Feast day: February 6
St. Paul Miki & Companions
A Japanese Jesuit seminarian crucified with 25 companions in Nagasaki; he preached forgiveness from his cross.
Christianity had been brought to Japan by St. Francis Xavier in 1549 and had grown astonishingly, until by the 1580s there were perhaps two hundred thousand Japanese Christians. Then the rulers, fearing foreign influence, turned against the new faith, and in 1597 the warlord Hideyoshi ordered a group of Christians arrested at Kyoto and Osaka to be made an example before the whole country.
Among them was Paul Miki, a Japanese-born Jesuit, the son of a wealthy military family, and a gifted preacher who had won many of his countrymen to Christ. With him were twenty-five companions — Japanese laymen and catechists, three Japanese Jesuits, six foreign Franciscan missionaries, and several boys, the youngest only twelve and thirteen years old.
They were marched some six hundred miles in the bitter cold to Nagasaki, mutilated and mocked along the way, and on February 5, 1597, they were crucified together on a hill overlooking the city, then pierced with lances. From his cross Paul Miki preached his last sermon, declaring that he died gladly for the faith and that he forgave his executioners, asking only that they too might become Christians and be saved.
The twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki were only the first of thousands who would die in the centuries of persecution that followed, during which the surviving 'hidden Christians' kept the faith in secret, without priests, for over two hundred years. Canonized in 1862, Paul Miki and his companions are honored as the protomartyrs of the Far East and patrons of Japan.
When missionaries returned to Japan 250 years later, they found thousands of 'hidden Christians' who had kept the faith in secret all along.
“After Christ's example, I forgive my persecutors. I ask God to have mercy on all.”
— St. Paul Miki & Companions
Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke (CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09744a.htm
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