The Catholic times. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1951-current, 1958-02-21
Church I'm Japan's South
Now Is Time To Bring
Japanese Back To Church
BY Erik Ven KvehneIt-Leddihn

BY Erik Won KvehneIt-L eddihn
What about the Church in Japan? The answer to
such a question is as difficult as the reply to the one
which worries so many American Catholics: what is
the Church in Europe really Gke?"
Take a map and you will see that the Realm OF
the Rising Sun consists of a main and three other
large islands. The southernmost of these is Kyushu
and that's where the Church started her. activities in
the 10th century and where she failed gloriously
and wonderfully.
This was the area where St. Francis Xavier land
ed, where the missionaries made an overwhelming
success, and where the i~ntrigues of the Dutch, eager
to gain a trading monopoly-behind the missionaries.
stood Spain and P~ortugal-resulted in the persecution
of the Catholics by the various Shoguns. Between
1897 and l641 thousands upon thousands Of Chris
tianS we're martyred among the most fiendish tor
lures, many of them crucified in mockery of their
Saviour's death. @
In Nagasaki, | stood on the spot where the
'Twenty Six Saints" (all later canonizeO sealed with
their blood their allegiance to God and His Church.
From here you can see the outline of the Bunks-
kaikan, the Culture House" erected as a memorial
near the spot where the murderous A-BomD fell. /
have stood before a simple cross in Unzen National
Park, overlooking the geysers and hot water pools
where the Catholics were boiled alive as a mockery
of baptism. / walked over the ruins of the castle in
Shimabara where the Catholics made their last stand
in 1641, defying the Shotgun. He could never have
taken this powerful fertilization had not the Dutch
lent him the ordnance of their battleships. Thus 80
900 men, women and children were maSsacred.
The Dutch had succeeded only too well in spread
ing the tale that Catholics were bound to be illoyal
citizens because they really paid homage to a foreign
potentate. Ever heard that one before0 Now they
got their reward by being confined to Dejina form
erly an iSland) in the harbor of Nagasaki where they
could receive their Japanese clients. Only once a year
they were allowed to 60 on land and to travel to the
court of the Shotgun in Yedo to-day Tokyo where
they were put on a stage and ordered to behave like
Europeans: to smoke, to dance, to talk their gibber-
ish. The court OF the Shotgun rocked with laughter.
An a~basement? Well, business is business and
money does not stink.
Were all Christians wiped out! By no means.
When the first French Missionaries arrived in Oura,
a suburb of Nagasaki, in the eighteen-sxties a group
tons: did they have wives, did they have any affection
for the mother of 'Kirishito', and did the have any
connection with the Great Father in ROM
The answers being in the affirmative they re-
vealed themselves as part of a group OF about $4,000,
mostly in the city of Urakami near Nagasah and in
the Goto Islands, who still chung to their ancient faith.
For 220 years they had preserved their religion with
the help of two S~acraments only Baptism and mar
riage), since they had no priests.
Not all of them, however, came back to the
Church. A minority, called the Hanare, up to our days
flatly refuses to recognize our priests and to worship
openly because, they insist, religion must be practlsed
as a secret. They have stone idols IN front of their
houses and 40O-year old Catholic images and statues
hidden between double walls. They are pathetic. They
recite prayers in garbled Latin whose sense they no
longer understand. ROMA has become confused
with Heaven and St. Francis Xavier with God Himself.
Only now Catholic missionaries and the native clergy
make desperate efforts to bring them back.
III UlSSCoI OIOW dSdIIioC IO NotAfOAS -
shu was struck by the A-bomb which fell on a Sunday
at IL OF a. M, a stones throw. from the Cathedral in
Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki. All, the faithful were
killed, almost 1900 of them. They were attending
High Mass in what was the largest church in Eastern
Asia with a seating capacity of 5000.
met a variety of native priests and missionaries
in that area There is an American Augustinian mis-
sion in the suburbs of Shiroyama, one of 10 churches
in greater Nagasaki, and from these priests, mostly
Pennsylvanians, | learned a lot. In Kyushu the situ-
alton is very different from that in the north. Here
the Catholics form largely a lower class element and
are still treated with suspicion, if not contempt.
They themselves refrain from intermarryiing with
Pagans-th the native) bishop also forbids all mixed
marriages-and the slightest gesture which might be
interpreted as a surrender to paganism is abhorred by
them. (The modern Roman Instructions are more
lenient than the Kyushu Catholics of old lineage). Yet,
now the time has come to break the crust and the
stage has been set for a real expansion of the Church
in the South, which means missionizing, preaching,
proselytizing rather than just normal pastoral care.
1872; 2 Thessalonians 1:79, When Pope Leo XIII wrote his
Jude 1853, Apocalypse 14:1D great encyclical on The Condi.
g. Doesn't the Catholic .;on of tbo UorL;rr No.