Thursday, November 12, 2015

November 11, 1634: Saint Marina of Ōmura

             November the Eleventh marks the martyrdom of Saint Marina of Ōmura, canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 18, 1987.  I first learned of her story on seeing her statue in the courtyard of the Kako-machi Catholic Church in Ōmura, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan—a lady in black-and-white Dominican habit clutching a crucifix to her breast and standing atop a crown of flames that would send her straight to Heaven, her face aglow with faith and hope and love—and superhuman strength. 
          In 1626, entering the Dominican Order as a Tertiary, or lay Dominican, she had dedicated her life and her virginity to Christ:  a vow which was anathema to the Shōgun up in Edo (modern-day Tokyo):  Iemitsu, a sin-enslaved sadist who, heavily guarded, would prowl the streets of his capital at night in disguise, looking for innocent victims to test the sharpness of his sword on. Of all his imagined enemies he feared Christ the most.    
          Marina lived in Ōmura, a very long way from the capital but not far from the port-town of Nagasaki, the Christian capital of Japan. Ōmura itself had been a Christian stronghold in former times. Indeed, Ōmura Sumitada, lord of Ōmura three generations past, had been Japan’s first-baptized Christian domainal lord, and had had his own daughter baptized as ‘Marina’. Alas, since those days, a profusion of anti-Christian tyrants had put an end to the freedom of conscience that some parts of Japan had once known: in Saint Marina’s day, to profess Christ was death throughout Japan.
          Her supposed crimes were legion:  she had manifested charity selflessly, giving refuge in her home to hunted priests and persecuted Christians at risk of her life. Thank God that Saint Marina—like so many Holy Martyrs before her—despised the pains of death, for in her eyes these were but the merest footsteps in her steady climb to Heaven to meet her one true Spouse and Lord.  Once arrested, she was stripped naked and paraded through the whole domain of Ōmura to shame her, yet she marched with perfect modesty: as a virgin self-promised to Christ, she remained untainted. She was transferred to Nagasaki and immolated by ‘slow fire’ on Nishi-zaka, the holy execution-ground overlooking Nagasaki Bay—the sacred soil that had held the crosses of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan back in February of 1597.  Many holy souls had followed their path to Heaven since that icy winter day thirty-seven years before; Marina of Ōmura would stand tall among them as a paragon of indomitable faith. 
          ‘Slow fire’ meant that the firewood prepared for her execution had been covered with saltwater-wetted straw, leafy green branches and soil to produce noxious, stinging smoke; it was also placed at a distance from the stake to which she was bound in order to prolong her miseries by slow roasting, thus delaying merciful death. Marina, however, did not amuse her torturers with displays of agony; instead she prayed for her persecutors and her fellow persecuted Christians: thus is she remembered in Ōmura and beyond as a Christian heroine of remarkable strength. 
          Superhuman, supernatural strength, modesty, and courage, as befits a faithful spouse of Christ.

          Saint Marina of Ōmura, pray for us.

Copyright © 2015 by Luke O’Hara
Kirishtan.com


References:

Witnesses of the Faith in the Orient, Ed. Ceferino Puebla Pedrosa, O.P., Trans. Sister Maria Maez, O.P. 2nd. Ed. (Hong Kong: Provincial Secretariat of Missions, Dominican Province of Our Lady of the Rosary, 2006) 78-79.


Boxer, Charles Ralph, The Christian Century in Japan 1549-1650 (Lisbon: Carcanet, 1993) 363-364.

On “slow fire”:  P. Ángel Peña, O.A.R., Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki (Lima: Agustinos Recoletos, Provincia del Perú, no date) 39-40.







