the Turks!"These are family memories handed down in the Society, and they are given here as Charlevoix tells them (Tradition).
Charlevoix also records the vow that changed his life. Dangerously ill, the young man promised to visit Our Lady of Loreto if she obtained his cure; he recovered, made the pilgrimage, and came away, Charlevoix says, so filled with consolation that he scarcely knew himself. Soon afterwards he felt drawn to the Society of Jesus, of which he had hardly heard, and he entered its novitiate at Ferrara.The dates of his entry and ordination differ between sources (see Disputed).He was rector of the Jesuit college at Loreto in 1565 to 1566, so the shrine of his vow became his first great charge.
His heart, Charlevoix writes, "was always in the East." Fr Laynez, the general, would not let him go; when St Francis Borgia succeeded, Organtino renewed his request with tears, offering to make the journey on foot, without money, begging his way. Borgia gave in.He reached in 1567 as head of St Paul's College, and in 1570 sailed on to Japan with the new mission superior, Francisco Cabral.
Learning Kyoto
They landed at Shiki in Amakusa on 18 June 1570.At a month-long meeting of the Kyushu missionaries that summer, Cabral assigned Organtino to , where had been working alone for seven years, and he set out that same year.Cieslik calls it "a happy choice." Under Fróis he learned the language and the manners of the capital; Fróis showed him the city's great monuments, and in 1573 and 1574 the two priests studied the Lotus Sutra with a former Buddhist monk, so as to understand the faith of the people they served.Cieslik, himself a Jesuit of the Japan mission, saw in Organtino the man who carried the policy of adaptation inherited from and Fróis "to its greatest degree of perfection."
By late 1572 he could begin real mission work. On 8 November he set out with the Japanese for Sanga in Kawachi, baptised about fifteen samurai at Christmas, and stayed at the request of the Christian lord, Sancho Sanga, until Easter.He wrote to Fróis about that Easter: a torch procession with the cross before dawn, a Christian named Matthew playing the violin while the people sang, Lourenço preaching, a High Mass and Holy Communion; and afterwards the lord lashed four fishing boats together with bamboo, built a little pavilion on them, and took the missionaries out to watch two hundred boats at work, while the Christians put on a play and sang their own hymns and some three thousand onlookers came to see.It is the letter of a man who was happy.
The church of the Assumption
When the capital was rebuilt after the fighting of 1573, the missionaries decided that Kyoto deserved a real church. Vilela's old building, bought in 1560, had three of its four main pillars split.Organtino drew up the plan with Dario Takayama and the other Christian nobles and supervised the work himself; Cieslik notes that he "evidently knew something about architecture," and that some of his letters in Japanese, still extant, discuss roof tiles.The governor Murai Sadakatsu obtained a permit for timber and workmen at a time when had commandeered both. Neighbours protested that a three-storey church would overlook their gardens; when the governor sent a thousand men to raise the great beams, they changed their minds and lent a hand.
The church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption on the feast of 15 August, in memory of St Francis Xavier's landing in Japan on that feast in 1549. Cieslik dates the dedication to 1577, after a first solemn High Mass at Christmas 1576; the New Catholic Encyclopedia and the Heibonsha encyclopedia give 15 August 1576 (see Disputed).At the dedication the Christian lords came in with their retainers in festive dress, two hundred from Takayama's Takatsuki alone; many confessed and received Communion, and the church became one of the sights of the city.Kyoto people called it the Nanbanji, the "temple of the southern barbarians."A screen-style painting attributed to Kanō Sōshū shows it rising above the roofs of the capital.
Before Nobunaga
Organtino visited Oda Nobunaga often, and their friendship, Cieslik writes, grew with each visit.Charlevoix preserves the most famous of their conversations. Nobunaga once took Organtino and Brother Lourenço aside and made them swear to answer sincerely: did they really believe what they taught? The Buddhist monks, he said, had confessed to him in private that their teachings were fables to keep the crowd in order. Organtino said nothing. He picked up a terrestrial globe that lay at hand, showed Nobunaga the immense distances he had crossed to reach Japan, and asked whether men who had left parents, friends and country, crossed the stormiest seas and lived without any of the comforts of life would have done all this to tell fables. "Does not the way we live here suffice to convince the most incredulous that we must have very certain proofs of the truths we preach?" Nobunaga, Charlevoix says, sat with his eyes lowered, thinking, then brightened and sent them away with every mark of esteem.The scene comes from the Jesuit sources and cannot be checked against a Japanese record, but it fits the man.
In 1578, when Araki Murashige rose against Nobunaga, Organtino persuaded the Christian lord , Araki's vassal, to come over to Nobunaga, and so saved the Church from a grave danger; the episode belongs to our page on Takayama Ukon.In 1580 Nobunaga gave him ground at Azuchi, under the walls of the new castle, for a residence and a seminary for Japanese boys (see our page on the ).
Through the ban
too favoured him at first, granting land for a church in Osaka in 1583.In 1587 came the edict expelling the missionaries. Organtino, superior of the Kyoto region, would not leave his people. He hid for a time on Shōdoshima, an island in the lands of the Christian lord .It was at his direction that summer that Hosokawa Tama was baptised at home by her lady-in-waiting, taking the name Gracia.After he and were received by Hideyoshi in 1591, he worked openly again around the capital.Charlevoix tells that Christians at court spoke to Hideyoshi of an old priest near Kyoto, "so gentle and so peaceful" that he could give no cause for complaint; Hideyoshi, who had always esteemed Organtino, let him stay where he was.
In the winter of 1596 to 1597 the Kyoto Christians were arrested who would become the . Organtino had already sent a Christian named Peter to follow the prisoners with provisions on the long road to ; Peter and another Christian named Francis were themselves added to the condemned, and died with them.
The last years
Old and failing, Organtino moved in 1605 to the college at Nagasaki.He died there in April 1609, on the 22nd according to the Nipponica encyclopedia and the New Catholic Encyclopedia.He died in the arms of the Italian Jesuit Camillo Costanzo, who would himself be burned for the faith at in 1622 and is honoured as Blessed.Costanzo wrote to Europe that "the tears of all the faithful of Japan" showed how precious this holy man had been to the whole Church there.
The boy who wanted to die for Christ did not die a martyr. Instead he gave nearly forty years to Japan, learned its language and its courtesy, built its most famous church, trained its first native seminarians, and stayed with its Christians when staying was dangerous. Japanese Catholics remember him by the affectionate name the people gave him.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Entry and ordination. NCE: entered at Ferrara in 1555, ordained 1561. Cieslik: entered 1555. Charlevoix: entered the novitiate at Ferrara in December 1556, five months after the death of St Ignatius. Heibonsha: already a priest in 1556, entered the Society later. Nipponica: became a Jesuit priest at Ferrara in 1556. Disputed.
- Mother's prophecy and childhood words. Tradition (Charlevoix).
- Nobunaga and the globe. From Charlevoix, from the Jesuit letters; Unverified as verbatim.
