The Gospel came to Japan with Saint Francis Xavier and the first Jesuits in the 1540s, and for a time it flourished beyond every expectation. More than a hundred thousand Japanese were baptized, among them many daimyō of Kyushu, and the shogunate and imperial court at first favored the missionaries, hoping to check the power of the Buddhist monasteries and to open trade with Spain and Portugal. But the same rulers grew wary of foreign influence, remembering how the Spanish had taken power in the Philippines after the conversion of its people. Emperor Ōgimachi banned Catholicism by edict in 1565 and again in 1568, with little effect; then in 1587 the imperial regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi forbade the Jesuit missionaries, and Christianity began to be repressed as a threat to national unity. In 1597 twenty-six Christians were crucified at Nagasaki — the Twenty-Six Martyrs, canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862 — and burnings at the stake became a familiar sight in that city.
The persecution did not end with those twenty-six. It grew fiercer under the Tokugawa shoguns, and in the years from 1617 to 1632 the blood of the Japanese Church was poured out again and again. The two hundred and five whom the Church honors together were gathered from every rank of that persecuted community: European missionaries who had crossed the world to preach, Japanese priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus, Dominican and Franciscan and Augustinian friars, and above all the laity — catechists, tertiaries, confraternity members of the Holy Rosary, householders, wives and mothers.
The first blows fell on 22 May 1617, when the Franciscan Pedro of the Assumption and the Portuguese Jesuit João Baptista Machado were put to death. Ten days later, on 1 June 1617, the Dominican Alfonso Navarrete, the Augustinian Recollect Ferdinand of Saint Joseph, and the Japanese Jesuit catechist Leo Tanaka gave their lives; from Navarrete the whole company takes its name. On 1 October of that same year the laymen Gaspar Ueda Hikojirō and Andrew Yoshida, brothers of the Rosary, followed them. Year by year the roll lengthened: Leonard Kimura, the Jesuit, in November 1619; the Augustinian Peter of Zúñiga and the Dominican Luis Flores in August 1622; the Jesuits Francisco Pacheco, Baltasar de Torres, John Baptist Zola, Gaspar Sadamatsu and the Korean Vincent Kaun on 20 June 1626; the burnings of August 1627; the massacre of the Tomachi, Nihachi and Yamada households on 8 September 1628; and on 3 September 1632 the great martyrdom of the Augustinian Bartolomé Gutiérrez, the Augustinian Recollects Francis of Jesus, Vincent of Saint Anthony, Martin of Saint Nicholas and Melchior of Saint Augustine, and the Japanese Jesuit Antony Ishida. The Japanese Augustinian Thomas of Saint Augustine, known as Kintsuba, and the Augustinian Recollect tertiary Magdalene of Nagasaki — later raised to the honors of the altar as a saint — belong to the same generation of witnesses.
The crown of the whole company is the Great Genna Martyrdom at Nagasaki on 10 September 1622, when twenty-two Christians were burned alive over slow fires and thirty more were beheaded before their eyes. There died the Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola and his Japanese brethren Sebastian Kimura, Anthony Kyūni, Gonzalo Fusai Chōzō, John Chūgoku, Louis Kawara Rokuemon, Michael Satō Shunpō, Peter Sanpō and Thomas Akahoshi; the Franciscans Pedro of Ávila, Richard of Saint Anne and Vincent of Saint Joseph; the Dominicans Francisco Morales, Angelo Orsucci, Alonso de Mena, Jacinto Orfanell and Joseph of Saint Hyacinth; and with them the lay faithful who had hidden the priests in their houses — among them Lucia de Freitas, Isabella Fernandes, Apollonia of Nagasaki, and the Korean women Agnes Takeya and Catherine of Nagasaki. It is for this day that the Church keeps their memory.
Many of these martyrs were Koreans, carried off from their homeland as captives and slaves during the Japanese invasions of Korea. Sold into a foreign land, they found in Christ a freedom no master could take away, and they died for him as gladly as any: Vincent Kaun, Caius of Korea, Cosmas Takeya and his wife Agnes, Gaspar and Maria Vaz, Caius Akashi Jiemon, Thomas Satō Shin'emon, Anthony and Peter Hamanomachi. Whole families went to death together — the Tomachi, the Araki, the Onizuka, the Yakichi, the Gengorō — parents and children confessing the same faith at the same stake, so that the sword and the fire could not divide what baptism had joined.
Jesuit fathers and others who escaped to the Philippines wrote back detailed reports of what they had seen, and from these came the account printed at Madrid in 1624, "A Short Account of the Great and Rigorous Martyrdom, which last year was suffered in Japan by One Hundred and Eighteen Martyrs." Such records preserved the names, the dates and the constancy of the witnesses when, after the shogunate's total ban of 1620, the Church in Japan ceased to exist in public. Some believers went underground as kakure kirishitan, the hidden Christians who kept the faith without priests for over two centuries; others simply died. Only after the Meiji Restoration could Christianity be openly professed again in Japan.
Pope Pius IX, having promulgated the decree on their martyrdom, declared the two hundred and five venerable on 26 February 1866 and beatified them in July of 1867, the beatification document bearing the date of 7 May. For their feast the Church chose 10 September, the day of the Nagasaki massacre of 1622. They are honored under the title of Blessed Alfonso Navarrete, Pedro of Ávila, Carlo Spinola, Joachim Díaz Hirayama, Lucia de Freitas and their companions — friars and housewives, Europeans and Japanese and Koreans, standing together in one glory.
Their virtue was not a single heroic hour but years of quiet risk: opening a door to a hunted priest, teaching a child the Creed, refusing to tread on the sacred image, and at last walking to the fire with a hymn.
May these two hundred and five witnesses obtain for us the courage to confess Christ without apology, and let us practice today the hospitality that welcomes Christ in the persecuted and the poor, whatever it may cost.
