Chosen for the Ryūkyū islands
Théodore-Augustin Forcade (フォルカード) was the first pioneer missionary of the restored Catholic mission in Japan.A priest of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP), he reached Macao in August 1843 as assistant to the procurator, Fr Libois.Bookkeeping did not suit him, and his superior teased him for being "a little spendthrift" (translated).
Admiral Cécille sent the corvette Alcmène, under Captain Fornier-Duplan, to reconnoitre the Ryūkyū (琉球) islands, and asked Libois for a missionary who would stay there to learn the language and later serve as his interpreter in Japan.The procurator chose Forcade.He sailed on April 3, 1844, with the Chinese catechist Augustine Ko, whom Cécille had just freed from the prisons of Canton, where he had been held two years for the faith.Because the catechist spoke only Chinese and Latin, the priest would not hear his mother tongue for two years.
Arrival at Naha
The Alcmène anchored at Naha (那覇) on April 28, 1844, the feast of the Patronage of St Joseph.On May 1, after Mass in the ship's sick-bay, Forcade placed his mission under the Immaculate Heart of Mary.He vowed to ask the Holy See to ratify this consecration solemnly if Christianity took root in the islands.
On May 3, the feast of the Finding of the Cross, the missionary carried a relic of the True Cross and pleaded before about a hundred men in the bonzerie on shore: "I do not come to ruin you, but to save you" (translated).Asked to sing, he sang the Magnificat, the Stabat and the Te Deum, and his hosts answered with a song about how hard it was to stay in their islands, which he called the most amiable way of telling him to leave.
Fornier-Duplan then announced that he had orders to leave Forcade on the island as the first imperial interpreter, with Augustine Ko as an interpreter of lower rank.Cécille had given the captain secret instructions that left the priest sole judge of when to land, and the two men went ashore on the morning of May 6, 1844.
Life under guard at Tomari
Forcade and his catechist were interned at Tomari (泊), where the priest said Mass every morning at 4 a.m. with a portable chapel.When the guards woke, Augustine Ko told them in Chinese that the master was praying to his God, and that they must either go out or kneel.They knelt on the first day, and after that they left the room each morning during Mass.
The watch never let up."By night as by day we could not blow our noses, expectorate, or cough, without seeing ourselves approached by a dozen persons," the missionary wrote.When a mandarin seized him on the road to Naha, the governor cited a law that forbade foreigners to walk anywhere but on the shore.Forcade replied that he obeyed just laws, not arbitrary ones, and he shook off his escort by walking faster and farther the larger it grew.By the end of his stay he could go out with only two officers and one servant.
For months nobody would teach him the language, but after seven or eight months a minor official befriended him and dictated dialogues, and he compiled a dictionary of over 6,000 words.He insisted on paying for his own food, and for six months he lived on sweet potatoes.His only visitor in two years was the British ship HMS Samarang, in June and August 1845, whose captain gave him money.
Vicar apostolic, and a glimpse of Japan
On May 1, 1846, the French corvette Sabine reached Naha, and that night Forcade went aboard.It brought Fr Leturdu and a letter from Libois.The letter told him that Pope Gregory XVI had made Japan and the Ryūkyū islands a vicariate apostolic and had chosen him, then thirty, as its bishop.When Admiral Cécille paid a state visit on land on June 19, the new bishop's only cassock was so worn that he wore a commander's trousers and the admiral's own sky-blue coat.
That summer Forcade went with the admiral to Nagasaki (長崎) as his interpreter.On July 23, 1846, he first saw Kyūshū (九州) at sunset and greeted the shore once trodden by St Francis Xavier: "Who knows if you do not still hide living remnants in your breast?" (translated).Cécille arrived at Nagasaki on July 29 in the first French warship to anchor in a Japanese port, and was treated with great rudeness because the Japanese knew what he had done in the Ryūkyūs.The Japanese who came aboard already knew the bishop's name and told Augustine Ko that another missionary was still at Naha.He could learn nothing about where the martyrs had died or where the old churches had stood.He never set foot in Japan, and after those few days he never saw it again.
A shepherd without a flock
The bishop sailed to Manila to be consecrated, arriving on September 29, 1846, but none of the bishops of the Philippines had yet been consecrated themselves.He was finally consecrated on February 21, 1847, in the chapel of the Paris Foreign Missions house at Hong Kong, by Bishop Rizzolati.
Finding no ship for the Ryūkyūs, Forcade went with Commandant Lapierre to Tourane (Da Nang), where in April 1847 the French destroyed the Vietnamese fleet and the only French sailor killed died in the bishop's arms.The commandant asked him to go to Paris to justify the action.He agreed, seeing a chance to settle in Rome his strange position as "a shepherd without a flock, charged with evangelising an inaccessible empire" (translated).
