Alfonso de Mena was born at Logroño, in the Spanish Rioja, in early February of 1568 — tradition places his birth on the third of the month, though some accounts give the thirteenth. He belonged to a family that gave more than one son to the Church and to the missions: he was the nephew of the Jesuit Blessed Peter Paul Navarro, who would win the martyr's crown in the same year as his nephew, so that the two kinsmen went to God almost together.
Drawn to the Order of Preachers, Alfonso made his religious profession among the Dominicans of Salamanca in 1594. There, in the great house of study that had formed generations of theologians and missionaries, he learned the double love that marks the true son of Saint Dominic: love of the truth that must be studied, and love of the souls to whom that truth must be preached. In him the second grew until it carried him to the ends of the earth.
In 1598 he set sail with a band of young friars led by Francisco Morales — himself destined for martyrdom in 1622 — and reached Manila, where he remained until 1602, labouring in the missions of the Philippines. From that outpost of the Spanish Indies he was then sent to Japan, the field where Christian blood had already been flowing since the crucifixions of Nagasaki in 1597. Alfonso entered it with open eyes, knowing what awaited a priest there.
In Japan he gathered the faithful into a Confraternity of the Rosary, teaching them to hold fast to Christ through the beads of His Mother — a form of prayer that could be said in secret, in a field or a hidden house, when there was no church left standing and no priest at hand. This was the wisdom of his apostolate: he did not merely visit the Japanese Christians, he armed them, forming lay brothers and sisters of the Rosary who would keep the faith alive when the missionaries were seized. Amid ferocious edicts, denunciations, exile, and death sentences, he strengthened his people and refused to abandon them.
In 1619 he was arrested for this very work and shut up in the prison of Ōmura, near Nagasaki. There he remained for some three years, in the harsh confinement that broke the bodies of many of his companions but not their constancy; the prison itself became a novitiate of martyrdom, where the friars prepared one another for the fire. On 10 September 1622, on the hill of Nishizaka at Nagasaki — the place ever since called the Hill of Martyrs — Alfonso de Mena was burned alive together with a great multitude of Christians, priests, religious, and lay faithful, some given to the flames and some beheaded. It was the day the Church remembers as the Great Genna Martyrdom, the most sweeping single execution of Christians in Japanese history, and the Dominican from Logroño stood in the front rank of it.
The memory of these witnesses was carefully guarded, and Blessed Alfonso was beatified by Pope Pius IX on 7 July 1867, in the group of the 205 Martyrs of Japan, the decree bearing the date of 7 May of that year. His liturgical memory is kept with his companions on 10 September, and he is also commemorated on 1 June with Blessed Alfonso Navarrete; among the Dominicans he was long honoured on 6 November together with the hundred and seven companions of the Far East, the tertiaries and lesser-known faithful called the Brothers of the Rosary, whose names heaven knows even where earth has forgotten them.
May Blessed Alfonso de Mena obtain for us his own courage, and let us take up the Rosary today with the confidence of a Christian who has nothing else left but Christ and His Mother.
