Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Putting Into the Deep
December 19, 2008
Last week we encountered the heroism of the 35,000 Japanese martyrs who gave the supreme testimony to Christ between 1597-1639. It may have seemed a strange column to appear in the heart of Advent rather than, for instance, in Lent, even though 188 were beatified less than a month ago in Nagasaki. But the Japanese martyrs teach us at least two great Advent lessons.
The first is the deep longing for the coming of Christ at the end of time or at the end of one’s life, whichever comes first. This is the principal focus of the season of Advent up until December 17, after which the Church begins to emphasize the historical coming of Christ in Bethlehem. The Japanese martyrs had so deep a hunger for union with Christ that they were willing to undergo cruel martyrdom, knowing that after enormous sufferings they would pass into Christ’s arms and experience an even greater and eternal joy. They lived according to St. Paul’s words, “I consider the sufferings of the present time not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).
The second Advent lesson comes from the care they took to pass on the faith. The time of preparation for Christmas, perhaps more than any other occasion during the year, is a privileged opportunity for parents and grandparents to transmit their faith in Jesus to children. The Japanese Christians, catechized by the great St. Francis Xavier, learned from him the art of handing on effectively and fully the precious treasure of the faith. In addition to learning the sign of the Cross, prayers, and commandments, Japanese children, as we detailed last week, learned as well the lessons of how to remain faithful under persecution and even what prayers to say if they were selected to die for the faith. Example is always the greatest teacher and the young Japanese witnessed ten percent of the Catholics of the country heroically and faithfully die out of witness to the truth, and they could not help but be influenced by it.
The greatest testimony to the ability of the Japanese Catholics’ ability to transmit the faith, however, was seen only two centuries later. After a 42-year bloodbath, the persecutions ceased in 1639. Basically all the leaders — priests, religious and catechists — had been massacred. Most of the rest of the adults had apostasized, abjuring the faith lest they suffer the martyrs’ fate. The government had no fear of the thousands of Christian orphans they had made as well as the perhaps few Christian adults they had missed. They believed the Christian faith would die without teachers to pass it on, not to mention without Churches, bishops, priests, and sacraments. Christianity had been wiped out, they thought, just as they had intended.
For two centuries, from 1639-1854, Japan was closed to all foreign influence. The few missionaries who succeeded in smuggling themselves into the country were quickly arrested and executed. In 1854, for economic reasons, Japan once again opened its borders to allow foreign businessmen to enter. The more Christian traders arrived in Japanese port cities, the greater they pressured the Japanese government to allow them to have tiny Churches to minister to their needs. The government acquiesced, but the Churches would be only for foreigners; they reminded the Japanese that Christianity was still illegal and punishable by death.
In 1865, something happened that I think is one of the most moving scenes in the history of the Church. It is so gripping that I remember as if it were yesterday where I was when I heard it and what were the emotions that ran through me. I was a seminarian at the North American College in Rome listening to one of Msgr. Timothy Dolan’s eloquent monthly rector’s conferences. Now the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Msgr. Dolan combined his training as a Church historian with best talents of Irish storytelling. Even if his rector’s conferences were not published in a great book, Priests for the Third Millennium, from which I’ll quote below, I think I would have remembered most of the details.
He told the amazing story related in diary entry of Fr. Bernard Petitjean, a French priest in the Society of Foreign Missions, who came to Nagasaki to serve the foreign businessmen. After celebrating a private Mass on March 17, 1865 about a month after consecrating the Church, Fr. Petitjean went to the Church door where he was met by a group of Japanese on the steps. I’ll let Archbishop Dolan take it from here:
“In a remote corner in the northeastern part of the country, Jesuit missionaries were flabbergasted to discover a tiny village where the hundred or so inhabitants gathered every Sunday to pray the Apostles’ Creed, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Acts of Faith, Hope, Charity and Contrition, and recite the ten commandments and eight beatitudes.
“Shocked, they asked the people where this custom came from, only to be told by the Japanese villages that, sometime in the distant past, men whom they called ‘fathers’ had taught those words to the people, and, anticipating their martyrdom, instructed the people to memorize those formulas and gather every Sunday to recite them together.
“The ‘fathers’ had also assured them that, one day, other ‘fathers’ would return to teach them more about Jesus and his way. Ecstatic, the new missionaries blurted out, ‘We are those fathers,’ only to be met by a stony, suspicious silence. The village leader came forward. ‘It has been passed down, too, that, when men come back claiming to be those “fathers,” we must ask them four questions to be sure they are from the true Church.’
“A bit nervous, the newly arrived priests responded, ‘Go ahead. Ask us the questions.’ The village leader came forward: ‘When you enter your Churches, what do you do?’ The Jesuits replied by demonstrating a genuflection, which was met by excited gasps from the crowd.
“‘Second, does your Lord have a Mother?’ ‘Yes,’ assured the priests, ‘and her name is Mary,’ whereupon more electricity spread through the people.
“‘Where does the earthly leader of your Church live?’ continued the village elder. ‘In Rome,’ answered the missionaries, as the crown neared unrestrained joy.
“‘Finally,’ anxiously inquired the chieftain, ‘do your “fathers” have wives?’ And, as the priests smiled and responded, ‘No,’ the villagers broke into a tumult, hoisted the missionaries on their shoulders and led them into the little church for they had not seen a priest for two-and-a-half centuries.”
So great was the trust in God and in his Church by those who were being killed in the 1600s that they prepared the people for the time when Catholic priests would return to Japan, and their simple instructions were passed down by the kakure Kiristan, the clandestine Christians, for a dozen generations. They had the foresight to know that Protestant missionaries might be the first to arrive, and so they taught their children the four marks of the Church to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants: belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the importance of Mary, the papacy and the priesthood.
Word quickly spread among the hidden Christians of Japan that their long advent for Christ to return to their country in the Eucharist was over. Within a month, on Good Friday, fifteen thousand Christians emerged from the villages and presented themselves before the priests in Nagasaki. Many of them would die for the faith again before Christianity was decriminalized in the 1880s.
The joyous Christians said to the missionaries, “The heart of all of us here is no different than yours.” They were of one heart because they shared the love of Christ — a love that had never died over the course of 230 years.
As we gather around mangers, Christmas trees and tables in upcoming days, let’s all try to pass on that love in such a way that it will be strong enough to last not just twelve generations but forever.