St. Paul Miki and Companions

Who they were

On a February morning in 1597, twenty six Christians, Jesuits and Franciscans, Japanese and foreign, and several laymen including three young boys, were crucified on a hill above Nagasaki: the first martyrs of a persecution that would attempt, for two and a half centuries, to erase Christianity from Japan. Paul Miki, a Japanese Jesuit seminarian of samurai family and a famed preacher, preached his last sermon from the cross, forgiving his executioners and declaring that he was Japanese, a Christian, and dying for nothing else.

What follows is the second act. The missionaries were expelled, the churches razed, and the faith presumed dead, until 1865, when Japanese villagers approached a newly built church in Nagasaki and asked the astonished French priest three questions to identify him, then told him: our hearts are the same as yours. The kakure kirishitan, the hidden Christians, had kept baptism, the prayers, and the faith through two hundred and fifty years with no priest, no Mass, and no book, handing it parent to child in secret. It is one of the most astonishing survival stories in religious history, and the rosary was among the devotions that carried it.

Why people turn to St. Paul Miki and Companions

Anyone keeping faith alone, without parish support, with a hostile family, or in an isolated posting. The hidden Christians are the patron ancestors of every solitary believer.

How to ask their intercession

Two prayers sit in this story: forgive the persecutor, and keep the flame small and alive.