St. Paul Miki (February 6th)
February 3rd - Saint Blaise, Bishop and Martyr
February 3rd - Saint Ansgar, Bishop
February 5th - Saint Agatha, Virgin and Martyr
February 6th - Saint Paul Miki and Companions, Martyrs
February 8th - Saint Jerome Emiliani
February 8th - Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin
I’ve chosen to write about St. Paul Miki (and his companions).
The future St. Paul Miki was born about 1565, to a significant Japanese family. His father Miki Handayu was a warlord during this (Sengoku) period of relative instability in Japanese history. It was MIki Handayu who converted to Christianity (Catholicism), being baptized in 1564 and took the baptismal name of Paulo. His son, the future St. Paul Miki was baptized at the age of five and took his father’s baptismal name as well. St. Paul Miki’s Japanese name is unknown.
The future St. Paul Miki’s father sent him to the first (minor) seminary established in Japan, located by Azuhi Castle. A few years later, after the castle had been burned down, remember this was a time of a good deal of instability in Japan, the seminary was moved to Arima (today Takatsuki City).
During this time the future St. Paul Miki’s father, though Catholic, remained considered a loyal member Japan’s elite, serving under the warlord Oda Nobunaga in Kyoto, one of Japan’s most important cities and arguably its capital at the time.
After hearing that his father died during the Kyusu Campaign seeking to re-unity the Japanese islands under one rule, the future St. Paul Miki decided to devote himself to his faith. In August 1586, he entered as a novice into the Jesuit Order.
He became known as both a knowledgeable and eloquent preacher, studying Buddhism in order to debate its clerics, and he had success in converting a fair number of his audiences.
However, persecution of the nascent and growing Church in Japan soon came to fore.
After the San Felipe Incident in October, 1596, which involved a shipwreck off the coast of the Japanese island of Shikoku of a Spanish galleon carrying large number of Catholic missionaries from the Philippines, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the military commander who lead the above mentioned Japan unifying Kyusu Campaign and serving by then as the military regent to Japan’s Emperor ordered the registration and monitoring of Christian missionaries.
By December 1596, the increasingly paranoid Hideyoshi ordered the capture and execution of Franciscan missionaries in Japan. Despite Miki and his companions being Jesuits, they were arrested as well and sentenced to die.
However, Hideyoshi sought to have the arrested missionaries not merely executed but made an example of. So though arrested in Osaka, Miki and his companions were paraded as prisoners across the country. In Kyoto, Hideyoshi had the prisoners’ left ears cut off, in an attempt to display Japan’s imperial power over them. However, the action only gained the prisoners sympathy from the city’s population. Finally the prisoners were taken to Nagasaki, the site of St. Francis Xavier’s first Christian mission in Japan.
When the prisoners saw that they were meant to be crucified on what Nikasika Hill then at the outskirts of Nagasaki, by legend, the the prisoners, 26 of them, broke into singing the tradition Catholic hymn, the Te Deum. Also by tradition, the future St. Paul Miki, S.J. continued to preach to the people even from the cross of his eventual martyrdom, noting that unlike various foreign priests and laymen crucified around him, he was Japanese, and therefore was not dying as “a foreigner” but simply for his Catholic Christian faith.
St. Paul Miki, S.J., died on Feb. 5, 1597. Crucified with him were 25 filipino missionaries, including the future St. Lorenzo Ruiz.
St. Paul Miki, S.J. was canonized on June 8, 1862 by Pope Pius IX. St. Lorenzo Ruiz and his filipino companions were canonized on Oct. 18, 1987 by St. John Paul II.
St. Paul Miki, St. Lorenzo Ruiz and companions, pray for us!
Caption: Picture from Theophilia website.
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