He reached Paris on July 2, 1847, and dined with King Louis-Philippe on July 7.Among the ministers only Guizot, a Protestant, showed interest in the missions.Forcade later told the pope that this Protestant was the one he had found most Catholic of them all.He reached Rome on September 25, 1847, and was received by Pius IX.Fearing that Japan would not open for a long time, the Propaganda made him pro-prefect apostolic of Hong Kong, a post from which to watch events, while he kept the Japan vicariate.
He asked the Sisters of St Paul of Chartres to open a Holy Childhood orphanage in the colony, and his elder sister Calixte, in religion Sister Alphonsine, was named its superior.On May 17, 1848, he sailed from London with several sisters and Fr Mounicou.
Waiting at Hong Kong
Forcade reached Hong Kong in September 1848 and took over the mission there from the Italian missionaries.The bishop believed a Western military expedition would reach Japan within two years, and he refused to send missionaries ahead of it, so that they would not look like its forerunners.His plan was simple: "When the ports are opened to foreigners, we shall settle there" (translated).Events proved him right, though much later than he expected.
The chief work of these years was the Holy Childhood orphanage run by his sister.Weighed down by an ill-defined position, he asked Paris to relieve him of the prefecture.In September 1849 he arranged for an American warship to land his missionaries quietly in the Ryūkyūs.On September 7, 1849, on a steamer from Macao, he met a Japanese man from Shimabara (島原), a former castaway who had become a Protestant.
Sick with dysentery, he left for Singapore on January 6, 1850, making Fr Mahon pro-vicar general of Japan.The new pro-vicar wrote that the bishop suffered from something worse than dysentery, a broken heart.Forcade came back to Hong Kong on September 25, 1850, and on October 13 his sister died of brain fever, aged 36.
In November 1850 he proposed to be landed at night near Edo (江戸), walk openly in a violet cassock with his cross at his neck, and ask to be brought before the Emperor.He put the plan to Cardinal Fransoni, with a Latin letter asking Pius IX to command it or forbid it.Mahon thought it the fruit of a sickly imagination, and Rome did not approve.Within a month the Propaganda relieved him of the Hong Kong post.
Leaving the mission, and later years
Late in 1851 the bishop attended the synod of the bishops of China at Zikawei (Xujiahui), which sent him to Rome with its acts, partly so that he could recover his health in Europe.On January 2, 1852, he told Libois that he must leave the Paris Foreign Missions.He named a Jesuit as vicar general for Japan, but gave Fr Mahon the same title, since he did not mean to hand all authority to the Jesuits.
Forcade left Hong Kong on January 27, 1852, and reached Rome on April 6.On April 6, 1853, he was named Bishop of Guadeloupe.He became Bishop of Nevers in 1861 and Archbishop of Aix in 1873.In 1877 the archbishop consecrated Osouf as a bishop, assisted by Petitjean.His journal of 1844 to 1846 was published at Lyon in 1885.He died on September 12, 1885.Japan, the promised land he had glimpsed but was never allowed to enter, never left his thoughts.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birth year. Laures and Ballhatchet give 1816, while the title of J. M. Martin's 1948 article gives 1818.His age of thirty in 1846 fits 1816.
- Name. most sources give Théodore-Augustin;Ballhatchet writes Théodore-Auguste.
- The dedication of May 1, 1844. Marnas and Jennes say the Immaculate Heart of Mary;Williams says "the Most Pure Heart of Mary".
- Appointment. Marnas says the Holy See made him Bishop of Samos and Vicar Apostolic of Japan by a consistorial act of March 5, 1846, news brought to him at Chusan by Fr Adnet, but Marnas's date for Adnet's arrival there does not fit the calendar and may be wrong.
- His Hong Kong title. pro-prefect apostolic in Marnas,Pro-Vicar from 1847 to 1852 in Laures, and charge of the Catholic Church in the colony in Cary.
- Leaving the Ryūkyūs. Murdoch says Cécille arrived in June 1846 and took him away;Marnas has him board the Sabine on May 1, 1846, with the admiral's state visit on June 19.
- The first Japanese he baptized. Mahon's letter, used by Marnas, says it was Mahon's Japanese teacher, baptized Paul on January 25, 1851; Spinola (1868) says Forcade baptized in 1850 the Japanese who had taught him the language.
- The 1849 castaway. Marnas, from Forcade's letter of September 18, 1849 (printed as 1840), says the man told him Ryukyuan was only a poor Japanese patois, so that Forcade dropped his plan to return to the islands and began Japanese lessons at Hong Kong with Mahon on September 17, 1849.
- Leaving the MEP. Cary says he decided to leave;Marnas presents him as forced to leave.
- Jesuit influence. Marnas hints that the Jesuits who backed his journey to Europe were not wholly disinterested, hoping to take back the Japan mission they had founded.
- The title of his journal. Laures gives it both with and without the word "catholique".