This story begins on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 1560,
when the town of Laino in Cosenza, Italy was graced with the birth of a boy of noble
blood. Eschewing the life of privilege that could have awaited him, the boy chose
instead to serve his God and save the souls of his fellow men in a foreign land.
Pietro Paolo Navarro entered the Society of Jesus
at Nola (Kingdom of Naples) in 1579, the very year that Father Alessandro Valignano,
the great Italian Jesuit, entered Japan at the port of Kuchinotsu to remake the
face of her Church and spread its fame across the Catholic world. Father Navarro
arrived in Japan in 1586, landing at the port of Hirado along with seven other priests
aboard the trading-ship of Domingos Monteiro. Saint Francis Xavier had visited Hirado in 1550,
leaving a number of converted souls in his trail of miracles, along with great hopes
for the future of the Japanese Church.
First, Father Navarro applied himself
assiduously to the study of Japanese. He learned the language quickly and could
soon preach powerfully to the Japanese in their own tongue, so he was sent to Iyo
in Shikoku to found a new apostolate. Sadly, that was to be short-lived.
On July 24, 1587, the Feast of St. James,
the dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi proclaimed a ban on the Catholic Faith and ordered
the expulsion of all clergy. Fr. Navarro withdrew from Iyo but stayed on in Japan,
moving secretly around the island of Kyushu to serve her orphaned Christians.
By 1596, Father Navarro was pastoring the
church of Yamaguchi, famously founded by St. Francis Xavier with an astounding display
of courage. In the face of constant threats to his life, the saint had preached
the Gospel in the streets of that city, railing against the unspeakable abuses committed
by the Buddhist clergy of his day, particularly the “abominable sin” of pederasty
so rampant among them. He had preached the same lesson in an audience with the ruler
of Yamaguchi, an addicted pederast, while Brother Juan Fernández, his companion
and interpreter, trembled for their lives.
On February 5, 1597, Hideyoshi crucified
the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki in a fit of megalomania. The following year he died in
a frenzy, babbling incoherently about “a thousand things out of context” and talking
about crowning his little son King of Japan.[1]
This dream never saw fruition, nor did Hideyoshi’s command, in his last will and
testament, that he be deified after death as Shin-Hachiman, i.e. the New God of
War.
Father Navarro professed his four solemn
Jesuit vows at Nagasaki in 1601. It seemed a time of great promise for the Japanese
Church: Hideyoshi was dead, and his successor, the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, seemed
anything but hostile to the Catholic mission. Dutch and English protestants, bitter
enemies of everything Catholic, had arrived in Japan in 1600, however, and their
calumnies were quick to find the Shogun’s ear. In 1612, things came to a head when
the Catholic lord of Arima got duped into bribing a shogunal official for a phony
promise to enlarge the Arima domain. Both schemer and victim were Catholic; this
infuriated the Shogun, who banned the Faith in all shogunal territories. The ban
would extend to all Japan in 1614.
1617 was a year replete with the shedding
of Christian blood on Japanese soil. We find Father Navarro in the domain of Bungo,
where, given the frantic hunt to round up and exterminate Catholic missionaries,
he was forced to hide for some days on end in a hole he had dug. There, having no
help from his fellow man, he turned to God, who not only sustained him, but gave
him strength to ‘return to his work with ardor’ once the danger had passed. He went
about disguised as a baggage-porter, wearing a straw hat under which he could presumably
hide his face in shadow.[2]
In May of 1619, Fr. Navarro was given responsibility
for all of the Shimabara Peninsula (Arima) and the far flung Amakusa Islands to
the south, among the most fervently-Catholic regions of all Japan. He must have
foreseen his end, for, come Advent of 1621, he made a general confession to the
Jesuit Provincial at Kazusa in southern Arima. He sailed northward from there
to the hot-springs town of Obama and, two days later, passed by night to the village
of Hachirao, where he went on retreat to do the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. He
had intended to then celebrate the Nativity at the old Catholic castle-town of Arima,
but the locals wrote him urging him to stay away for fear of the daimyo’s spies.
He thus celebrated Christmas at Hachirao and afterwards set out for Arima in the
night, a risky journey, for he had to take the main road in bright moonlight. He
was readily spotted by a servant of the daimyo’s, who grabbed him by the robe; the priest submitted without protest.
