St. Francis Xavier Returns to Japan

Irish Jesuit Province

St. Francis Xavier Returns to JapanAuthor(s): Hugh KellySource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 77, No. 914 (Aug., 1949), pp. 343-349Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516031 .

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ST. FRANCIS XAVIER RETURNS TO JAPAN By HUGH KELLY, S.J.

T HE tide of this article is somewhat sensational and suggestive of the captions of the popular press; but it is meant to draw

attention to a striking event which has just taken place. At

the end of May the right hand of St. Francis Xavier, which is pre

served in a rich reliquary in the Gesu in Rome, was taken aboard a plane and brought across America and the Pacific to Japan and

received with veneration and honour at the airport at Tokyo.

Cardinal Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, was appointed Papal Legate by the Holy Father, to preside at the celebrations that are to

prepare for the duc honouring of the fourth centenary of the coming of St. Francis Xavier to Japan.

The Telic was borne in a solemn fourteen-days pilgrimage to an

the places that witniessed the Saint's labours and sufferings. 'Thou sands of Japanese Catholics with their Bishops accompanied the

Cardinal Legate inl his pilgrimiage. The celebration opened on Sunday, May 29tlh. on a hill between Nagasaki and the Catholic settlement of Urakami. It was on this spot that the second atomic bomb was

dropped, whicth destroyed ten thousandi out of the twelve thousand Catholics of the city. in (le midst of the ruins and destruction alnd of the lhuts that mark tlie first attempts at recovery High Mass was. celebrated in the Tower of Peace. That saxme hill has already wit

nessed two other tritimphs of the Faith; for on it forty-three years

alfter tde deparltire of St. Franicis Xavier twenty-eight Japanese Christians and six Spanish Franciscans were crucified for their

religion. 'TIhat was tihe beginnitng of onie of the most ruthless and

(levastatinig persecutions in tlic history of the Church-a persecution which almost stamped out the flourishing Church which St. Francis

hiad founded anid which had grown immensely in the generation after

his death. I said almost because a small remnant of Christians

managed to survive the centuries of persecution. There were no

pricsts to teach or administer the sacraments. The catechism which

the Saint had composed was handed down by oral tradition; the

elders of the village baptized the children and taught them the

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IRISH MONTHLY

elements of the Faith; and all were imstructed how to make an act

of perfect contrition; and devotion to Our Lady and the saying of

the Rosary were notable features in the tradition. On this slender fragment of the great store of Catholic teaching and practice the Faith was kept alive through centuries when all contact with the Western world was completely cut. When about the middle of the 19th cen tury Catholic priests were again admitted into Japan, they soon came across this hidden, living link with a past which had been thought to

lhave left no traces.

This remarkable pilgrimage is to prepare for the celebration of the event with which Christianity began in Japan-the arrival of St. Francis Xavier at Kagoshima on August 15th, 1549. And now four

hundred years after, the Saint again returns to Japan. That right

hand that held up the crucifix for the first time in that country; which had baptized so many; which had been raised in blessing and healing -it has been brought back again by the command of the Pope to

the field of its former activity. We trust that by the power of God it will once again become a source of blessing; that it will again work

prodigies of grace; and begin a new chapter in the religious history of the people he loved above all others.

In a world prostrate after the war, when the hopes and purposes of Christian countries and indeed of all countries seem to be razed as thoroughly as the ruins of Hiroshima, we look eagerly for any sign of a new resurgence of Christian civilization. Perhaps we may hail that jewel-studded reliquary which enshrines the right arm of the great missionery as an omen in the heavens. It has travelled 15,000

miles, high up in the air. Perhaps that Mass celebrated among the

ruins caused by the atomic bomb is the beginning of a great revival of Catholicism in Japan. Perhaps in the designs of God the destruc

tion of a proud militaristic state was necessary if Japan is to live again to Christ. " Unless the grain of wheat falling into the earth dieth, it remaineth alone; but if it dies it yields much fruit." A resurgent

Japan that is Catholic in great part-what may it not stand for in

Asia? And may we not see something providential in the coincidence

that it is just at the moment when atheistic communism has got control

in China that St Francis Xavier has come back again to Japan?

Lux ex oriente. The expedition to Japan was the most striking episode of a great

missionary career. The Saint's letters to his brethren in EuropeS

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XAVIER RETURNS TO JAPAN

despatched from remote, almost unknown places, told of his travels in a continent that was as yet only dimly revealed, and opened up vistas of strange peoples, and religons and climates. But the journey to Japan was the crowning achievement of courage and enterprise; it excited to a peculiar extent the admiration and stirred the imagina tion of the great numbers who followed his career. Japan was the end of the world; it was an unknown land, hidden by its remoteness, inaccessible because of its typhoons, to which not even the most daring of Portuguese discoverers had penetrated. Now it was learned that Master Francis Xavier had reached it and his letters from that land were read with the greatest interest; letters in which he described the land and its people and their customs in great detail, and in which he expressed his own high hopes for the progress of the Faith among them in that new field.

