Another Fourth of July

 

 

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

 

A November Sacrifice, a December Reckoning

            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.

Slaughtering the Healers

  “It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, from out of the blue.  I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin when out came this treasure from the store-room of his heart. It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of the face of a child.  This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18.10)  That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones, untainted as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God, so much like the face of the Infant Jesus.

         When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Lk 5:31)  Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing.  How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world:  murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms. 

How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians.  And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony.  How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights’.

            If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child, but perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘experienced’, too hardened of heart:  perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain.  We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.

              How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones. 

 

 

December 28th: In Honor of the Holy Innocents

Slaughtering the Healers

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens
Public Domain (PD-US)

            “It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, completely out of the blue.  I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin, and out came this treasure from the store-room of his heart.

            It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of the face of a child.  This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 18:10)  That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones, untainted as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God, so much like the face of the Infant Jesus.

            When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Lk 5:31)  

       Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing. How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world:  murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms.  

        How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians.

  And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony.  How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights’ or, God save us, ‘women’s health.’

            If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child, but perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘experienced,' too hardened of heart:  perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain.  We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.

              How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones.

Luke O'Hara

Kirishtan.com

Santa Magdalena: the Perfect Bride

Statue of Magdalena at the Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, Manila. Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez (Wikimedia Commons)

  

    Thirteen days and a half she hung in the pit, singing hymns and blessing the names of Jesus and His mother: no other human being in all the dark history of Japan’s persecution of Christ’s Church ever withstood the torturers’ cruelties so long. Yet, in the end, it was not the cruelties of the Shōgun’s minions that ended her life; rather, it was the merciful Hand of God that gently took holy Magdalena home.

A young woman of extraordinary beauty and refinement, Magdalena so enthralled the diabolic Governor of Nagasaki, Takenaka Uneme, that he tried to dissuade her from seeking the arrest and martyrdom she so craved. She was worthy of marriage to a noble of the highest order, he insisted; nay, to the very Emperor himself. But Magdalena would have none of that. She boldly declared to Uneme’s face that her only spouse was Christ,¹ and in so doing handed herself, life and limb, over to him: to Uneme, the infamous deviser of the cruellest torture ever known to humankind.

The life and glorious death of Santa Magdalena, or Saint Magdalene—or Marie-Madeleine, as French historian Léon Pagès called her—is a dazzling tale so replete with signs of supernatural power as to make modern atheists stop their ears and crimp shut their eyes, lest “they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted,” and Jesus should heal them.²

Magdalena was a prodigy who displayed a love of learning from childhood, reading “pious books in the two languages of Portuguese and Japanese” and consecrating her virginity to God in front of an image of Our Lady of the Rosary.³ The orphaned daughter of Catholic martyrs, she risked martyrdom herself by laboring as interpreter and catechist for the Augustinian friars Francisco de Jesús and Vicente de San Antonio as she “accompanied them in their vicissitudes in the mountains.”⁴ Father Francisco gave her the habit of an Augustinian Tertiary and she thereafter made her profession, though barely fifteen years of age.⁵ Léon Pagès tells us that she worked tirelessly for the conversion of pagans, and with great success.⁶

Such a devoted disciple was she that, when her spiritual fathers were arrested in November of 1629, Magdalena wanted to join them in their inevitable martyrdom (they would be tortured to death by “slow fire”) by turning herself in to the authorities. God let her know that He had different plans for her, though: she would find new pastors and continue her work among her people. She served two more Augustinian Friars, Melchor de San Agustín and Martín de San Nicolás, as their right hand until they too were captured by the Shogunal authorities. She had been with them barely three months; they would die by “slow fire” on 11 December 1632.