Wednesday, November 11, 2015

11 November 1634 : Seventy-one Christian Faithful Climb Martyrs' Hill

November 11, 1634: a day of infamy and glory. The train of martyrs led up Martyrs’ Hill was extraordinarily long. Two Dominican Friars on horseback, their hands tied behind their backs and hoops around their necks, led the procession; sixty-nine other Christians formed their train. The sixty-nine lay Catholics were destined for beheading or burning at the stake; the two priests would be hung upside-down in torture-pits to meet a slower, more excruciating sort of death.
On the flat stretch of earth atop the steep slope called Nishi-zaka, all the martyrs found their allotted spots prepared, arrayed inside a stockade built to keep out the milling onlookers. Here were the chopping-blocks from which severed heads would drop to earth, here the stakes against which human forms would squirm and writhe, emitting groans and screams and squeals if the torturers could have their way; and then there were those two pits with the gallows built over them, the stone counterweights readied with ropes to hold the priests dangling by their ankles head-down in the dark, horrid, filth-strewn pits. No sunshine would peek in once the wooden lids were closed tight around those two human waists—no natural sun, at least.
And yet the darkness failed to do its work: neither man called out for respite, neither gave the hoped-for signal that, after all, this unexampled agony, this horror, this test too terrible for merest human mettle to endure, had done its work. The slightest groan could suffice, some word that could be twisted to the tyrant’s purpose, a supposed sign of apostasy, of surrender to his evil will. Instead the two Christian heroes endured their agonies unflinching, surrendering their flesh and lives and souls to the God to whom they had consecrated these in their youth.
Friar Thomas Nishi was the first to die: so weakened by privations and tortures was his flesh that his soul escaped Heavenward within a day; it would take a week for Friar Giacinto Giordano Ansalone to follow his friend home. These two, the only Dominican Friars left in Japan, had been arrested on the fourth of August, the feast day of their Order’s patron saint. With what warm embraces he must have welcomed them home.
Yet more such fearless preachers would come.

Copyright © 2015 by Luke O’Hara
Kirishtan.com


Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Saint Magdalene of Nagasaki:

Spouse of Christ, Martyr, and One of God’s Greatest Miracles


The quality of mercy is not strain’d:
it droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

           
            Thirteen days and a half she hung in the pit, singing hymns and blessing the names of Jesus and His mother: no other human being in all the dark history of Japan’s persecution of Christ’s Church ever withstood the torturers’ cruelties so long. Yet, in the end, it was not the cruelties of the Shōgun’s minions that ended her life; rather, it was the merciful Hand of God that gently took holy Magdalena home.
            A young woman of extraordinary beauty and refinement, Magdalena so enthralled the diabolic Governor of Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, that he tried to dissuade her from seeking the arrest and martyrdom she so craved. She was worthy of marriage to a noble of the highest order, he insisted; nay, to the very Emperor himself. But Magdalena would have none of that. She boldly declared to Uneme’s face that her only spouse was Christ,[1] and in so doing handed herself, life and limb, over to him: to Uneme, the infamous deviser of the cruellest torture ever known to humankind.

The life and glorious death of Santa Magdalena, or Saint Magdalene—or Marie-Madeleine, as French historian Léon Pagès called her—is a dazzling tale so replete with signs of supernatural power as to make modern atheists stop their ears and crimp shut their eyes, lest “they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted,” and Jesus should heal them.[2]
Magdalena was a prodigy who displayed a love of learning from childhood, reading “pious books in the two languages of Portuguese and Japanese” and consecrating her virginity to God in front of an image of Our Lady of the Rosary.[3] The orphaned daughter of Catholic martyrs, she risked martyrdom herself by laboring as interpreter and catechist for the Augustinian friars Francisco de Jesús and Vicente de San Antonio as she “accompanied them in their vicissitudes in the mountains.”[4] Father Francisco gave her the habit of an Augustinian Tertiary and she later made her profession, though barely fifteen years of age.[5] Léon Pagès tells us that she worked tirelessly for the conversion of pagans, and with great success.[6]
            Such a devoted disciple was she that, when her spiritual fathers were arrested in November of 1629, Magdalena wanted to join them in their inevitable martyrdom (they would be tortured to death by “slow fire”) by turning herself in to the authorities. God let her know that He had different plans for her, though: she would find new pastors and continue her work among her people. She served two more Augustinian Friars, Melchor de San Agustín and Martín de San Nicolás, as their right hand until they too were captured by the Shogunal authorities. She had been with them barely three months; they would die by “slow fire” on 11 December 1632.                         
            Execution by “slow fire” consisted in tying the Christian to a stake surrounded by firewood placed far enough away from him to produce an excruciatingly slow, agonizing death. To aggravate the torture, the executioners covered the firewood with a layer of leafy foliage, then a layer of straw mixed with green branches; they doused the whole with saltwater mixed with soil; this would produce a thick cloud of acrid smoke to sting the Christian’s eyes and nose and poison every breath he took.[7] Death would finally come only after hours of choking, broiling torture. The point of all this was to procure public apostasy: to produce such torment in the Christian captive that he would publicly renounce his faith, thereby opening the flood gates to mass apostasy. Slow fire, however, wasn’t doing the job: something more gruelling was in order.
Enter Takenaka Uneme. In August of 1629 the Shōgun had installed him as Governor of Nagasaki with orders to expunge the Catholic Faith from that staunchly-Catholic town, the historical wellspring of Catholicism in Japan. Since slow fire was producing only blackened corpses and seemed even to be fanning the flames of that proscribed Faith, the diabolical Uneme devised what would prove to be the ultimate in torture: “the pit.” Thus:

