Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Catholic Register
February 6, 2026
Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese’s movie Silence, based on the 1966 book of the same name by Shusaku Endo, exposed multitudes to the horrors of the persecution of Christians in Japan in 16th and 17th century Japan.
The Japanese of that era were expert sadists and were unafraid to use that aptitude to try to compel apostasies among Christian missionaries and converts and to scare people from entering the waters of baptism or living according to their baptismal identity.
Today’s feast of the Japanese martyrs — liturgically called Saint Paul Miki and companions, but involving those who perished in ferocious anti-Christian persecutions between 1597-1639 — gives Catholics everywhere an opportunity to give thanks to God for the heroic witness of the Japanese members of the eternal hall of fame but to learn from them how to be faithful disciples and effective in passing on the treasure of our faith effectively to newer generations.
The Japanese martyrs did more than simply die for the faith. They lived it with missionary vigor and intentionality that ensured it would outlive them. At a time when every external structure of the Church became virtually nonexistent, they showed that the Gospel does not survive by institutions alone, but by disciples who know they are called to give their lives.
Their witness reveals three essential dimensions of the missionary dimension of our Christian identity that are helpful for us to ponder on their feast.
First, Japanese converts knew that they were signing up to follow a crucified man, and so they weren’t surprised when they were summoned to give their supreme witness to Him who had given his life on Calvary for them.
Just decades after St. Francis Xavier brought the faith to Japan, nearly 35,000 Japanese Christians refused to renounce their allegiance to Jesus Christ despite proven threats of torture and death. They endured not a sporadic persecution, but a systematic plot to erase Christianity from their entire nation.
When the imperial minister Toyotomi Hideyoshi sentenced 26 Catholics to death by crucifixion in 1597, he intended to make an example of them. They were marched some 600 miles to Nagasaki — the equivalent of New York City to Halifax, Myrtle Beach, or Louisville — enduring humiliations and torture along the way. Rather than cry out for human mercy, they clamored for the divine. They sang the Te Deum.
At the place of execution, one of them, St. Paul Miki, used what he called “the most powerful pulpit” of his life to declare publicly why he was being killed and what he believed: “The only reason for my being killed is that I have taught the doctrine of Christ… Ask Christ to help you to become happy… I obey Christ… I forgive my persecutors… and I hope my blood will fall on my fellow men as a fruitful rain.”
The authorities hoped fear would extinguish faith. Instead, as Tertullian promised and Miki desired, “the blood of martyrs became the seed of Church.” Rather than dissuade others from converting and practicing the faith, their sufferings emboldened them.
That leads us to the second lesson they teach us: suffering is a powerful form of evangelization. There is a missionary dimension of martyrdom. St. Paul Miki’s prayer that his blood would fall “as a fruitful rain” was not a vain and sentimental wish. History proved that it became a downpour.
In November 1981, St. John Paul II stood on Martyrs’ Hill in Nagasaki, he praised the Japanese martyrs — samurai, farmers, artisans, mothers, pregnant women, and children as young as three — who died in every imaginable way, crucified, beheaded, burned alive, drowned, or tortured slowly, and called for the stories of these witnesses to be told so that the whole Church might learn from them. At the time, their deaths were meant to isolate and silence. Instead, the deaths evangelized. Their fidelity transformed death into seed, not a grave.
That leads to the third lesson we learn on their feast: how to tell the story of the martyrs in a way that helps evangelize. The Gospel has the power to transform cowards into courageous disciples, potential apostates into powerful apostles. The Japanese martyrs were experts in transmitting the faith even in the face of the strongest headwinds.
Japanese parents understood that they were to be the primary teachers of the faith to their children. We know that at the beginning of the baptismal rite, the priest, parents and godparents make the Sign of the Cross on the child’s forehead, as an indication that they seek to “bless” the child by raising the son or daughter in the school of cruciform love. The Japanese did.