Execution by “slow fire” consisted in tying the Christian to a stake surrounded by firewood placed far enough away from him to produce an excruciatingly slow, agonizing death. To aggravate the torture, the executioners covered the firewood with a layer of leafy foliage, then a layer of straw mixed with green branches; they doused the whole with saltwater mixed with soil; this would produce a thick cloud of acrid smoke to sting the Christian’s eyes and nose and poison every breath he took.⁷ Death would finally come only after hours of choking, broiling torture. The point of all this was to procure public apostasy: to produce such torment in the Christian captive that he would publicly renounce his faith, thereby opening the flood gates to mass apostasy. Slow fire, however, wasn’t doing the job: something more gruelling was in order.

Enter Takenaka Uneme. In August of 1629 the Shōgun had installed him as Governor of Nagasaki with orders to expunge the Catholic Faith from that staunchly-Catholic town, the historical wellspring of Catholicism in Japan. Since slow fire was producing only blackened corpses and seemed even to be fanning the flames of that proscribed Faith, the diabolical Uneme devised what would prove to be the ultimate in torture: “the pit.” Thus:

This was their method of persuasion: they would coil their victim tightly in rope from the feet up to the chest, tie his hands behind his back, and then hang him upside-down from a gallows with his head and torso lowered into a hole, six feet deep, perhaps containing human waste or other filth and covered with a lid to trap the stench. The lid was made of two boards closed together; crescent cutouts in the center closed tight around 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. François Caron, the chief of the Dutch trading-post in Hirado, wrote, “This extremitie hath indeed ... forced many to renounce their religion; and 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.”⁸

This is how Magdalena’s next two pastors would die. The first, Dominican Father Domingo de Erquicia, described Uneme as “man dressed as demon, or devil incarnate.”⁹ He succumbed on 14 August 1633. The second, Italian Dominican Father Giordano Ansaloni, would meet his death on 17 November 1634. By that time Magdalena had already left this wretched earth, for she had sought out martyrdom, marching into that incarnate devil’s very lair in her black monastic habit to declare her burning love for Christ and her contempt for any torture that hell and all its minions could throw her way.

Upon learning of Father Giordano’s arrest, she went straight to Nagasaki to present herself to the authorities and demand that she too—as a Christian, a disciple of Father Giordano’s, and a member of a religious order—be arrested. At first, taken by her beauty and her obvious refinement, Uneme tried to dissuade her, but seeing her unshakable faith, he ordered her put in jail. “She entered with great happiness, shedding tears of joy,” history tells us.¹⁰ To dampen her spirits, Uneme ordered her tortured; his torturers jammed sharpened strips of singed bamboo under her fingernails. Seeing blood pouring from her wounds, she reveled, “With what rubies have you adorned my hands!”¹¹ The torturers ordered Magdalena to scratch furrows in the earth with the bamboo strips; she obeyed, undaunted.¹² They tried a water torture, pouring copious amounts down her throat and then throwing her onto the floor and loading heavy stones onto her so that the water gushed out violently through her mouth, ears, and nose.¹³ Though they repeated this torture time and again, giving her no rest, beautiful Magdalena was unmoved. They hung her by her arms on ropes, raised her high, and dropped her, dislocating her shoulders,¹⁴ to no avail: still she clung to Christ.

Giving up, Uneme condemned Magdalena to the pit along with ten other Christians. First he had them paraded around the streets of Nagasaki with Magdalena at their head on horseback, a rope strung tight around her throat like a garotte and tied to her wrists, bound fast behind her. A sign on her back proclaimed her sentence: condemned to death for refusing to abandon the Law of the Christians. ¹⁵ Her eyes showed no terror, nor the slightest hint of disquiet; indeed, they glowed with joy as she preached to onlookers all along the lengthy way. Finally her horse was led up the steep slope called Nishi-zaka to the execution-ground above, overlooking Nagasaki Bay. There the executioners cocooned her in rope, slung her by her heels from a gallows, and hung her, head downwards, into the pit of horrors—a six-foot-deep hole whose bottom, filled with the vilest filth the torturers could gather, reeked abominably—and clamped the lid around her waist, cutting off all light, fresh air, and even her own circulation. Perhaps, as usually happened, blood began to drip from her ears and mouth and nose; perhaps her agonies were ‘wholly unsufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence’; but Magdalena uttered not one groan or plaint or squeal: instead, she happily sang sweet songs in Japanese to Jesus, her Spouse in Heaven.¹⁶