Matsukura Shigemasa, the daimyo of Arima, was as
yet no enemy of the Christians. He had taken over the domain from Arima Naozumi,
an apostate who had failed in his promise to the Shogun to purge his ancestral religion
from the land. Matsukura put Fr. Navarro under house arrest but gave him the privilege
of receiving visitors, saying Mass and hearing confessions. In the meantime, he
strove to get shogunal permission to merely deport the well-beloved priest to Macao
rather than burn him alive as the Shogun’s law demanded, often summoning him to
his fortress, Shimabara Castle, to question him about the Catholic Faith.[3]
Father Navarro’s answers clearly moved Matsukura profoundly, for at their final
meeting, he, the lord of the castle, escorted the priest of that banned ‘foreign’
religion outside, fell to his knees, put his palms to the earth, and bowed his head
to the ground—a gesture that could have cost him his life.
The Shogun’s answer—death by fire—arrived
on the eve of the Feast of All Saints. On the morning of 1 November, 1622, Father
Navarro said Mass “with an abundance of tears,” apparently informed by the Spirit
that this was his last day in this Vale of Tears, for he had not yet been told of
his death sentence. Matsukura gave him the word two hours before noon.
Father Navarro “put his chaplet around
his neck to prepare himself for the final combat” and stepped outside into a windy
autumn day.[4] He would be burned along with three companions—Jesuit
brothers Dennis Fujishima, 38, and Pedro Onizuka, 18; and layman Clemente Kyuemon—
none of whom could keep up with 64-year-old Fr. Navarro in his zeal to reach the
site of his holocaust. The condemned Christians were accompanied by fifty armed
soldiers to the execution-ground outside the gate of the city, all of them presumably
sprinting to keep up with that old Italian priest burning with an unquenchable love
of the Lord he would soon meet face to face.
Reaching his appointed stake, he took off
his hat and bowed to it before the guards tied him to the instrument of his death
as they would the three others. When Matsukura arrived, the firewood was lit, and
a gust of wind engulfed Fr. Navarro’s mantle in flame, yet he used all his strength
to encourage his companions to hold on for the crown of glory. When his ropes had
burnt away, he fell onto his side shouting, “Jesus! Mary!” These holy names he shouted
to his last breath, with the hair-shirt he had worn for penance clinging to his
skin, revealed under his burnt-away mantle. His three companions, too, held on to
the end, all worthy sons of St. Francis Xavier.
In 1623 a new Shogun took over: Tokugawa
Iemitsu—sadist, pederast, and such an enemy of Christ that it seemed he was possessed
by a demon. Matsukura Shigemasa he soon won to his side, turning him into a persecutor
who tortured his Catholic subjects by mutilation, branding, and boiling them in
the hot sulfur springs atop Mount Unzen.
Matsukura fell mortally ill in 1630 and
summoned 200 apothecaries to bring their cures to Shimabara Castle. In a panic
he took all their concoctions together, creating a brew that boiled noxious in
his stomach and drove him to a frenzy in which he hallucinated demons from hell.
Or were they hallucinations? For stones came flying from out of nowhere in the
corridors of Shimabara Castle, and ‘long, supernatural howls’ resounded within its
walls.[5]
On 19 December, Matsukura fled to the
hot-springs town of Obama, where he slipped into a bath whose water his servants
had tested and found merely tepid. Yet their raving master felt himself burning,
and he thought that the fire inside him could devour his surroundings. This was
his final frenzy.[6] The
mountain atop which he had tortured and killed so many Christians in boiling
sulfur-springs towered over his bath-house; perhaps as he died he was hearing
the voices and seeing the faces of the martyrs he had murdered.
I wonder if he saw the face of Father
Pietro Paulo Navarro looking benignly down at him as he bowed his forehead to
the earth to do the priest reverence on that bygone day at Shimabara Castle? Or
did he see him wrapped in flames, cheering on his companions in martyrdom?
Either memory, with a wriggle of repentance, might have saved poor Matsukura Shigemasa’s
soul.
[1] François Solier, Histoire Ecclesiastique
des Isles et Royaumes du Japon, v.2 (Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy, 1627) 127.
[2]
Solier,
767-8.
[3]
James Murdoch, A History of Japan
during the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse 1542-1651 (Kobe: Office of
The “Chronicle”, 1903) 647 note.
[4] Solier, 766.
[5] Léon Pagès, Histoire
de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu'à 1651: pte. Texte (Paris:
Charles Douniol, 1869) 732.
[6]
Ibid,
732.
