Memorial of the Dominican martyrs of Japan

The Order once celebrated all its martyrs of the Far East on this day, but now remembers three groups on separate days, Francis de Capillas and the martyrs of China on January 15th, Ignatius Delgado and those of Indochina on November 24th, and those of Japan today.

Blessed Alfonso Navarrete-Benito was a Spaniard, born in Valladolid, who suffered beheading in 1617, the first to die in a wave of persecution which saw the deaths of 205 people of whom 50 were members of the Dominican Family and 58 members of the Rosary Confraternity. Dependants were murdered along with heads of families.

A stream of Dominican missionaries spread through the Far East in the wake of the Spanish expansion, the journey typically being made via Mexico where the friars walked coast to coast and took ship then for Manila, where they founded the first Catholic university of South East Asia, Santo Tomas, in 1611. 

Alfonso spent 23 years in the Philippines, returning then to Spain in order to recruit men for Japan. He reached Kyoto in 1611. Today there is a community of Dominican sisters there. From there he was assigned to Nagasaki. He formed lay fraternities for the relief of the sick and the rescue of babies exposed to die.

The Dominicans were vigorous preachers and instructors and trained many catechists, and a strong and vital Catholic laity developed. Tertiaries, lay members of the Order, were important in the spreading of the faith: Blessed Joseph of St Hyacinth was inspired by the preaching of Alfonso, became a lay Dominican and began publicly instructing people. He was captured in 1621 during another wave of persecution and burnt to death.

In the way of life of these people, and in their concern for afflicted and discarded people, the rulers saw an implicit threat to authority and to the culture of Japan. Indigenous Japanese suffered the most. Around Nagasaki, the Church flourished and survived into modern times.

The Japanese martyrs were beatified by pope Pius IX. That indefatigable preacher general, Bertrand Wilberforce, grandson of the Liberator, promoted their cause with a book.

Our Dominican brother Geoffrey Preston in a posthumous book, ‘Faces of the Church’, notes that in the Eucharist as traditionally and typically celebrated, the memorial of the martyrs is linked with the expectation of the parousia, the Lord’s Appearing. The prayer Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus, that ends the Apocalypse, was the prayer of the martyrs for resurrection, for their individual resurrection and for the resurrection of the whole body of Christ.

We recall this today when we place relics under the altar of the Eucharistic sacrifice, for they are there precisely as relics in expectation of the second coming of the Lord. The relics, Geoffrey says, long to stop being relics: they focus the prayer for the resurrection of the dead. As such they intensify the prayer which the Mass itself is: ‘Come, Lord Jesus’.

- text from (and our thanks to) fr Bob Eccles OP