He who receives his testimony sets
his seal to this, that God is true.
John
3:33 (Ignatius Bible)
Enduring hell to gain Heaven: what better declaration
of freedom could mortal man make than testifying to the truth of Christ in
one’s own death? This is the essence of martyrdom, and thus does ‘martyr’
derive from Greek μαρτύριον (martyrion), i.e., testimony, proof.
Meet the scion of a Catholic family,
a samurai youth who saw the dayspring from on high on the remotest shore the
Church had ever reached and pledged to Him his life and breath and blood. He
traversed half the world to become a priest and risked countless mortal dangers
to get back home, knowing he would face a gruesome death there, for he had
vowed to bring light to his benighted land if only for a day, a week, or, God
willing, a few restless years. His name is Peter Kibe.
Peter Kasui Kibe
was born in Urabe, a seaside hamlet in northeast Kyushu perched beside the
Bungo Strait. His parents were both samurai and Catholic, kin of the castellan
of Kibe Castle. The word ‘samurai’ derives from the verb ‘saburau,’ ‘to serve,’
but Peter Kibe had a higher calling than serving a merely-mortal lord. Peter’s
birth in 1587, the very year of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ban on the Faith, looks
like the hand of Providence taking up a fiery sword. He was baptized in the
church at Nakatsu, a coastal town north of Urabe, where Miguel Kuroda, samurai and future lord of
Akizuki, was baptized on Easter Sunday of that very year.
At age 13, Peter
entered the Jesuit Seminario at Nagasaki, but the school was moved to
Arima, the staunchest redoubt of Catholic Japan, after a fire in November 1601.
While studying in Arima, young Peter must have imbibed the spirit of that land
so Catholic that the Faith would flourish there even when driven underground,
its flame burning bright until all its adherents were slaughtered by the Shogun Iemitsu’s horde
in April of 1638.
On his graduation
in 1606, Peter requested admission to the Society of Jesus, but first he would
have to labor as a humble dojuku—a lay helper, preacher, translator and
catechist. He chose the name ‘Kasui’ as his dojuku surname; some presume
it was written “living water” in kanji ideographs, though no record of
its kanji spelling survives. Notably, Peter labored in Miguel Kuroda’s Catholic
haven of Akizuki, where a miraculous apparition, a burning cross,
would appear on a mountaintop on the Easter Vigil of 1616, in the early years
of the Tokugawa persecution.
The
elder shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu set loose that persecution in 1612, a juggernaut
that bared its fangs with a demonic venom specially destined for Arima, where
hundreds of Catholics signed their names to registers of those willing to
suffer for the Faith rather than apostatize. The tortures inflicted on them by
Ieyasu’s governor in Nagasaki, Hasegawa Sahioye, are too repulsive to recount
here: suffice it to say that he left behind virtual mountains of human flesh
when he withdrew from Arima with his 10,000 shogunal troops.
This
was the prelude to Ieyasu’s exile of all Catholic missionaries to Macao and
Manila in November 1614. Undaunted, Peter continued his studies in Macao,
dreaming of a future as an underground Jesuit priest serving his countrymen
under the heel of the Tokugawa tyranny.
But
the Jesuits in Macao, finding their resources strained by the huge influx of
Japanese exiles, discontinued their Latin lessons in 1618 and later closed
their Seminario entirely. Clearly, the top brass were reluctant to see
these young Japanese ordained and sent back into the inferno of Tokugawa Japan.
Many dojuku left Macao for Manila, while three sailed for India, seeking
ordination in Rome: Miguel Minoes (from Mino), Mancio Konishi (grandson of the
famous Catholic general Augustine Konishi, beheaded by the Shogun Ieyasu), and
Peter Kibe. From India, Miguel and Mancio would sail for Rome via Portugal, but
the intrepid Peter Kibe would set off on foot, aiming first for the Holy Land,
trekking through 3,000-odd miles of mountains, deserts, and countries hostile
to Christians to reach Jerusalem (the first Japanese to do so), and thence on
to Rome.
Where,
having appeared out of the blue with no
proof on paper of his studies in Japan and Macao, he nevertheless
conquered the churchmen’s doubts, and on Sunday, November 15, 1620, he became
Father Peter Kibe by the laying-on of the Bishop’s hands in a chapel at the
Lateran. He was 33 years old. When he showed up in his cassock at the
Jesuits’ door in Rome five days later, they didn’t turn him away, despite the
Jesuit Visitor’s exhortations, written from Macao, to distrust wandering
Japanese exiles like him: he won them over too, and he entered the Jesuit
novitiate — normally lasting two years.
