Francisco Castellet Vinale was born on 17 October 1592 at Esparreguera in Catalonia, in the diocese of Barcelona. Of his childhood the sources tell little, but the direction of his heart appears early: on 23 October 1608, just past his sixteenth birthday, he entered the Order of Preachers at Barcelona, and with the habit received the name by which the Church now honours him — Dominic, after the founder whose passion for the salvation of souls he would carry to the ends of the earth.
The Dominican houses of Spain in those years echoed with news from Asia: of the Philippines, of China, and above all of Japan, where a young and fervent Church was being tested by fire. Dominic asked to be sent. In 1613 he left Spain for the missions of the Far East, and after the long and perilous voyage by way of the Indies he reached Manila at the end of April 1615. There he was formed for the apostolate and spent several years preaching among the peoples of the Philippine islands, learning the patience, poverty, and adaptability that mission life demands.
Japan, however, was the mission that consumed his desire, and Japan was by then a country closed and hostile. The Tokugawa authorities had outlawed the Christian faith, expelled the missionaries, and set a price on the heads of priests who dared return. Knowing this, Dominic accepted the assignment and landed secretly in Japan on 22 July 1621, together with his brother in religion Peter Vazquez. From that day he lived as a hunted man: sheltering in the houses of the faithful, moving by night, celebrating Mass in hidden rooms, absolving, catechising, baptising, and strengthening Christians who risked everything to receive the sacraments from him. For seven years the persecution could not find him, and for seven years he did not abandon his flock.
On 15 June 1628 he was at last arrested and imprisoned at Kuwara. He bore his captivity as a Dominican preacher should, still an apostle behind bars, waiting for the sentence he had long foreseen. On 7 September he was transferred to Nagasaki, the city already sanctified by the blood of many martyrs. The next day, 8 September 1628, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he was led to the hill of Nishizaka and there burned alive together with many other Christians — priests, religious, and lay men and women who had hidden and served them. The slow fire of Nagasaki was designed to break the will of the condemned; it broke nothing in Dominic, who at thirty-five years of age gave back to God the life he had offered at sixteen.
The memory of the Japanese martyrs was guarded by the Church through two centuries of silence in that land. On 7 July 1867 Blessed Pope Pius IX beatified Dominic Castellet Vinale in the great group of the 205 Martyrs of Japan, whose feast is kept on 10 September. His name stands among the Dominican witnesses of the faith in the Orient — a Catalan boy who crossed the world for souls, and a friar who preached most eloquently in the hour when he could no longer speak.
May Blessed Dominic Castellet Vinale obtain for us the courage to hold fast to Christ at cost, and let us imitate today his readiness to go wherever souls are waiting, however inconvenient the road.