        This was their method of persuasion:  they would coil their victim tightly in rope from the feet up to the chest, leaving one arm free for signaling that he renounced Christ, and then hang him upside-down from a gallows with his head and torso lowered into a hole, six feet deep, perhaps containing human waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the stench. The lid was made of two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the center closed tight around the victim’s body, pinching his waist and cutting off his circulation. It felt like his head was going to explode; his mouth, nose and ears would soon start oozing blood. François Caron, the chief of the Dutch trading-post in Hirado, wrote, “This extremitie hath indeed ... forced many to renounce their religion; and some of them who had hung two or three days assured me that the pains they endured were wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence.”[8]

           This is how Magdalena’s next two pastors would die. The first, Dominican Father Domingo de Erquicia, described Uneme as “man dressed as demon, or devil incarnate.”[9] He succumbed on 14 August 1633. The second, Italian Dominican Father Giordano Ansaloni, would meet his death on 17 November 1634. By that time Magdalena had already left this wretched earth, for she had sought out martyrdom, marching into that incarnate devil’s very lair in her black monastic habit to declare her burning love for Christ and her contempt for any torture that hell and all its minions could throw her way.  

          Upon learning of Father Giordano’s arrest, she went straight to Nagasaki to present herself to the authorities and demand that she too—as a Christian, a disciple of Father Giordano’s, and a member of a religious order—be arrested. At first, taken by her beauty and her obvious refinement, Uneme tried to dissuade her, but seeing her unshakable faith, he ordered her put in jail. “She entered with great happiness, shedding tears of joy,” history tells us.[10] To dampen her spirits, Uneme ordered her tortured; his torturers jammed sharpened strips of singed bamboo under her fingernails. Seeing blood pouring from her wounds, she reveled, “With what rubies have you adorned my hands!”[11] The torturers ordered Magdalena to scratch furrows in the earth with the bamboo strips; she obeyed, undaunted.[12] They tried a water torture, pouring copious amounts down her throat and then throwing her onto the floor and loading heavy stones onto her so that the water gushed out violently through her mouth, ears, and nose.[13] Though they repeated this torture time and again, giving her no rest, beautiful Magdalena was unmoved. They hung her by her arms on ropes, raised her high, and dropped her, dislocating her shoulders,[14] to no avail: still she clung to Christ.  
            Giving up, Uneme condemned Magdalena to the pit along with ten other Christians. First he had them paraded around the streets of Nagasaki with Magdalena at their head on horseback, a rope strung tight around her throat like a garotte and tied to her wrists, bound fast behind her. A sign on her back proclaimed her sentence: condemned to death for refusing to abandon the Law of the Christians. [15] Her eyes showed no terror, nor the slightest hint of disquiet; indeed, they glowed with joy as she preached to onlookers all along the lengthy way. Finally her horse was led up the steep slope called Nishi-zaka to the execution-ground above, overlooking Nagasaki Bay. There the executioners cocooned her in rope, slung her by her heels from a gallows, and hung her, head downwards, into the pit of horrors—a six-foot-deep hole whose bottom, filled with the vilest filth the torturers could gather, reeked abominably—and clamped the lid around her waist, cutting off all light, fresh air, and even her own circulation. Perhaps, as usually happened, blood began to drip from her ears and mouth and nose; perhaps her agonies were ‘wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence’; but Magdalena uttered not one groan or plaint or squeal: instead, she happily sang sweet songs in Japanese to Jesus, her Spouse in Heaven.[16]
