"I do not want this religion:
a religion of love and union, which is therefore harmful for this
kingdom."
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The 26 Martyrs started their death-march on the tenth of January, 1597. They were marched from dawn till nightfall
for twenty-seven days, paraded as criminals and outcasts through town after
town. The youngest of the martyrs was twelve,
the oldest sixty-four. Twelve-year-old
Louis Ibaraki laughed when they clipped his ear, and thereafter marched along
jauntily toward Nagasaki. On their
wintry road to Calvary Thomas Kozaki, fourteen,
wrote to his mother, “You should not worry about me and my father Michael”—his
father was marching with him to be crucified—“I hope to see you both very soon,
there in Paradise,” he explained.1
At one point in their trek the
guards grabbed Peter Sukejiro, a young believer accompanying the martyrs,
robbed him of everything he had and threw him in with them, thus sentencing him
to death on their own authority. Rather
than protest, Peter merely remarked, “Seeing that we all have to die anyway,
it's better to die for the Faith,” 2 thus proving his own fitness
for martyrdom.
Their last night on earth was
miserable: it was a bitterly frosty
night and the Martyrs must have prayed and shivered all night long, since they
were hunched together in open boats offshore of Togitsu, a Christian
village north of Nagasaki, with musket-men guarding the shoreline. Hideyoshi's sheriff, afraid of Christian
violence, would not take the risk of putting them under a Christian roof for
the night, as if he had something to fear from that “religion of love and
union”.
On the Fifth of February the martyrs
were marshaled to their feet at dawn and marched double-time toward Nishizaka,
the mountain slope atop which they would die; it would be a twelve-kilometer
marathon. The local Christians lined the
roadside in silent reverence watching them pass, breathing not a whisper of
hostility. From time to time Jesuit
Brother Paul Miki exclaimed, "Today is Easter Sunday for me! The Lord has shown me such mercy!" as
they climbed toward their Calvary.3 They
arrived at half-past nine in the morning:
just about the time Our Lord was crucified.
Up on their crosses the Twenty-Six
awaited the coup de graçe that would end their Japanese-style
crucifixions: twin spear-thrusts from
below, into their left and right sides and upward through their hearts and out
their shoulders. The false charges laid
against them were painted on a placard stood in front of the row of crosses for
all to see, but all of Nagasaki knew that they had been condemned merely for
the crime of being Christian. Paul Miki
spent his last minutes preaching, just as he had been doing all the length of
their twenty-seven day march to Calvary, proclaiming to the thousands of
Nagasaki Christians blanketing the hillside below, "I greatly rejoice to
die for this cause!"
When the soldiers unsheathed their spears, the
crucified martyrs and the crowd all started shouting in one voice,
"Jesus! Mary!" This holy cry resounded again and again until
every last martyr’s heart was pierced; it resounded among the hills of
Nagasaki, across the waters of the bay, through the rigging of the ships from
halfway round the world that lay in Nagasaki Bay tethered to their moorings,
their crewmen watching transfixed by the spectacle above, as if it were they
themselves and their holy Faith whose hearts were being pierced.
Twelve-year-old
Louis Ibaraki had long been prepared for this moment. Twenty-seven days earlier, at the start of
their journey, the martyrs had been paraded in oxcarts around the capital and around
nearby Sakai, the mercantile center of Japan, and in their oxcart the three
youngest boys had brightly sung the Our Father and the Hail Mary as their
just-clipped ears poured blood; now, raised on their crosses, the three sang a Psalm—Praise the Lord, O ye children, praise ye
His Holy Name. Louis alone among the
Twenty-six was there entirely by personal choice, for he had been offered his
freedom by Hanzaburō, the sheriff in charge of the execution, on condition that
he give up the Faith.
Louis
didn’t hesitate; his answer was swift and clear: “I do not want to live on that condition, for
it is not reasonable to exchange a life that has no end for one that soon
finishes” 4: a holy precocity reminiscent of Our Lord at
age twelve in the Temple, “Sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to
them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at His
understanding and His answers” (Luke 2:46b-47).
In
that same spirit, on the Fifth of February in the Year of Our Lord 1597, atop that
slope called Nishizaka that overlooked wholly-Catholic Nagasaki and its perfect
harbor, the boy-Saint Louis Ibaraki shouted words that would carry His blessing
to the ears and hearts of all the listening world, before the soldiers gouged
their spears into his sides and up through his twelve-year-old heart: “Paradise! Paradise!” he shouted, struggling toward
Heaven, “Jesus! Mary!”
Website: Kirishtan.com
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2007/2014 by Luke O’Hara