But two years was
too long to wait for a samurai-priest determined to save his countrymen’s
souls. Father Peter asked the General of the Society for permission to complete
his novitiate enroute to Japan, and his fervor won the day. A fervor stoked, no
doubt, by the Canonization Mass of St. Francis Xavier, which Peter Kibe
attended, possibly shaken to his knees. More fuel was added to that fire in his
soul, no doubt, by his studying in Rome with St. John Berchmans and his
acquaintance with St. Robert Bellarmine. On 6 June 1622, he left Rome for
Portugal, and while in Madrid read the Jesuits’ 1621 report from Japan: the
persecution was worsening, with house-to-house searches for underground priests
and once-friendly daimyos turning up the heat on Catholics in their domains—not
only priests and dojuku, but even laity were now in their sights.
Finishing
his novitiate on 21 November 1622, Peter Kibe made his public Jesuit vow in
Lisbon and then entered the Colegio there to await passage to India. A
fleet of six sail — three huge, lumbering carracks and three galleons to
protect them — embarked on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1623,
carrying an archbishop, two auxiliary bishops and seventeen missionaries, and
ran into a fierce gale that very afternoon. They returned to port to wait out the
storm and get repairs: one carrack had a broken mast and a galleon had smashed
into rocks.
A
few days later they set sail again into the crucible of nature’s dangers and
Dutch and English pirates’ predations, aiming for the Cape of Good Hope. In the
tropics their food and water would putrefy; cholera, typhus, dysentery and the
like would flourish; and many of the passengers and crew would spend weeks flat
on their backs, mortally ill, as their vessels crawled interminably on under
the merciless sun. The archbishop himself was bled nine times during two
months’ prostration. Rounding the Cape, they met a gale that destroyed the
mainsail of the archbishop’s carrack, then doldrums, and finally a contrary
wind that blocked their way to India; they wintered in Mozambique.
On
28 May 1624, the fleet would reach India, only a rest-stop for Fr. Peter Kibe.
He was off to Macao, whence he had begun his pioneering journey.
Macao: an outpost of Catholic
Portugal at the very gate of Ming China. Portugal’s commitment to the Faith ordained
her as Christ-bearer to the Orient in an era when the Portuguese were “the finest [ship’s] pilots and seamen in the world.”
Thus, St. Francis Xavier, the Basque Jesuit titan from Navarre who seeded a swath
of Christendom from India to Japan, could always depend on Portuguese captains’
support for his mission in times of need.
And yet, when Fr. Peter Kibe arrived in Macao after traversing
the globe just to become a priest and a Jesuit, he hit a dead end. No ship’s captain
would dare carry a priest to Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate’s ban on Christ,
for Macao’s economy depended on her merchants trading precious Chinese silks in
Nagasaki. This surrender to Mammon would have invited fire and brimstone from St.
Francis Xavier were he still in the flesh.
But down in Siam was a flourishing royal capital, Ayutthaya,
replete with Japanese ronin swordsmen hired to protect the king, and the
place was frequented by traders carrying spices to Japan. In February 1627, Fr.
Kibe embarked in a lumbering Portuguese carrack for Malacca on the Malay Peninsula,
intending to go northward to Ayutthaya from there and eventually catch a ride to
Japan on a trading ship.
And the devil did his damnedest
to stop him. As the Portuguese behemoth was nearing Malacca, four nimble Dutch pirate
ships appeared and attacked her. Many aboard the carrack abandoned ship and swam
for shore, including Fr. Kibe carrying his breviary and other necessities on his
shoulders. All made shore, but they had to survive without food for three days,
walking in pouring rain through territory rife with bandits, until they reached
Malacca and safety. Fr. Kibe was just regaining his strength when a fever laid him
low.
Once recovered, he boarded a
ship for Siam. Now the weather turned so foul that the normally-short sail turned
into a three-month slog, another ordeal, before he could disembark and hunker down
among his countrymen in the guise of a sailor while looking for passage to Japan.