            This went on for nearly fourteen days. The guards would hear her ask, “Would you like to hear a song?” in the cheeriest of tones, and on their answering ‘Yes,’ Magdalena would immediately break into song, singing “a thousand canticles of praise to God our Lord in the Japanese tongue.”[17] Accounts abound of miracles performed by—or through—Magdalena during that fortnight, but it was miracle enough that she had remained alive without a sip of water or a bite of food through that overlong ordeal, incredible enough to bring the torturers’ overlords up to Nishi-zaka to see for themselves just what was going on. They had no doubt that the guards had been suborned, that some Christian misfits were slipping her food and drink and bribing the guards to let them in. This the guards denied, and Magdalena backed up their words when they opened the lid to have a look at her for themselves. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t die in this ordeal,” she told the incredulous officials. “The Lord whom I adore preserves me and holds me up. I feel a paternal hand touching my face, and my body is lightened, so that I don’t suffer.”[18]  
That was enough for Uneme’s minions: they told the guards to club her unconscious, orders they must have obeyed with bitter reluctance, having been soothed for nearly fourteen days on end by Magdalena’s sweet, angelic songs—songs “in praise of her Husband [sung] with singular melody and sweetness, so much so that they said it couldn’t be a human voice.”[19]
Their dirty work done, those men must have closed the lid on Magdalena’s pit with leaden stomachs and searched their souls for some relief, something like that soothing Hand that had caressed that lovely maiden’s face throughout her impossibly-long ordeal. Perhaps they felt a hint of that relief when Heaven opened her floodgates that evening, drenching them as they stood at their posts atop Nishi-zaka, looking down on holy Nagasaki, home of so many martyrs, and trying to make sense of the horrors they had to stand watch over. Then, come morning, there was perfect silence: no heavenly joy, no sweet, angelic songs, for they saw Magdalena’s hole filled to the brim with Heaven’s cleansing rain, and pulling her out, they found that she had drowned: her Lord and Husband had finally, and ever so gently, taken her home.
Pretty Magdalena, holy Magdalena: the perfect bride for Heaven’s earthborn King.

Copyright © 2015 by Luke O’Hara
Kirishtan.com




[1] Léon Pagès, Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu'à 1651, pp. 805-806.
[2] Matthew 13:15, Douay-Rheims Bible.
[3] Léon Pagès, Histoire De La Religion Chrétienne Au Japon Depuis 1598 Jusqu'à 1651: Pte. Texte (Paris : 1869), p. 805.
[4] P. Ángel Peña, O.A.R., Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki, Lima, Perú, p. 30.
[5] Pagès, p. 805.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Peña, Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki, p. 39.
[8] http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-julian-nakaura
[9] P. Ángel Peña, O.A.R., Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki, Lima, Perú, p. 18.
[10] Ibid, p. 59, quoting Luis de Jesús, Historia de los Agustinos Descalzos (1621-1650), Vol. II. Madrid: 1681.
[11] Pagès, p. 806.
[12] Peña, p. 50, quoting the Relación of Padre Francisco de Paula, 1636.
[13] Ibid, p. 51.
[14] Pagès, p. 806.
[15] Peña, p. 56.
[16] Peña, p. 51.
[17] Testimony of Úrsula Torres, Japanese and native of Nagasaki, relating what the guards themselves had told her; recorded at the Proceso de Macao, 1 Feb. to 2 March 1638. Peña, p. 71.  
[18]Pagès, p. 806. Another rendering of her words can be found in Peña, p. 51: “No os canséis que no he de morir de este tormento, porque el Señor, a quien adoro, me sustenta y siento una mano suave que arrimada   al rostro me está aliviando el cuerpo.”  
[19] Peña, p. 57.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Another October Martyrdom: The 52 Martyrs of Kyōto