St. Francis Xavier was drawn to this journey to Japan by a number

of influences and suggestions. As he passed beyond the Straits of Malacca, the gates to the Pacific, he came, to be more and more im

pressed by the influence of China; he came to be immensely impressed by the prestige it exercised by its wealth, civilization and the rigid exclusiveness by which it kept itself free from any contact with other nations. He came to the conclusion that the key to the conversion of the Far East lay in China. Then suddenly in a strange way his

attention was drawn in another direction. Three years before this a Portuguese vessel which was making for Canton-or rather for a place where Cantonese merchants might be met-was driven off its

course by a typhoon and touched at an unknown land which was

found to be one of the almost fabled islands of Zipanga, which had

been described by Marco Polo centuries before but which had not been visited by any European. The Portuguese were well received

and traded by means of signs with the Japanese and were invited

to retum. Shortly after a second vessel was despatched, whose

captain George Alvarez was a friend of St. Francis. As the Saint

was officiating at a marriage in the cathedral at Malacca Alvarez

entered with a stranger, a man of about thirty-five, low-sized, of

yellow complexion, and with the slanting eyes that told of Chinese

origin. He was in ftact a Japanese, the first that St. Francis had met,

and the man destined in God's Providence to be the instrument for

the introduction of the Faith into Japan. His name was Anjiro; he

was a man of middle class with a wife and family who having com

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I ItISH MONTHLY

mitted a murder fled the country in the Portuguese ship. He con sulted Alvarez about the troubles of his conscience and was advised to meet St. Francis at Malacca. He was an intelligent man who quickly picked up a working knowledge of Portuguese; and he gave the Saint oopious knowledge of his countrymen. As he was anxious to become a Christian he was instructed and baptized by St. Francis and took the name of Paul of the Holy Faith. This strange meeting

with a man from Japan and the accounts given by Alvarez seemed to the Saint to be an invitation from God to visit the country so

suddenly and strikingly brought to his notice. All the more so as the new convert held ou t high hopes of other conversions even on a large scale. "'Will your countrymen become Christians? " Francis asked of Paul. "c Not at once," was the reply. "First they will ques

tion you about many things . . . And above all, they will observe

whether you live up to your teachings. If they are satisfied about these two things, then in the space of half a year the king and the

queen and the prominent people and all other reasonable persons will become Christians; for the inhabitants of Japan follow reason as their guide."

Though this attractive forecast was not at all borne out in the experience of St. Francis Xavier, he accepted the grounds on which it was made, and came to have a special love for this people. He

was attracted by their trust in reason and discussion, by their love of learning, to which their many universities bore witness; by their appreciation of the religious and monastic life, as witnessd by the great number of Bonzes; and not least by their esteem for bravery which was manifested by the position in their State held by the chival

rous order of the Samurai. All these characteristics seemed to him to

give them a special affinity to the Christian religion. The project of a missionary journey to Japan appealed to him strongly and he began to make preparations for it with his usual impetuosity. Hearing that the Bonzes never used meat or wine he resolved himself to practise the same abstention. He declared that he had met no nation between

Portugal and the end of the world which seemed more adapted for the Christian Faith than the Japanese.

Here was certainly an enterprise that made every kind of appeal to St. Francis. It seemed to hold out the highest hopes for the

spread of the Church and the salvation of 'souls. Moreover it pre

sented so many dangers that he felt in it a certain challenge to

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himself. And strangely enough, when he had once decided on the expedition, he was assailed, for perhaps the first time in his life, with a strange feelng of dread. Fears of the journey and the encounter

with pirates and with storms; fear of the opposition which his preaching was bound to arouse among the Bonzes; repugnance, doubts, premonitions, shrinkings from something indefinite and there fore all the more formidable-these gripped and for a time seemed

to paralyse him. Was he wise in undergoing such risks? Was he

justified? Was he certain that his enterprise had the blessing of God? Take merely the voyage-was it not a fact of observation that only

one vessel in three came home safely from a voyage in those waters? He attributed these unwonted troubles of mind and conscience to the

enemy of souls who strove to keep him from a work that was to be

so rich for God's glory. He reacted vigorously against these crippling fears by affirming in a letter to his father in God St. Ignatius, " There

is only one fear which we are permitted to have-the fear of offending God." He recalled also a statement made by St. Ignatius to the effect that those who wished to belong to the Society of Jesus must take great pains to master themselves first and to cast away all fears lest it weaken their Faith and Hope in God. And St. Francis himself

