Pope Gregory XIII and Japan

In March 1585 four Japanese boys were hurrying across Tuscany. Messages kept reaching them from Rome, our The Tenshō Embassy page records from Michael Cooper's history: the Pope was old and ill and wanted to see them before he died.¹They entered Rome on 22 March. The next day Gregory XIII received them in a public consistory, with twenty-five cardinals present, while the bells rang and the cannon of Castel Sant'Angelo fired a salute. The old Pope wept as he embraced them.¹

He was eighty-three. Less than three weeks later he was dead. But the welcome he gave that morning was not a single gesture. It crowned thirteen years in which the Bishop of Rome had taken the small, distant Church of Japan to his heart: paying for its schools, approving its arrangements, protecting its mission, and at the end honouring its first envoys as if they were the ambassadors of kings.

Ugo Boncompagni was born at Bologna in 1502.²He studied law and became a professor at the University of Bologna, where his learning was well known.²Pius IV made him a cardinal in 1565, and in 1572 he was elected to succeed Pius V, taking the name Gregory.²³

The Japanese encyclopedias remember him above all as a builder of schools. The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, in the entry by Tsuchiya Yoshimasa, explains that he carried on the reform of the Church that followed the Council of Trent and wanted that reform grounded in sound learning, so he encouraged study of every kind. He founded the Gregorian University in Rome and several other colleges, and through them trained and sent out many missionaries.²Britannica's Japanese edition adds that he founded Jesuit seminaries in many places for the formation of clergy, and built up the German College that Ignatius of Loyola had founded.³He completed the revision of canon law and issued it under the title Corpus Iuris Canonici.²Both encyclopedias note that he worked hard for the missions of the East.²³

That love of schools reached Japan. In 1580 the Jesuit Visitor Alessandro Valignano opened a seminary for Japanese boys at Arima, and another near the capital; with the college at Funai and the novitiate, Maria de Deus Manso and Leonor Diaz de Seabra write, these schools "all originated from the same project": to raise a Japanese clergy.⁴The two seminaries, they write, taught Latin, Japanese, Chinese literature, the arts and humanities, music, the sciences, and Japanese etiquette and ceremonial, to give boys of good families a Christian education so that they could spread the faith as laymen or as clergy.⁴Such schools needed money that the mission did not have.

The crown of Portugal had long given what it could: King John III granted 500 cruzados a year from the Malacca customs house in 1554, and King Sebastian raised it to 1,000 in 1574.⁵The Holy See now added far more. Helena Rodrigues, in her study of the mission's finances in the Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, writes that at the beginning of the 1580s Gregory XIII gave 4,000 ducats in alms, to be paid by the Spanish church tax authorities; the following year this was turned into an annual allowance for twenty years.⁵Her table of the mission's income from outside Japan lists "Gregory XIII, 1583" as the largest single item, larger than the royal grants from Portugal, and she notes that the Jesuits used his gift of 1583 to buy revenue-bearing land in India for the mission in 1584.⁵

Christina Lee, writing on the embassy, sums up what followed: at the envoys' request the subsidy for the missions in Japan was raised from four thousand to six thousand ducats a year, though the money was often slow to arrive.⁶Rodrigues dates the increase to 1585, under Sixtus V.⁵

In 1580 the Christian lord Ōmura Sumitada gave the town of Nagasaki and the village of Mogi to the Society of Jesus. Our Nagasaki Given to the Jesuits page follows the long Jesuit discussion of whether to accept: at Usuki in October 1580, at Azuchi in July 1581, and at Nagasaki, with Valignano's ruling in 1582. According to the Ōmura City History, Valignano approved on condition that the mission superior always remain free to give the place up, and the question was referred to Rome, where the General and then Pope Gregory XIII gave their approval.⁷

So the Christian town that would become the heart of Catholic Japan was held by the Society with the knowledge and consent of the Pope.⁷