            Behold a heart-wrenching martyrdom in which families were burned together—including mothers with their infant children—to satisfy the almighty Shōgun Hidetada’s ire.
            In October of 1619, Hidetada was passing through Fushimi after a visit to Kyōto, the Imperial capital, when he heard that there were a great many Christians being held in Kyōto’s jail. The volatile Shōgun exploded into rage and ordered them all burned alive immediately, regardless of age, gender, or station. They were to be crucified and burned on their crosses as a mise-shime:  a lesson to recalcitrant believers.
            Itakura Katsushige, Kyōto’s Shogunal Governor, was a decent man—the most moderate man on earth, one account tells us[1]—but he dare not contravene the Shōgun’s orders, not even to “defer the execution of a lady of the first quality who was about to give birth.”[2] He had allowed the faithful Catholics to return to their homes, but now they were rounded up to be loaded onto eleven wagons and paraded through the streets of Kyōto, the men, the boys, and the girls in the foremost and hindmost wagons, and the women, many with babies at their breast or in their arms in the others.[3] History records that

A crier led the cortege and proclaimed the death sentence: “The Shōgun … wills and commands that all these people be burned alive as Christians.” And the martyrs confirmed the crier’s words, saying, “This is true; we die for Jesus. Hurrah for Jesus!”[4]

            Twenty-seven crosses had been erected along the river called Kamo-gawa, on the outskirts of Kyōto, awaiting these sacrificial victims. Among the martyrs were Johane Hashimoto Tahioye and his wife, christened Magdalena, along with their six beautiful children. On the Shōgun Hidetada’s orders, all the children must of course be burned along with their mothers. The martyrs were clamped to the crosses—the mothers with babies in their arms in the center, and the others back to back, in pairs. Historian Leon Pages lists more names: “Magdalena … had her two-year-old daughter Regina in her arms; Maria had Monica, her daughter, four years old; and Marta, her son Benito, two years old,” and on and on, including “little Marta, eight years old and blind.” And Tecla, mother of five, with four-year-old Lucia in her arms and her other children on crosses to her right and left.[5]
            The firewood was lit; as the Shōgun’s inferno erupted around the martyrs, their voices rose above the roar of the flames, calling the name of Jesus. Mothers with little ones in their arms caressed their babies’ faces to soothe their pain, as if to ward off the horror of the flames.

            Tecla’s daughter Catherine cried, “Mother, I can’t see.”
            “Call to Jesus and Mary,” her mother answered.[6]

            Richard Cocks, an English Protestant who witnessed this holocaust, wrote:

“I saw fifty-five martyred at Miyako, at one time when I was there, because they wold not forsake their Christian Faith, & amongst them were little Children of five or sixe yeeres old burned in their mothers armes, Crying out, Jesus recive their soules.”

            Historian Léon Pagès wrote that a comet “and supernatural fires” marked this martyrdom. Fact or no, no-one of faith can doubt that Christ Himself was there among the martyrs, the Conqueror of Death claiming victory amidst those hellish earthly flames.

Copyright 2015 by Luke O’Hara
Kirishtan.com




[1] Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l'établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l'empire du Japon, Vol. 2, p. 187.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Léon Pagès, Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu'à 1651, p. 413.
[4] Ibid, my translation.
[5] Ibid, my translation.
[6] Ibid.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

October Martyrs: Father Julian Nakaura




       Father Julian Nakaura withstood the torture of the pit while in his sixties, hanging on to the glorious end while those around him, notably the Jesuit Vice-Provincial and Vicar of Japan himself, were giving in to the torturers’ wiles. Unbearable were the agonies these experts in cruelty inflicted on captive Christians, agonies compounded by the noxious stench their victims were forced to breathe, hanging head-downwards inside those wretched holes loaded with filth and capped with wooden lids that crimped the captive’s waist. And then there were the torturers’ constant adjurations to apostatize—a temptation made all too sweet by promises of life and freedom and the loud insistence that all one’s brethren had given in, so what’s the harm?
       All the more glorious, then, this faithful pastor’s victory over death on 21 October 1633. Read his story here:




Friday, October 9, 2015

7 October 1613: Eight Martyrs of Arima

            In the Year of Our Lord 1613, the domain of Arima was in the hands of Arima Naozumi, the son of Arima Harunobu, longtime stalwart patron and protector of the Church in Japan. After Harunobu’s execution in 1612,  Naozumi had apostatized on the orders of the de-facto Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu and received lordship of his dead father’s domain on condition that he do his utmost to exterminate the very Faith that he had from his childhood espoused.            
        Although his domain was far removed from Ieyasu’s castle-town up on the Pacific coast of Honshu, down home in Arima, Naozumi had the ruler's own hound at his heels: Hasegawa Sahiōye, Governor of nearby Nagasaki—a close advisor of Ieyasu’s and a hell-driven enemy of Christ. Plotting to grab the domain of Arima for himself, Hasegawa threatened Naozumi, greenhorn Lord of Arima, with the Shōgun’s own hellfire if he did not prove his determination to purge the land of Christians with some solid evidence posthaste.           
         Naozumi called in his eight top samurai, formerly his father’s liegemen, and pleaded with them to renounce Christ, if only on paper, to save him from the threatened wrath—indeed, to save all of Arima’s faithful from that wrath, or so he claimed, citing Hasegawa's threat. Hearing their new liege lord’s artful pleading, five of the eight samurai agreed to the stratagem. Three, however, refused to budge: Leo Taketomi Kan’emon, Adrian Takahashi Mondo, and Leo Hayashida Sakuemon.      
         Naozumi sentenced them to death by burning, along with their wives and children. However, the new, spineless Lord of Arima postponed the order until the three Christian stalwarts were safely out of his castle and headed home. All of them being samurai, they and their families were escorted unbound to their respective prison cells, where each family was locked up together: Adrian Takahashi with his wife Joanna; Leo Taketomi with his son Paulo; and Leo Hayashida with his wife Marta, his eighteen-year-old daughter Magdalena, and his son Diego, eleven years old.                 
           Soon twenty thousand Kirish’tan had surrounded their prison, singing prayers and keeping vigil—at which they stayed for three days and nights on end, some huddling around campfires to keep warm in the night, some distributing food to those who were too hungry to bear it. For fear that the faithful would take relics from their remains, Naozumi ordered the martyrs-to-be spirited out of his jail to another location—clear proof that Arima Naozumi, his apostasy notwithstanding, retained a clear understanding of the restorative power of relics. Undeceived, Arima’s Kirish’tan faithful followed the soon-to-be martyrs to their new prison to continue the vigil.      
         On the morning of Sunday,  October 7, 1613, the prisoners were led out of their cells to meet their deaths. All were wearing the kimono of the Guild of Saint Mary, given them by its chief, and each but the youngest—eleven-year-old Diego—had his or her arms bound with rope in the form of a cross. Diego, seeing that all the others were bound, asked that the guards bind him too. They insisted that they had no more rope, and on hearing this, the boy submitted quietly.      
         En route to their deaths, each martyr was flanked left and right by a Marian with a lit candle in one hand and a rosary in the other; these members of the Guild sang the rosary as they marched with the holy ones. Coming to a river, the martyrs were ferried across, after which they had to traverse muddy ground. A certain man offered to carry Diego on his back across the mud, but the boy declined: “Our Lord Jesus didn’t ride a horse up Calvary,” he explained, and he tromped into the mud on his own two feet. Crowds of believers with scissors or knife in hand mobbed the holy ones to strip from their clothing some relic for saving; the condemned protested that they themselves were but mere sinners. Had the Eight not thus rebuffed these adorers, they would likely have been stripped stark naked.       
        They arrived at the place of execution: a wooden stable of sorts filled to the rafters with firewood, surrounded by a stockade, on the beach in front of the hill atop which loomed Hino-eh Castle. Their liege lord was most likely watching from up there, high above the heads of the countless Christians jammed into the town below the castle, people from all over the Peninsula, the erstwhile Christian bastion of Japan.       
        Leo Taketomi climbed onto a pile of wood and made a speech to the thousands, but many of his words were drowned out by the noise of the crowd. His few audible words went something like this:            
        Behold the faith of Arima’s Christians: for the glory of the Lord and as a testimony to our faith we now die. My brethren, my hope is that you shall preserve your faith unshaken to the very end!   

