The story of Sebastian Kimura begins before his birth. In the autumn of 1550, Saint Francis Xavier, having spent a year at Kagoshima, was received at Hirado into the house of a samurai named Kimura and stayed there some time. The master of the house asked for baptism and received it with his whole family, taking the name Anthony. Through every later tribulation and persecution that family held resolutely to the Catholic faith, and from its stock God would draw priests and martyrs.
Sebastian, grandson of Anthony, was born at Hirado in 1565 to Christian parents. In October 1580, at the age of fifteen, he was among the founding students of the Jesuit seminary newly opened at Arima near Nagasaki at the initiative of Alessandro Valignano, where young Japanese were formed as catechists — men indispensable to the missionaries for preaching, catechesis, and the service of the sacraments. Two years later, in 1582, he was admitted to the Society of Jesus and began his novitiate at Usuki with five other young seminarians, in a house Valignano had opened in 1581 as part of his patient policy of inculturating the faith and forming a native Japanese clergy.
In 1586 armed conflict between local lords forced the novices and seminarians to evacuate, and they took refuge at Yamaguchi, where Kimura was engaged in missionary work when the edict proscribing Christianity was promulgated on 24 July 1587. The decree was not strictly enforced, and the missionaries, giving up public preaching and mission tours, turned their attention to forming candidates for the priesthood. Sebastian learned Latin and then taught it in the school at Amakusa. In 1596 he was sent to Macau to complete his theology.
His studies finished, he returned to Japan in 1600, and on 21 September 1601 he was ordained priest at Nagasaki, together with a companion named Louis, by Bishop Luis Cerqueira of Funai. These were the first priestly ordinations on Japanese soil, and Sebastian Kimura was the first Japanese son of that land to be raised to the altar — a milestone for the Church in Japan, and the fruit of his grandfather's baptism fifty years earlier.
For the next twenty years he was, to outward appearance, an ordinary missionary priest who left behind no great enterprises, but the memory of a man zealous, devoted, faithful, and profoundly religious. He served at Hirado, his native region, at Bungo, at Katsusa near Nagasaki, and at Fudoyama. In February 1614 the persecution turned severe: the foreign missionaries were expelled, a few remaining in hiding, and greater responsibility fell upon the Japanese priests. Kimura stayed in Nagasaki. Because he was Japanese, he could at first move with a certain freedom, and his command of the language and his knowledge of his own people made him wonderfully adept at slipping through the net. He disguised himself as a soldier, a merchant, a laborer, even a physician, in order to enter Christian households and to bring the sacraments to those imprisoned for the faith. The police came to want his capture above all others, and his superiors asked him to withdraw until the danger passed. On 9 February 1620 he made his final religious profession in the Society of Jesus.
Betrayed by a Korean servant of the house where he was lodging, he was arrested on 29 June 1621 along with his catechist and helper Thomas Akaboshi and Louis Kawara. He was sent to the prison of Suzuta near Ōmura, where he found Charles Spinola, Dominican and Franciscan priests, and a great number of Christians — thirty-two crowded into a narrow cell. The conditions were terrible: the prison stood on a mountain height, cold and open to every wind, and the prisoners had a single blanket among them. Their food, rice and two sardines, kept them alive without ever satisfying their hunger; they could neither wash their clothes nor dry them in the sun. Yet through all those months the prisoners prayed, did penance, and gave one another spiritual conferences and instruction, turning a filthy cell into a house of religion.
After a year an order came from Edo that all the Christians held in the prisons of Ōmura and Nagasaki should be put to death. On 9 September 1622 they were led to Nagayo and then to Urakami, where on 10 September they were told they would be burned alive. Kimura received the news with serenity and spiritual joy. The execution took place at Nagasaki, on the very hill where twenty-six Christians had been put to death on 5 February 1597, and a great crowd of the faithful stood by. As fire was set to the crosses, Charles Spinola began the hymn Laudate Dominum omnes gentes, and all the condemned took it up in chorus. The wood had been laid more than two meters from the stakes, so that the victims would be consumed slowly by the heat rather than by the flames and the torment would last the longer. The martyrdom stretched on for hours; one account records that Father Kimura was the last to die, after three hours of agony. When it was over, the crowd dispersed into the mountains, carrying away the memory of what they had seen.
The Kimura family gave more than one martyr to the Church. Besides Sebastian, his cousin Leonard, also a grandson of Anthony Kimura and a Jesuit coadjutor brother, and his nephew Anthony Kimura died for the Christian faith. Sebastian Kimura and two hundred and four other victims of the great Japanese persecutions were beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1867, in a solemn ceremony in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. The martyrs of the Great Genna Martyrdom are honored together on 10 September, and Blessed Sebastian is also liturgically commemorated on 4 February with the martyrs of Japan.
Let us ask Blessed Sebastian Kimura, first priest of his people and last to die on that burning hill, to obtain for us the quiet courage to bring Christ to others at cost to ourselves, and to practice today the patient fidelity that turns even a narrow, cold place into a house of prayer.