However, every Japan-bound ship’s captain demanded
denials of Christian faith from all boarding passengers, given the horrors awaiting
Catholics (and their accomplices) in Nagasaki. Such treachery was out of the question
for Fr. Kibe, a samurai with the power to confect the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity
of Jesus Christ out of simple bread and wine. After two years’ fruitless wait, he
boarded a Manila-bound Spanish ship, sailing on the Feast of the Visitation of 1629.
To find Manila as inhospitable
to Japan-bound priests as Macao had been. But there in Manila, Fr. Peter found a
brother in intrepidity: Fr. Miguel Matsuda, a former schoolmate from Shiki in Amakusa.
They bought a beat-up boat, limped it to an island in Manila Bay, and in great secrecy
set to work patching it up with some Catholic sailors’ help. Then, as they awaited
fair winds, termites feasted on their hidden prize, a fact discovered just days
before they were set to sail. Undaunted, they patched her up with planking and put
her out to sea. It was June of 1630, sixteen years since their exile from home.
They had fair sailing almost all the way to Kyushu — until
a typhoon hit and smashed them onto an islet’s rocky shore, their ramshackle vessel
destroyed but their lives preserved. The friendly islanders sheltered them and,
when the typhoon had passed, sailed them to Bōnotsu, near Kagoshima. Perhaps it was Providence that landed
them so close to the spot where St. Francis Xavier had landed 81 years before, carrying
the Dayspring to Japan.
Both priests slipped into Nagasaki
to serve the underground Christians, but Fr. Kibe soon headed for northeast Japan
(Tōhoku), home to some 26,000 persecuted Catholics
dispersed far and wide. There he found shelter at Mizusawa in the home of a Catholic
samurai, Miyake Tōemon. It must have
been good to finally have a place to lay his head.
Until, on 13 February 1639, a certain Chōzaburo reported him and his hosts to the shogun’s
spies. Behold the Shogun Iemitsu: pederast,
sadist, rumored leper. Iemitsu derived special pleasure from observing the torture
of Catholic priests.
Along with four other priests captured in Tōhoku, Fr. Peter was taken to Edo, the shogunal
capital. Two were burnt alive at Fuda-no-Tsuji, a crossroads (I know not their names),
while Fr. Kibe and two other Jesuits — Frs. Giovanni Battista Porro and Martinho
Shikimi — were imprisoned to await the former-Jesuit apostate Christovão Ferreira,
now called Sawano Chuan, who was charged with persuading captured priests to follow
his wide and easy path to destruction. Instead, Ferreira found his own eyes opened
to Christ Crucified preached by a Jesuit willing to traverse the world braving mortal
dangers to become a priest and come back just to die for Him.
After ten days’ fruitless browbeating, they subjected the
three priests to the ‘wooden horse torture’ — with weights on their feet, they had
to straddle, in great agony, a triangular wooden saddle like a sharp-peaked roof.
When this failed to force their apostasies, they were subjected to “the pit.”
The victim, hands tied behind his back,
would be tightly coiled in rope from the feet up to the chest, hung upside-down
from a gallows, and lowered head-first into a hole six feet deep containing human
waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the stench. The lid comprised
two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the center crimped 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 into
the filth below his head.
François Caron, a Dutch eyewitness, wrote,
“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.”
While the victim hung clamped in the dank,
stinking hell of the pit, the torturers would twist his body back and forth to elicit
maximum torment, urging him to chant to Buddha — a sign of apostasy — and thus gain
his life and “freedom.”
In the throes of their torment, perhaps
in delirium, Frs. Porro and Shikimi each emitted mumbled groans. The torturers pulled
out the half-conscious priests, marking them as apostates, and sent them away for
medical care. Both later denied having renounced Christ, but their protests were
ignored.
Fr. Kibe, though, not only held firm,
but kept blasting volleys of encouragement to two dojuku hanging in the pits
beside him — preaching Christ, urging perseverance to the end.
This
the shogun’s torturers could not abide. They pulled Fr. Peter out for special treatment,
piling firewood on his naked belly and setting it alight. Still he held firm, even
as his belly split open, even as his bowels came bursting out, for he, true Jesuit,
true samurai, had conquered oceans and deserts and myriad perils to come back just
for this: to testify that Christ alone is King.
Father Peter
Kasui Kibe died unbroken on July 4, 1639, a cry of freedom to rouse all humankind.
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.
This story first appeared on ChurchMilitant.com in two
parts under this title: Spiritual Independence on July Fourth, here:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/another-fourth-of-july-part-i