            Leo stepped down; each of the martyrs was tied to a stake; the executioners lit the firewood. Quickly a storm of flames erupted around the three families. The chief of the Guild of Saint Mary, just beyond the stockade, held up a painting of Jesus in his Passion so that the martyrs could see it, a help in their death-throes. The crowd sang the Credo, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and other prayers to strengthen the martyrs; reportedly the martyrs evinced nothing but joy amidst the flames.       
        The boy Diego’s ropes were the first to burn away: he ran to his mother’s side shouting, “Zézusu! Maria!” and fell. Next his eighteen-year-old sister Magdalena found her arms free of the burning ropes: she reached down to pick up a flaming branch and held it above her head, seemingly worshiping the fire that would send her to Heaven as she held up her head with her other hand. Seeing this, the gasping crowd made the sign of the Cross. Finally, Leo Hayashida boomed the name of Jesus out of the midst of the flames; that word shook the crowd as a whirlwind of fire devoured the eight holy martyrs. All the onlookers beat their breasts as his shout resounded over all the scene.       
        When that shout of Heaven’s victory reached his ears, Arima Naozumi, looking down from his castle’s overlook, must have felt as if that maelstrom of flames were in his own stomach. Meanwhile, down below, all those thousands of his Kirish’tan subjects, fallen to their knees, were praying for the souls of the martyrs—and perhaps for the soul of their earthly lord as well, cowering in his fortress high above.           
      This martyrdom proved to be only a prelude to the litany of sufferings that Arima was bound to endure.

