The burning of Father Antonio Ishida. From Cardim's
Fasciculus e Iapponicis Floribus, Rome, 1646.
While
combing the narrow streets of Nagasaki in the autumn of 1629, the
Shogun’s police grabbed themselves a coveted prize: a Japanese
Jesuit priest, an heir of Saint Francis Xavier’s hope, born eighty
years earlier, to fill all Japan with Christ. By 1629, under the
Shogun Iemitsu’s persecution, that hope was all but smashed under
the tyrant’s heel, and yet a rare breed of intrepid men still clave
to that hope as if it were their very life and breath, despising
their own mortal lives to save immortal souls for Christ.
Father
Antonio Ishida, S.J. had been called to Nagasaki to hear the
confession of an ailing believer, and having done this work of
charity, he stayed on for six more days to hear a string of
confessions from underground Catholics too-long starved of the
Sacraments. He had been warned against making the dangerous trip to
Nagasaki by a fellow-priest in Omura, but he had chosen to obey the
call “for love of souls,” as he later explained in a letter from
his Nagasaki prison.
There
he languished with four other men: three Augustinians, one
Franciscan, and a Japanese diocesan priest. Meanwhile, the Shogun’s
governor in Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, was busily devising stratagems
designed to seduce Christ’s shepherds away from His flock—or,
that failing, to rip that hated faith out of them by tortures as
cruel as fallen Man could devise.
But
first the seduction. Uneme had Fr. Ishida brought out of jail to face
an erudite Buddhist monk chosen to convince him to renounce the
Faith, if only for show, in obedience to the Shogun. In his secret
heart, he could go on believing whatever he wished, the monk
explained, and save his life. The staunch priest replied that what a
Christian believed in his heart he must proclaim to all the world.
And the Shogun’s decrees, he went on, could in no wise prevail
against the law of the Creator of the universe.
Next
they tried bribing him with riches and prestige on top of the offer
of his life: the browbeating went on for twenty-four hours—to no
avail. The priest went back to jail, and Uneme turned his eyes toward
Mount Unzen, a volcano southeast of Nagasaki whose peak held boiling
pools of acrid sulfur water, the very stench of which would choke and
gag a passerby. But Uneme’s victims were not marched up there
merely to choke.
The
torturers had a practiced method: strip the victim naked, make him
stand on a rock at the boiling pool’s edge, and shower him with
that boiling, sulfurous crud dripped from a ladle with holes in its
bottom. A survivor reported that each drop felt like a knife’s
point driven into the skin. Throughout December of 1631, Fr. Ishida
and his fellows endured daily torture as their torturers demanded
they apostatize and thus procure relief. At night they were shoved
into a hut where they would wait, shivering, through the freezing
hours of darkness for their next day of agonies and pray for the
grace to go on. For sustenance, each victim was allowed one sardine
and one small bowl of broth per day.
Along
with Fr. Ishida suffered four priests and one brother: Frs. Bartolomé
Gutiérrez, Vicente Carvalho, and Francisco de Jesús, Augustinians;
and Br. Gabriel de la Magdalena, a Franciscan. Two were
Spaniards, one Portuguese, and one, Fr. Gutiérrez, was Mexico-born.
Along with these clergy, Uneme, the reptilian inquisitor, had
thrown in two Portuguese ladies from Macao, Beatriz da Costa and her
daughter Maria, perhaps out of gratuitous cruelty. Maria finally
collapsed, unconscious, and they said she had apostatized: a claim
she denied upon reviving.
Thirty-three
days of scalding having gained the torturers no prize, Uneme called
them back to Nagasaki. The ladies he sent back to Macao; he would
substitute a Japanese priest—Fr. Iyo, Franciscan—to stand in for
them on the execution-ground overlooking Nagasaki Bay. The six men
were led out of their cell on the morning of September 3, 1632. They
would climb a steep slope called Nishi-zaka to reach the place of
their martyrdom, the very flatland atop which the crosses of the
Twenty-Six Martyrs had been arrayed on a February morning in 1597;
many more faithful had seeded that soil with their blood in the
intervening years.
Atop
that sacred ground, Uneme’s men had built a cage of sorts in which
to roast those stalwarts of the Faith. Around it, on all sides, a
palisade of bamboo poles enclosed the killing-ground; inside stood
six columns in a line, topped by a roof of foliage and straw: this
would trap the acrid smoke intended to prolong the agonies of the
missionaries to be burned. Firewood was spaced at a distance from
each column calculated to provide a lingering death, and all was
doused with saltwater to produce as much choking smoke as possible.
Spotting some Portuguese onlookers on the way to Nishi-zaka, Fr.
Vicente shouted at them “Long live the Faith of Christ!” in their
tongue, and when none made a sound, he asked, “Will no-one
respond?” and repeated, “Viva!” At this there came a cry of
“Viva! Viva!” On their way up the slope, the martyrs chanted
Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes.
Inside
their death-cage, each of the martyrs was tied by a single finger to
one of the columns: this method was intended to elicit amusing dances
of agony and panic from the men of that proscribed faith, and even
perhaps provide an apostasy or two. The torturers, though, were
disappointed.
Fr. Gutiérrez was the first to die: he stood like a
warrior facing an inconsequential enemy, leaned into his column, and
gave up his soul in silence. Fr. Vicente, holding a bronze cross,
kept his eyes fixed on it until his last breath. All died without
providing any hint of cowardice or doubt of their eternal reward,
enduring hell on earth for love of souls.
Friday,
September 3, 1632: a day to remember when asking for prayers from
above.
***
Luke
O’Hara became a Roman Catholic in Japan. His articles and books
about Japan’s martyrs can be found at his website, kirishtan.com.