Gregory's most far-reaching act for Japan was a brief of 28 January 1585, Ex pastorali officio. The historians Pedro Lage Reis and, more recently, a 2023 study in Trans/Form/Ação describe it the same way: under pain of ecclesiastical censure, it forbade anyone but the Jesuits to enter and work in Japan.⁸⁹Lage Reis explains that it also placed Japan within the Portuguese sphere of the Padroado, the Church's patronage arrangement with the crown of Portugal.⁸

Why would a pope close a mission field to other orders? The reasons given in the sources are peace and order. Spain and Portugal had been under one king since 1580, but their empires were kept apart, and the Jesuits came to Japan from Portuguese Macao while the friars would come from Spanish Manila.⁹Lage Reis sets the brief in the long effort of the crowns and the Holy See, since the treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529), to mark out the Spanish and Portuguese spheres in Asia.⁸

It did not last. The 2023 study notes that at the end of 1586 his successor Sixtus V issued Dum ad uberes fructus, giving the Franciscans of the Philippines the right to found houses "in other lands" of the Indies and China, and that canon lawyers still argue over how the two briefs fit together.⁹Lage Reis traces the rest: Clement VIII opened Japan to all the mendicant orders in 1600 provided they came by way of Portuguese India, and in 1608 Paul V removed all restrictions.⁸The story of the friars in Japan, and of their martyrs, begins there.

The embassy was Valignano's idea. In 1582 three Christian lords of Kyushu, Ōtomo Sōrin, Ōmura Sumitada and Arima Harunobu, sent four boys from the Arima seminary, Itō Mancio, Chijiwa Miguel, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião, to the Pope and the King of Spain.¹¹⁰The Japanese reference works give the purpose plainly: to pay respects to the Pope, to make Japan known to Europe, to make the Jesuits' work understood, and to ask the Holy See for help for the mission.¹⁰

They sailed from Nagasaki in February 1582 and landed at Lisbon in August 1584.¹In October 1582, while they were still at sea, Gregory's new calendar came into force in Catholic Europe.²At Madrid Philip II received them warmly and sent them on to Rome with letters to his ambassador.¹

On 23 March 1585 Mancio spoke in Japanese, Diogo de Mesquita translated into Latin and Italian, and the letters of the three lords were read.¹Japanese encyclopedias record that the envoys were received in the Sala Regia with the highest honours.¹⁰Julião, sick with fever, could not come, and Gregory sent his own doctors to him.¹At a private audience on 3 April the boys gave the Pope the folding screen of Azuchi that Oda Nobunaga had given to Valignano; no trace of it has ever been found.¹

On 10 April 1585 Gregory XIII died.¹³The boys walked in the coronation procession of his successor, Sixtus V, who made them knights and gave them gifts for the seminaries of Japan.¹The Heibonsha entry for Gregory ends simply: "he was also the pope who welcomed the Tenshō embassy from Japan, which arrived in Rome in 1585."²

There is one more thread from Gregory to Japan, and every Japanese diary carries it. In 1582 he reformed the Julian calendar: Thursday 4 October was followed by Friday 15 October, dropping ten days without breaking the cycle of the week, and leap years were adjusted so that years divisible by 100 are leap years only when divisible by 400.²This is the Gregorian calendar, "the calendar most widely used in the world today."²Japan adopted it in 1873, the sixth year of Meiji.¹¹

It is a coincidence of history that 1873 was also the year the notice boards banning Christianity came down. The calendar of the pope who embraced the first Japanese envoys came into Japan in the same year that the Church came out of hiding.¹¹¹²

Gregory XIII never saw Japan. Yet the Church of Japan owed him its schools, the security of its chief town, a protected mission, and a welcome in Rome that its envoys carried home. The boy who could not come to the consistory because of fever, Julião, would die for the faith at Nagasaki in 1633, and is now Blessed.¹The love Gregory showed the four boys was returned.