Inès Takeya — known also as Agnes — was born in Korea about the year 1580, some accounts placing her birth nearer 1587. Her childhood was broken by war: during the Japanese invasions of Korea between 1592 and 1598 she was seized, enslaved, and carried across the sea to Japan. She arrived a captive in a foreign land, stripped of home and family; and it was there, in exile, that God gave her what no invader could take away. In Japan she heard the Gospel preached by the missionaries who had followed in the footsteps of Saint Francis Xavier, and she was baptized into the Catholic Church.
She was joined in marriage to another Korean who had shared her fate, Cosmas Takeya Sozaburō, a prisoner of the same wars and likewise a Christian layman. Their household became a small church. Both husband and wife enrolled in the Confraternity of the Rosary, praying the mysteries of Christ's life with the Church's beads, and both drew from that devotion the strength they would soon need. A son was born to them, Francis. In an age when the faith brought with it neither honour nor safety, the Takeya home was known instead for its open door.
For by the beginning of the seventeenth century the Japanese authorities had come to regard the religion from the West as a threat to the unity of the realm. Missionaries were banished, conversions forbidden, churches pulled down; those who persisted were denounced, imprisoned, tortured, or put to death. To shelter a priest was a capital crime. Inès and Cosmas nevertheless received the hunted Jesuit and Dominican missionaries into their house at Nagasaki, feeding them, hiding them, and making it possible for the sacraments to reach the faithful. She surely knew what it would cost; she did it all the same. Hospitality, in that time of terror, had become an act of heroic faith.
On the night of 13 December 1618 the household was betrayed and taken: Inès, her husband, and those who were lodging with them, along with the priests they had concealed. There followed long years of imprisonment. In November 1619 Cosmas Takeya Sozaburō was executed for having aided the missionaries, and Inès remained in prison a widow, with her child, waiting her turn and refusing to purchase freedom by denying Christ.
Her hour came on 10 September 1622, the day the Church remembers as the Great Genna Martyrdom of Nagasaki. Some fifty-five Christians died together on the hill above the city: about twenty-five were burned alive at the stake, among them the Italian Jesuit Blessed Charles Spinola, while some thirty others, priests' hosts and helpers and members of their families, were beheaded. Inès Takeya knelt among the beheaded, dying by the sword in her middle years — accounts give her age variously as about thirty-five or forty-five. The next day her son Francis, only twelve years old, was executed with two other companions, so that father, mother, and child were all offered to God within the space of three years.
The blood of Nagasaki did not stop the faith. When priests were hunted and Mass forbidden, it was lay people like Inès who kept the Church alive — hiding a missionary, handing on the prayers, baptizing their children in secret — and hidden communities preserved that memory for more than two centuries without priest or church. On 7 July 1867 Pope Pius IX beatified Inès Takeya together with her husband Cosmas and her son Francis, in the great company of 205 martyrs of Japan who suffered in the persecutions between 1618 and 1632. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 10 September.
She held no office and wielded no power. She was a woman twice a stranger — Korean in Japan, Christian in a land that had outlawed Christ — and her holiness was made of ordinary things: a table set, a lamp lowered, a door left unlocked for a hunted priest, a rosary told in the dark of prison.
Let us ask Blessed Inès Takeya to obtain for us her fearless charity, and today open our own door in some concrete act of hospitality to Christ in the stranger, whatever it may cost us.