instructed one of his future helpers in Japan that he must dominate

completely the fear of death if he is to be a true missionary in that

country. He set sail from Malacca on the feast of St. John the Baptist,

June 24th, 1549, on board the junk of a Chinese sailor whom the Portuguese called, doubtless rightly, the Pirate. The craft was a square ark-shaped thing, with a high, square deck fore and aft, carry

ing two bamboo masts with mat-weed sails. St. Francis carried a good deal of luggage-chiefly presents for the king of Japan and the other great men whom he wished to placate. The crew were Chinese and all pagans, and it was perhaps the greatest hardship of the voyage that he had to witness their constant offering of sacrifices to an idol

which they housed in the poop. As he approached the coast of China

the captain seemed to repent of his pledge to make for Japan and

tried to land at some island along the coast and put off the joumey to Japan until the next year; but owing to a combination of causes -the threats of St. Francis, the sight of a pirate junk, and a storm

that prevented him from returning to Canton-the ship was inex orably driven towards Japan, and on the feast of the Assumption,

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IRISH MONTHLY

August 15th, 1549, the 15th anniversary of his first vows as a Jesuit, taken at Montnartre, St. Francis landed at Kagoshima, the birth place of Paul of the Holy Faith.

He stepped at once into a civilization and a total way of life that

was entirely new and most strange; he found himself in a society that

had no connexion with or similarity to the Christian society in which he had hitherto lived, one which had developed from its own begin nings and along its own lines from time immemorial. Up to this he

hlad been following the steps, or rather the keels, of the Portuguese into every land and island to which he had penetrated. That people

had shown immense energy and enterprise in entering on the new world which Vasco da Gama had opened up to them, and wherever

they had gone they had brought their civilization with them. But on entenrng Japan St. Francis came across* something that was

entirely original and remote. More than any of his missionary episodes the journey to Japan

was in the nature of a reconnaissance or exploration. With his usual energy he managed to see a great deal of the country in his short

stay of two years and to get a good idea of the prospects for con

version which it held out. With the assistance of Paul he learned

enough of the language to translate the main heads of the Christian

religion, which he read to crowds at the street corners. He was

the first European they had ever seen, and they gazed with wonder

and mockery at a type of countenance so different from their own.

After a time they began to listen, being impressed by the immense earnestness and courage of the stranger who had come from the

other side of the world to give them the true knowledge of God.

He visited local rulers, was well received and given permission to preach and make converts. He counted much on getting into touch with the king, and travelled a long and painful journey in winter

to reach him. He found a helpless roi faineant who possessed only the title of king and had no power to control the local rival lords.

He mixed- much with the Bonzes, visited their monasteries and inquired into their principles and method of life. But he soon came to find out the vices and corruption that were prevalent among

them and saw that they could be of no use to him in spreading

the Christian religion. As a result of his labours, journeys and sufferings during the two

years of his sojourn in Japan he had established four or five small

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communities of Christians, amounting in all to about two thousand souls. It was certainly not the mass conversion that Paul had pro

mised, but it was a solid, satisfactory beginning. In a letter to St.

Ignatius he described his work in detail, and ended by saying: "About Japan I have so much to say that I don't know where to

stop." He was well satisfied with his mission; already the Christians of Japan were his dear friends, dearer to him than any other con

verts he had made. He conveyed to St. Ignatius the convictions and ideas which his Japanese enterprise had given him. He dwelt

much on the intellectual aspect of the mission. "To work among a people," he said, " who are intelligent and eager to learn, has

been a great consolation to me." There spoke the Paris professor who was never entirely lost in the missionary. The Bonzes would be the chief obstacle to the spread of the Faith; but the mission would be a severe -one with its cold climate and the hardships in

food and travel it would entail; and only men of tried virtue could be trusted in a country where there was so much moral corruption.

So he planned for the future of his newest and most beloved

mission fields as the junk bore him away from Japan, which he left in November, 1551. His estimate was just and the future bore out his hopes. In less than 30 years after his death there were over 30,000 fervent Christians in Japan. The terrible persecutions that were to quench in blood these bright prospects of a Catholic Japan were hidden from his eyes. But the persecution was in itself a triumph for St. Francis; and then it did not blot out entirely the

traces of his work.

Against some such historical missionary background we view the action of the Pope in sending the right arm of the Saint back to

the field of its labours. St. Francis Xavier is returnig to the Christians of Japan, "my special favourites ", 4 my own dear ones", as he loved to call them. He is returning with the full support of

the Holy Father at a moment when Japan is rising from the ruins of its materialistic, militaristic empire; when defeat, unprecedented in its destruction and completeness, must have chastened a proud people, and have shown them the inadequacy of their own religious support. He is returning to an infant Church, full of vigour and hope. Everything points to a rapid advance of Christianity in Japan; to a second spring in St. Francis Xavier's favourite mission field; he has literally set his hand to this great work.

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St. Francis Xavier Returns to Japan