Two
Heroic Priests: Friar Pedro and Father João
22
May 1617
In
1617 the Shōgun Hidetada (above) discovered that Ōmura Sumiyori,
the daimyō of Ōmura, was conniving at the hiding of Catholic
priests in his domain in Kyūshū,
the westernmost of the four home islands of Japan. The Shōgun’s
sledgehammer came down on this daimyō’s head: he had to expunge
the priests from his domain at once.
Ōmura
Sumiyori, christened Bartolomeo,
had been born and raised a Catholic; his grandfather, the illustrious
Bartolomeo Ōmura
Sumitada, had been the very first Japanese daimyō to receive baptism
and had remained a dauntless champion of the Faith unto his dying
breath. Sumitada’s faithless son Yoshiaki, however,
apostatized, and his
son, the great Bartolomeo’s
namesake, reluctantly
became a persecutor of the Church in the wake of the Shōgun
Hidetada’s threats.
Cowed,
presumably, by visions of his own unwilling martyrdom, Sumiyori
ordered the expulsion of all priests from his domain on pain of
death. Rather than abandon their flocks, however, there were some who
were ready to give their lives for them. Among these eternal lights
were Friar Pedro de la Asunción of the Franciscan Order and Father
João Baptista Machado de Távora, S. J. Both were beheaded
on Kōri Hill in the domain of Ōmura for the crime of being faithful
servants of the God who gave His life for faithless Man.
João
Baptista Machado de Távora was born at Angra do Heroísmo (Cove
of Heroism) on the island of Terceira, separated westward from Lisbon
by about a thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. His father and
mother were wealthy nobles, but his life-story proves that João
was no spoiled aristocrat: at the age of ten, on hearing of the
Catholic martyrdoms in contemporary Japan, the boy announced that he
hoped to go there and become a holy martyr himself.
At
age 16, on 10 April 1597 (64 days after the crucifixion of the 26
Martyrs of Nagasaki), João Machado entered the Jesuit Order at
Coimbra, Portugal, where he began his studies at the Jesuit
college. He sailed for India in 1601 and there, at Goa, studied
philosophy; next, at Macao (off the south coast of China), he studied
theology, and in 1609 headed for Japan, where he made astonishing
progress in Japanese.
Father
João Machado was based at Kyōto, the Imperial Capital, whence he
spread the Gospel far and wide. In 1614, however, the Tokugawa
Shōgunate promulgated its Christian Expulsion Edict, and Father João
found it impossible to remain among his flock incognito, for he was
by then too well-known to go unnoticed by the Shōgun’s vigilant
henchmen. He therefore slipped away to distant Nagasaki, a longtime
Catholic refuge on the west coast of Kyūshū,
the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. From Nagasaki,
Father
João’s
superior would send him on pastoral visits to Sotome, a
staunchly-Catholic bulwark nestled in the seaside mountains of
northwestern Kyūshū,
and to another bulwark of the Faith, the far-flung Gotō
Islands. These islands had become havens for Catholic refugees
fleeing the Shogunate’s increasingly-bloody persecution; Father
João is reputed to have performed awe-inspiring miracles of healing
on that archipelago.
In
April of 1617, detoured from an intended voyage to the Gotōs, Father
João said Mass at Sonogi, a fishing village a few miles up the coast
from Ōmura Sumiyori’s castle-town on the shore of Ōmura Bay. At
Sonogi the priest was betrayed to the apostate daimyō’s soldiers,
who arrested him immediately after he had celebrated Mass; as they
were all practicing Catholics, every last man was ashamed, and they
explained to Father João that it was only for fear of their lives
and those of their families that they were obeying their faithless
feudal lord’s orders.
Thanks
to contrary winds, the soldiers’ boat had to wait at Sonogi; thus,
for a blessed space of days, Father
João
was able to celebrate daily Mass for both his flock at Sonogi and his
captors. No doubt word got out and the faithful came from far
and wide to confess their sins and receive the Bread of Life. On 29
April, though, a fair wind having come, that boat with its
life-giving cargo sailed for the faithless daimyō’s castle-town;
en route, the captive priest heard the contrite soldiers’
confessions. From the dock at Ōmura, Father João was led to the
daimyō’s prison at Kōri in a torchlight procession, like Jesus
being marched out of Gethsemane.
