Ōura Cathedral

The treaties of the 1850s opened Nagasaki to foreign residents, and with them came priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Louis Furet reached Nagasaki in 1863 and Bernard Petitjean followed in August.³⁴ The prefecture's heritage site names Furet as designer and Koyama Hidenoshin as builder.⁴

The church went up in 1864 on the hill at Ōura, in the foreign settlement.¹ It was turned to face Nishizaka, where twenty-six Christians had been crucified in 1597, and it was dedicated to them on 19 February 1865. Captains of French, British, Dutch and Russian ships came with their men and fired salutes, but the Nagasaki magistrate sent only a deputy.²³ Disputed Church Trust dates the completion to 29 December 1864; a Nagasaki City feature dates it to November 1864.³⁸

On paper it was a church for foreigners. But on the front the priests wrote the word tenshudō in Chinese characters, so that Japanese passers-by could read it, and the prefecture says the priests hoped that believers who had kept their faith in secret were still out there.² The sign was an invitation. It took about a month to be answered.⁸

The villagers tested the priest as carefully as he tested them, asking about the feasts they kept and the "time of sorrow".⁵ Over the next days more came, and they gave the priests their baptismal names: "My husband is Paolo, my son here is Petoro, and I am Marina."⁵

The statue they asked for still stands at the side altar, to the right as you enter. The school guide says this is where they spoke to Petitjean, and the prefecture's panel says the Mary at the side altar is the one from that time and that the space inside has been kept.¹²

The news of the Discovery went out to hidden communities across the region. Their leaders came to the church in secret, and the prefecture says this contact is what ended the age of hiding: some returned to the Catholic Church, some kept their own form of faith, and some became Buddhist or Shinto.² The ban was still law. In 1867 the Urakami villagers who had declared themselves were arrested, in the last great kuzure, the fourth Urakami crackdown, and from 1868 they were sent into exile; the boards banning Christianity came down only in 1873.⁹¹⁰

The church became the centre of the new Catholic Church in Japan. In 1875 Father de Rotz built a Latin seminary beside it to train Japanese priests, and its graduates went out to the old hidden communities.¹ The church itself was enlarged in 1875 and 1879 into the present building, brick under white plaster, so that the brick is hard to see.¹ Bishop Petitjean blessed the rebuilt church on 22 May 1879.³ He died in 1884 and is buried in the church.⁴

Church Trust, which looks after the building, calls it the oldest church building standing in Japan: the Yokohama church of 1862 was older but was moved and rebuilt in 1906. Ōura was named a National Treasure in 1933 and designated again in 1953.³ The old seminary and the archbishop's house next door are now the Kirishitan Museum.¹

Ōura is still a church, and a museum of its own story. It is open every day except for church events, and it is the only World Heritage church in the region that needs no advance notice to visit.⁴¹¹ Go early. Stand at the side altar, and look back toward the door the villagers came through.