Louis Exarch was born in Barcelona on 14 June 1596 and was carried to the font the very next day, so that the life given him by his parents was almost immediately sealed by the life given him by Christ. From that early baptism to the fire of Ōmura, his whole existence would be a single unbroken act of belonging to God.
When he entered the Order of Preachers he took in religion the names Louis Bertrand, in honor of Blessed Louis Bertrand, the great Dominican apostle of the New World, who was a kinsman of his father. The name was more than a family memory; it was a program of life. The young friar formed himself in the Dominican school of study, prayer, and preaching, and the missionary flame of his namesake passed into him. After his ordination to the priesthood he did not wait to be sent but offered himself as a volunteer for the missions of the Far East, choosing freely the road that led away from Spain forever.
He left his homeland in July 1617. The voyage was long and wearying, across ocean and continent, and only in June 1618 did he reach Manila. There he began his apostolic labors in the Philippines, learning the demands of a missionary's life among peoples not his own. But the field that drew the Dominicans most fiercely in those years was Japan, where the Church, once flourishing, had been driven underground by edicts of persecution and where every priest who entered knew he was entering a country that had already made martyrs by the hundred.
In 1623 his superiors sent him to Japan, and on 14 October 1623 he came ashore at Nagasaki. For several years he carried on a clandestine ministry: hiding in the houses of Christians, moving by night, hearing confessions, celebrating the Holy Sacrifice in secret, strengthening the faithful who lived under constant threat of denunciation, torture, and death. Every family that sheltered him risked everything, and he in turn risked everything to bring them the sacraments. It was the hidden, patient, dangerous charity of a shepherd who will not abandon his flock.
On 29 June 1626 he was arrested as a missionary priest. There was no crime alleged against him but the priesthood itself and the faith he preached. He endured a full year of imprisonment, that long trial in which zeal is tested by inactivity and hope is tested by delay. Exactly one year to the day after his arrest, on 29 June 1627, he was led out at Ōmura and put to death by slow fire, burned alive together with his Dominican brethren Mancius of the Cross and Peter of St. Mary. The flames that consumed him were, in the ancient language of the Church, the last and best sermon of a preacher who had crossed the world to give it.
The memory of the Japanese martyrs was cherished by the Church, and on 7 July 1867 Blessed Pius IX beatified Louis Bertrand Exarch in the great company of the 205 Martyrs of Japan. With them he is commemorated on 10 September. His life is a summary of the Dominican missionary vocation: a name taken in reverence, a vocation offered without conditions, an ocean crossed, a hidden Church served, a year of chains borne in silence, and a death that preached Christ louder than words.
May Blessed Louis Bertrand Exarch obtain for us his own quiet courage, and may we practice today the constancy that keeps faith when it costs something.