When
Father João Machado walked into the prison, he was met by the
Franciscan Friar Pedro de la Asunción, in that prison since 8 April.
Friar Pedro—born in Cuerba, near Toledo, Spain—had been caught
via a stratagem employed by the sheriff of Nagayo (a town in the
Ōmura domain about 9 miles northeast of the port of Nagasaki), who,
feigning a desire to confess his sins, had lured the friar into a
trap.
Friar
Pedro had arrived in Japan in 1608 and had for some years been Father
Superior of the Franciscan monastery in Nagasaki. Despite recent
animosity between their two religious orders, however, this
Franciscan friar knelt to kiss the Jesuit padre’s feet when he saw
him walk through the prison door; the humbled Father
João,
refusing this show of obeisance from his brother in Christ, lifted
the man to his feet.
Ōmura
Sumiyori reported to the Shogunate that he had captured the two
priests and then sat back to await the Shōgun’s orders; in the
meantime, the imprisoned priests were celebrating daily Mass, hearing
their fellow-prisoners’ confessions, and restoring
korobi-Kirish’tan
(former Catholics who had been tortured or otherwise cowed into
apostasy) to their proper home, Holy Mother Church. On 21 May,
the Shōgun Hidetada’s answer came: kill the priests. Since
Pentecost they had been celebrating daily Mass together; that
morning, during Mass, Friar Pedro said to Father João, “We will
not be celebrating many more Masses.” The next morning he told
him with certainty, “This will be our last Mass.” Father
João agreed.
A
few hours later, Lino Tomonaga, Ōmura’s apostate sheriff, came to
visit the priests, talked with Father João at length—never
mentioning the death-sentence—and left; but he turned right around,
came back in, and made his grave announcement. Father João
Machado replied, “The
three happiest days of my life are: the day of my entry into the
college of Coimbra, that of my capture, and this one in which I
receive my death sentence.” The
two priests burst into song, the Te
Deum (Thee, O God, we Praise). Offered
a last meal, they declined. Instead, they scourged themselves,
confessed their sins to one another, and prayed.
On
their long march to the execution ground on Kōri Hill, Friar Pedro
carried a crucifix with his scourge fixed to it; from this scourge
hung a copy of the Franciscan Rule. Father João carried a bronze
crucifix and his breviary. Along the way, the two brothers in Christ
preached without ceasing. When they arrived at the execution-ground,
a Kirish’tan soldier baptized as Damian presented the holy martyrs
with two cushions to kneel on. Friar Pedro, the Franciscan,
thanked him for this courtesy and said, “Now may dust return to
dust.”
The
two priests knelt beside one another, a few feet apart. First
Friar Pedro’s head fell in one slash of the sword. The Jesuit,
Father João, had a more prolonged ordeal, however: he had to
endure three slashes of that sword before he could meet his
God. Perhaps the swordsman had been wrestling with his
conscience as he struggled to obey his earthly lord’s orders;
afterwards, he would perhaps have taken some mystical consolation
from seeing the two priests’ blood flows joining together into one
pool: a visual sign of their blood-brotherhood in Holy
Martyrdom.
It
was 22 May, Anno Domini 1617: the start of a great outpouring of
Christian Martyrs’ blood, a baptism of the very soil itself. This
heavenly rain, this testimony in blood to the truth of the Faith, to
the Living Word who is Himself Truth, would seed a bountiful crop of
steely faith throughout Japan, faith that would endure centuries of
persecution to outlive the Shōguns and all their puny,
merely-earthly power.
The
beheading of Padre Machado in an engraving by Pierre Miotte. It
appeared in António
Francisco Cardim´s,
Elogios,
Rome
1646 (Latin)
and Lisbon
1650 (Portuguese).
