On 25
August 1624, five Catholic heroes faced hellish deaths for having brought
Christ to the people of Japan. Burned at the stake in Ōmura, east of
Nagasaki, were Father Miguel Carvalho, S.J., Fathers Luís Sotelo and Luís
Sasada, Franciscans, Father Pedro Vázquez, Dominican, and Franciscan Brother
Luís Baba.
Padre
Miguel Carvalho, the Jesuit, had entered Japan in 1622 on a Portuguese
trading-ship, having disguised himself as a soldier. The three Franciscans had
been sent from Japan as private ambassadors to King Philip III of Spain and the
Vatican, only to be arrested on their return. Fray Pedro Vázquez, dauntless
Dominican, had once risked death by disguising himself as a Japanese official
to gain entry to Nagasaki’s prison, where he heard the confessions of Catholic
prisoners bound for execution.
A
decade had passed since the fateful Anti-Christian Edict of 14 January 1614
exploded onto Japan—ironically, on Saint Valentine’s Day. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the
retired-yet-reigning Shogun, on that day fettered Japan with a brutal regime of
suppression worthy of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, a regime that his progeny
would tighten with each new accession to the Shogunal throne. By 1624, every cleric
in Japan was living on the scythe’s edge, daring a gruesome death; nevertheless,
these men of God carried on.
In July
1623, Father Carvalho had slipped into the Ōmura domain to hear the confessions
of her underground Christians. Having done his heroic work, he was betrayed by
a spy, arrested, and jammed into a hellhole of a prison where the four other
servants of God already languished, awaiting martyrs’ deaths.
Ōmura
was the first domain in Japan where Catholicism took deep root; its ruler,
Ōmura Sumitada, christened Bartolomeo,
had embraced the Faith in 1563 and championed it, braving violent opposition
and even a rebellion led by his anti-Catholic half-brother. Bartolomeo stood
firm as a pillar of the Church unto his death in 1587.
Bartolomeo’s
progeny, however, did not prove so redoubtable: his son and heir apostatized in
a fit of pique, and his son,
christened Bartolomeo like his grandfather, was cowed into apostasy when the
second Tokugawa Shogun fumed threats of dire consequences at him should he not
rid his domain of that irking religion of truth and light. The cowed apostate started
executing priests in May 1617; perhaps by the time Father Carvalho showed up in
Ōmura, its ruler’s conscience was numb, inured to spilling holy martyrs’ blood.
On 22
July 1623, Father Miguel Carvalho was thrown into a foul, stinking cell no
bigger than a closet—“16 hand full long and 8 broad,” he wrote—with the four
Christian stalwarts with whom he would die. It comforted him that his
imprisonment began on the Feast of Saint Mary
Magdalene, his patroness, and that he had managed to convert two of his captors
on his way to jail.
Thirteen months the five faithful men endured an unendurable penance,
awaiting the chance to prove to the downtrodden souls of Ōmura that Christ
lives in His martyrs. That chance finally came on the feast day of the saintly
King of France who had daily set beggars at his own table.
August 25, 1624: the Feast of Saint
Louis. The five condemned men of God were led to the execution-ground in Ōmura
with ropes strung tight around their necks and their arms bound. Only their
hands were free—free enough for each priest to walk clutching a cross on the
way to his Calvary. The Palme of Christian Fortitude (Douai,
1630) relates their ordeal:
They arrived at the place
appointed for their death, a field called Hokonohara, when giving thanks unto
those who had conducted them, … the Priests lifting on high the crosses which
they bare in their hands, they began to recite psalms with a loud voice; when
Father Carvalho, perceiving now a great multitude to be assembled, turning unto
them, You must understand, said he, that we are Christians,
and that we die of our free and voluntary accord, for the faith of Christ our
Lord. The admirable serenity of their countenances put their joy
so clearly in view of the beholders, that amazed thereat they said, these men
seemed to go rather to some feast or banquet, than unto death.
The
five men were loosely tied to their stakes in order that, flailing about in
their agonies, they might provide amusement to the crowd: the loose cords would
also burn away quickly, giving each victim the chance to flee the flames and
apostatize.
But
not a man gave in. The first to die was Brother Luís Baba, the native
Japanese catechist. Freed by his burnt-away cords, he ran to the stakes
of his priest-companions to kneel and kiss their hands, and
then exhorting with a loud voice the standers
by to embrace the faith of Christ in which alone is true safety and salvation,
he returned generously unto the stake again, and leaning himself unto it,
without any further tying … he endured, without ever moving himself, the fury
of those flames, until at length he rendered his invincible soul to God.
The
next to die was Father Carvalho, and then Father Luís Sasada, a native-born
Japanese who tried, like his countryman Luís Baba, to leave his stake and do
reverence to the surviving priests. He could not move his feet, though, for
they were burnt to cinders. The longest survivors were Fathers Luís Sotelo
and Pedro Vázquez, who endured the torment of a slow, smoky fire of straw “and
other dry litter” to choke them and cook them slowly, torturously—to effect
their apostasies. Yet they hung on
3 hours in the fire, ever immovable, consuming
away in lingering slow flames; after which space of time they ended the course
of a combat so much [the] more glorious, as it was produced longer, upon the
twenty-fifth of August 1624, by order of the Governors of Ōmura and Nagasaki.
Five
shining examples of faith, five luminaries to strengthen us from Heaven.
