Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549, in the person of St. Francis Xavier, one of the original Jesuit missionaries. By the end of the century, there were thought to be some 300,000 Catholics in Japan, a community centered around the port of Nagasaki. Thereafter, a series of Japanese rulers launched a ruthless persecution that all but eliminated Christianity from Japan by the mid-1600s. Thousands of Christians were executed, many by crucifixion.
For the next two centuries, Japan remained closed to foreigners. In 1860, Father Bernard Petitjean was permitted to serve as chaplain to the French community in Nagasaki. By 1865 he had built a church there, dedicated to the first 26 martyrs of the persecution. Imagine Father Petitjean’s amazement when he was approached in the church by a group of Japanese who revealed themselves as Christians. In the words of Robert Ellsberg:

Astoundingly, it turned out that a secret Christian community numbering tens of thousands had continued to pass along the faith from generation to generation, carefully remembering Latin prayers, feast days and the ritual of baptism. They had seen no priest in two hundred years.
Thus having emerged from the catacombs, and despite intermittent persecution, the Catholic community of Nagasaki proceeded to thrive. Many churches and a magnificent cathedral arose on the sites of ancient martyrdom. But the memory of the cross remained fixed in the people’s hearts. And in this light many of them tried to comprehend the terrible mystery of August 9, 1945. That day, an American pilot, finding a break in the clouds of Nagasaki, used the steeple of the Urakami Cathedral as his target before releasing a plutonium-fueld atomic bomb. Seventy-nine thousand people were immediately killed. These included at least ten thousand Catholics, half the Catholic population of this traditional center of Japanese Christianity.

Drawn from Ellsberg’s excellent All Saints. Two centuries without a priest… only to become the first Christian community to face nuclear holocaust. Nagasaki’s Catholics have nevertheless rebuilt Urakami Cathedral. Never confuse faith with religion, as Timothy, an Episcopal monk once told me…

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