             Copyright 2015 by Luke O’Hara 
                     Website:  Kirishtan.com

Monday, June 8, 2015

Blessed Adam Arakawa, Samurai Martyr, June 1614

Adam Arakawa: Samurai, Servant, and Martyr
(One of the 187 Companions of Blessed Peter Kibe Kasui)
         “Martyr” is a word much abused in our day; here’s one excellent definition from the mouth of Joseph Takami, the Archbishop of Nagasaki:  “True Christian martyrs forgive others.  Even while being killed by others, they forgive them.  They teach us the meaning of a death like Jesus’ death.”
Take Adam Arakawa, for example, one of the 187 Companions of Peter Kibe, beatified en masse by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008:  “He was a man of prayer,” Jesuit historian and pastor Father Diego Yuuki told me. “When the last missionary in Amakusa was expelled, he took the responsibility of the church, and for that reason he was killed.”
Adam was a samurai, brought up in that proud martial tradition, but a samurai who had the humility to become a servant to his fellow-Christians after having been dismissed by his feudal lord.  He served the church at Shiki, in the Amakusa Islands.
The Shōgun had banned the Faith in 1614, expelling all Christian missionaries, and Kawamura Jirōemon, the castellan of Tomioka Castle, which overlooked Shiki from a nearby mountaintop, was ordered by his lord to exterminate Christendom in the Amakusa Islands.  Humble old Adam, in his seventies, was the obvious primary target:  Kawamura thought that he could intimidate Adam into renouncing the Faith; then, he thought, the other local Christians would follow his example.
Kawamura had misjudged his man:  when Adam, steely old Catholic samurai, heard that they were looking for him, he fell to his knees, thanking God, and asked Him to grant him martyrdom.  Friends warned Adam to abandon Christ, lest he be killed.  His answer is recorded in history: “’Disobey God,’ you’re telling me?  You’re telling me to shame my God?  Kawamura-sama’s orders or the law of the Shōgun of all Japan notwithstanding, please understand:  I am a Christian.  A true Christian puts Christ’s teaching above his own life.  No matter how they torture me, I cannot disobey Christ, true God.”
Kawamura  had Adam brought to his castle for interrogation and bound to a pillar outside; to break the old man’s spirit he kept him out there all night.  Come morning, though, Adam’s spirit was unbroken. When Kawamura told him it was not just his own nor just his feudal lord’s command, but the very Shōgun’s orders that he apostatize, Adam replied, “A man’s soul is more important to him than his body.  I obey the true God, Deus, savior of souls.”  In old Japan, Catholic missionaries called God by his Latin name, Deus, rather than use the Japanese translation of “god,” i.e. kami, to avoid confusing Him with the “gods” of superstition.
On March 21, 1614, the Friday before Palm Sunday, Kawamura ordered Adam stripped naked, paraded through town, and then hung by his elbows from a cross-bar (or lintel) supported by two pillars; they tied his legs to these, with his tiptoes barely touching the ground.  Adam was in constant agony, straining against the weight of his own body, besides being exposed to the elements and public ridicule.  It was March—cold and windy—and Kawamura had had the pillars set up at land’s edge to expose him to the cold sea wind, but to keep from killing him, they untied him at night and took him indoors.  This torture lasted nine days.  Unable to join his hands while praying, Adam did his best to raise them toward Heaven.  Rather than show his pain, he encouraged the local Christians in their faith, speaking only of things of the soul.  He was finally untied on Holy Saturday, his faith untouched, and put in the hands of a local Christian, under house arrest—an internment that would last for sixty days.
Kawamura eventually sent a message to Adam:  “We’ll cut your fingers off unless you renounce your faith.  Not all at once, but slowly.” They would cut off one piece at a time, allow the wound to heal, and then come back to cut off another bit, to prolong his agony to the maximum, they told him.  Adam’s response:  “I’m determined to bear any sort of torture.  God will surely strengthen me and give me perseverance to the end.  Even if I die after long suffering, having undergone repeated tortures, I’ll be happy to get it, for penance’ sake and for love of God.”  On hearing that, Kawamura, the castellan, ordered the cutting to begin; but his men, afraid of Heaven’s recompense should they mutilate such a good old man, held off.
Finally Kawamura sent to Terazawa Hirotaka, his feudal lord up in Karatsu, in northern Kyushu, for orders, reporting Adam’s unshakable determination to hold onto his faith.  A courier came back at breakneck speed with new orders:  kill him.  Meanwhile, in his imprisonment, Adam had seen a vision of the Mother of God:  she was holding a cross in her hands, and Adam understood that he was to become a holy Martyr.
Kawamura had Adam brought to his castle.  Along the way a crier kept blowing a conch shell and announcing that Adam would be executed in two or three days.  This was a lie:  they just wanted to put the local Christians off the track, lest they come in droves to his execution, seeking relics.  The next morning, at first cock’s crow, Kawamura’s executioners took Adam out of the castle in the pre-dawn darkness and led him up a steep mountain path with a rope around his neck.  Anxious for martyrdom, Adam “climbed like a leaping deer,”[1] pulling the soldier with the rope in his grip right off his feet.  At the chosen place, Adam knelt and prayed.  He then advised his executioners to make their children study the Christian Faith, and he told them they had better become Christians too, and fast.
The swordsman must have been unsteady on his feet on the steep slope, for his first slash went awry, into Adam’s shoulder:  Adam didn’t flinch; he was too busy praying to Jesus.  It was only after two more slashes that his blessed, hoary head fell to earth.
They put Adam’s bloody remains in a net, weighted down with two large stones, took them out in a boat and sunk them into the sea, afraid, perhaps, of that eternal truth:  The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Faith.  The local Christians, though, scooped up the earth on that hillside that had drunk Adam’s sacred blood and saved this as a relic.
Adam’s fearless testimony in blood did truly seed the Faith:  repentant Catholics all over the Amakusa Islands publicly declared their faith, emboldened by Adam’s example after having been cowed into silence by the Shōgun’s ban on Christ.  In one village alone, more than 150 emboldened souls declared their faith in the Truth that has overcome the world.
One almighty Truth indeed, and terror to the Enemy of all men’s souls.
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Notes:
Blessed Adam Arakawa, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 November 2008, is one of the 187 Companions of Blessed Peter Kibe Kasui. He was beheaded on or about Tuesday, June 5, 1614.  (The date is unclear; that his martyrdom was fulfilled on a Tuesday, before dawn, is established.)
            Father Diego Yuuki, consummate historian of Japanese Christendom, passed away on November 17, 2008 in Nagasaki, city of Martyrs.  As of today, June 10, 2013, Joseph Takami continues in the office of Archbishop of Nagasaki.
[1]Kataoka Yakichi, Nihon Kirishitan Junkyō-shi  (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha, 1979) p. 252.
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