Another Country of Martyrs

The Big-N baseball stadium in Nagasaki was sacred ground yesterday, November 24, 2008, as it became the scene of the first beatification ceremony to ever take place in Japan.  On behalf of Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins delivered blessings on 188 Christian martyrs who were killed between 1603 and 1639.  Beatification is a step towards sainthood in Catholicism, but even without official recognition, these 188 men, women, and children are saints – part of the great cloud of witnesses cheering on those of us who are still pressing on in the race.

According to the Kyodo News, the beatification is the fulfillment of convictions expressed by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Japan in 1981.  Deeply moved by the faith of the Japanese Catholics, and by the legacy of those who had given their lives for their faith, John Paul II had told an archbishop in Nagasaki that Japan was a country of martyrs and that they should be recognized.  Pope Benedict XVI issued the decree for the beatification last year, AFP news service reported.  And according to AFP, some 30,000 Christians from Japan and other Asian nations attended the ceremony, the same number of Japanese Christians who are believed to have been martyred after Christianity was introduced to Japan in 1549 by Portuguese Jesuit Francis Xavier.

The persecution and martyrdom of Christians in Japan has been powerfully depicted in the novel Silence by Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo.  Much of the novel is based on factual accounts such as those being commemorated by the Church in this beatification.  In an Asia News story November 21, 2008, Father Mark Tardiff reveals that within sixty years after Xavier began preaching in Japan, “the Shogun (the military ruler of Japan) unleashed a persecution of the young Church which rivaled in fury that of the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century.”

The first Japanese Christian martyrs, beatified in 1627 and made saints in 1862, were crucified during the rule of Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, reports the Associated Press. Even more cruel and widespread was the persecution under Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu.  Among those beatified yesterday, martyred under Ieyasu, are sixteen people, including three children, whose fingers were chopped off, their foreheads branded with the sign of the cross, and then were thrown into the boiling waters of a volcanic mountain.  Others were beheaded and burned at the stake.

The martyrs include four priests, one religious, and the other 183 were laypeople – noblemen and samurai, common people, and farmers.  Father Tardiff says that sixty were women, thirty-three were under the age of twenty, and eighteen were children under the age of five.  In some cases, entire families faced martyrdom together.

The priest whose name is mentioned in the liturgical title of the martyrs’ group (Petrus Kibe and 187 Martyrs) is Peter Kibe, a Japanese seminarian who was exiled with the missionaries to Macao in 1614.  Tardiff tells that Kibe’s burning desire was to become a priest, so he left Macao in 1618 by ship.  He arrived in Goa, in India, then set out on his own, going through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, and the Holy Land.  He finally reached Rome in 1620 where he was ordained as a priest.  He was managed to get back to Japan in 1630, “beginning a life as a fugitive priest ministering to the Christians in hiding.”  His martyrdom came in 1639, in Edo, present-day Tokyo.

The beatification of the martyrs highlights “a tragic page in history for Japan, which shut itself to the outside world during the 17th century, when the shogun rulers, seeking to control people’s lives, banned contact with the West, including Christians,” says Yuri Kageyama in the Associated Press.  It was not until 1873, under Emperor Meiji, that the end of persecution was decreed with an edict of tolerance.

The organizers of the beatification told the Associated Press that the ceremony was designed to be a celebration of the strength of Christianity in a culture dominated by Buddhism and Shintoism.  Although Christians make up only one percent of the Japanese population, Japan now has its first Catholic prime minister, Taro Aso.

Tardiff concludes by saying that the “power of Christ was shown forth in the Japanese martyrs of the seventeenth century as clearly as it was in the Christians of the first centuries.  There is the same clear eyed awareness of their choice, the same unflinching conviction in the face of demands to renounce their faith, the same unbowed and even joyful spirit in the face of cruel suffering, the same more than human strength that witnessed to Another who suffered in them.”  This same power of Christ has been shown in the martyrs of all ages, in all countries around the globe where men, women, and children have died for the sake of their Lord.  Echoing St. Paul’s affirmation to the Romans, Tardiff declares, “Torments and death could not overcome them; they were killed and they conquered.”