One of the most striking aspects of the Japanese martyrs involves the martyrdom of young children. Moms and dads were radically intentional about passing on the faith to their children, including how to prepare for martyrdom. They did not dilute discipleship. Jesus called us as his followers to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross each day and follow him, and the Japanese used every opportunity they had to instruct their children how to do so.
When they taught them how to make the sign of the Cross, they communicated that one day they, too, like Jesus, might be crucified. They urged their kids not to be afraid, even if they saw their parents executed first, because just as Jesus was raised from the dead after his crucifixion, so would anyone who lived and died out of love for him.
When they taught them to pray the Lord’s Prayer, they stoked in them the desire for the coming of the kingdom of the Father in heaven. They likewise taught them that God the Father would strengthen them when in trial and deliver them from the Evil One.
When they taught them in the Hail Mary, they reminded them that the Mother of God was praying for them at that moment and would be praying for them at the hour of their death, so that they should never be afraid. The sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary, they described, pass into the glorious ones.
When they celebrated the Holy Eucharist, they taught them to understand that it is not just a liturgical rite, but a true participation in Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, and that every Mass helps us prepare for the new and eternal Passover from death to life.
One of the most poignant examples is that of five-year-old martyr Peter Hatori. After watching his father beheaded, the child removed his kimono, knelt in prayer, and presented his neck to the executioners. When the first blow from a suddenly timid samurai failed, he rose again and continued praying until he was killed, invoking the names of Jesus and Mary. Such courage was not improvised. It was formed.
This is missionary catechesis. This is evangelization. at its most fundamental level. Children are to be raised not merely for this world but for eternity. They are to be formed how not to be afraid and to believe in Jesus’ promise that “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt. 10:39).
The fruit of this formation explains how the faith survived even after all missionaries were expelled. There were no priests in Japan for over 225 years, but the faith was passed down by heroic hidden Christians who would secretly gather to pray the Apostles’ Creed, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, Acts of Faith, Hope, Charity and Contrition, and to recite the ten commandments and eight beatitudes. The martyrs had instructed them to memorize those formulas and gather every Sunday to recite them together.
Eventually when Fr. Bernard Petitjean from Belgium arrived in 1865, he discovered that there were thousands of these hidden Christians whose faith was strong and distinctive, hungry for the Eucharist, confident in the prayers of Mary, in unity with the Pope whoever he was, and waiting for chaste clergy.
The practice of the Japanese obviously reminds us of the way the faith was transmitted during the centuries of persecution in the early Church. Adults could not be baptized until they were willing to be martyred, because, as soon as they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit, they could pass soon to a baptism by blood.
The faith is still meant to be passed on today with this Christian realism. We’re not called to water it down, to preach a cross-less Christianity, but to prepare people to be crucified with Christ so that the life they life they will live by faith in the Son of man who loves them and laid down his life for them (Gal 2:18-2).
The question is whether we communicate this faith in its fullness in our homes, parishes and OCIA programs? When we look to places like Nigeria, where 8,000 died for the faith last year, and see a Sunday Mass attendance rate that is by far the highest in the world — 93 percent — do we grasp that their failure to be cowed by the threat of being kidnapped, or tortured, or killed for the faith that our faith is not just a bunch of truths about God, us and how to please him, but a true treasure worth living for and dying for?
Like today’s Nigerians, the Japanese martyrs understood that the Cross is not a stumbling block for those who believe. The question is not whether persecution will come in every age, but whether, when it does, the Church will be ready to respond with the same faith, hope, love and evangelizing zeal. The Cross still stands as Christ’s most powerful pulpit and his Church’s. And the mission of the Church is to form people ready to seize, courageously running toward it like the firefighters toward the twin towers on 9/11.
The Japanese martyrs did not preserve the faith in comfort or compromise. They knew and manifested that faith was worth everything even death, that it spreads through sacrifice, and that we must transmit it always with faith and confidence in the power of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
Today as we celebrate their eternal triumph, we ask through their intercession for the grace to live and communicate the faith like they did.