This went on for nearly fourteen days. The guards would hear her ask, “Would you like to hear a song?” in the cheeriest of tones, and on their answering ‘Yes,’ Magdalena would immediately break into song, singing “a thousand canticles of praise to God our Lord in the Japanese tongue.”¹⁷ Accounts abound of miracles performed by—or through—Magdalena during that fortnight, but it was miracle enough that she had remained alive without a sip of water or a bite of food through that overlong ordeal, incredible enough to bring the torturers’ overlords up to Nishi-zaka to see for themselves just what was going on. They had no doubt that the guards had been suborned, that some Christian misfits were slipping her food and drink and bribing the guards to let them in. This the guards denied, and Magdalena backed up their words when they opened the lid to have a look at her for themselves. “Don’t be surprised if I don’t die in this ordeal,” she told the incredulous officials. “The Lord whom I adore preserves me and holds me up. I feel a paternal hand touching my face, and my body is lightened so that I don’t suffer.”¹⁸

That was enough for Uneme’s minions: they told the guards to club her unconscious, orders they must have obeyed with bitter reluctance, having been soothed for nearly fourteen days on end by Magdalena’s sweet, angelic songs—songs “in praise of her Husband [sung] with singular melody and sweetness, so much so that they said it couldn’t be a human voice.”¹⁹

Their dirty work done, those men must have closed the lid on Magdalena’s pit with leaden stomachs and searched their souls for some relief, something like that soothing Hand that had caressed that lovely maiden’s face throughout her impossibly-long ordeal. Perhaps they felt a hint of that relief when Heaven opened her floodgates that evening, drenching them as they stood at their posts atop Nishi-zaka, looking down on holy Nagasaki, home of so many martyrs, and trying to make sense of the horrors they had to stand watch over. Then, come morning, there was perfect silence: no heavenly joy, no sweet, angelic songs, for they saw Magdalena’s hole filled to the brim with Heaven’s cleansing rain, and pulling her out, they found that she had drowned: her Lord and Husband had finally, and ever so gently, taken her home.

Pretty Magdalena, holy Magdalena: the perfect bride for Heaven’s earthborn King.

Copyright © 2015 by Luke O’Hara

Kirishtan.com

1 Léon Pagès, Histoire De La Religion Chrétienne Au Japon Depuis 1598 Jusqu'à 1651: Pte. Texte (Paris: Charles Douniol, 1869) 805-806.

2 Matthew 13:15, Douay-Rheims Bible.

3 Pagès, Histoire De La Religion Chrétienne Au Japon, 805.

4 P. Ángel Peña, O.A.R., Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki (Lima: Agostinos Recoletos, Provincia del Perú, no date.) 30.

5 Pagès, 805.

6 Ibid.

7 Peña, Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki, 39.

8 http://kirishtan.com/samurai-martyrs-father-julian-nakaura

9 Peña, Santa Magdalena de Nagasaki, 18.

10 Ibid, 59, quoting Luis de Jesús, Historia de los Agustinos Descalzos (1621-1650), Vol. II. Madrid: 1681.

11 Pagès, 806.

12 Peña, 50, quoting the Relación of Padre Francisco de Paula, 1636.

13 Ibid, 51.

14 Pagès, 806.

15 Peña, 56.

16 Peña, 51.

17 Testimony of Úrsula Torres, Japanese and native of Nagasaki, relating what the guards themselves had told her; recorded at the Proceso de Macao, 1 Feb. to 2 March 1638. Peña, p. 71.

18 Pagès, 806. Another rendering of her words can be found in Peña, 51: “No os canséis que no he de morir de este tormento, porque el Señor, a quien adoro, me sustenta y siento una mano suave que arrimada al rostro me está aliviando el cuerpo.”

19 Peña, 57.