How does one begin to dry the tears streaming down the ash-stained faces of Parisian Catholics? To be sure, Notre Dame Cathedral is a treasure for the world, for people of all nations and creeds. But it is first and foremost a Catholic church — where the sacraments have been celebrated for centuries, where the faithful labored more than a hundred years to erect a glorious monument to God. To watch this sacred space burn during Holy Week — the most solemn of the Christian
liturgical year — stings all the more.
Here’s one suggestion for where Paris’s grieving faithful might turn for comfort: eastward, to Nagasaki, Japan.
Nagasaki has been the heart of Catholic Japan almost since St. Francis Xavier arrived on the island of Kyushu in 1549. By 1580, the country had an estimated 200,000 converts, many of them concentrated in the trading port that regularly welcomed their Portuguese co-religionists.
It was also Nagasaki that suffered when, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Japanese authorities expelled missionaries and prohibited the practice of Christianity. It was atop the city’s Nishizaka hill that 26 foreign priests and native believers were crucified as martyrs in 1597; it was in the bubbling, sulfuric volcanic springs of nearby Mount Unzen where Christians were boiled until they apostatized (or died).
And it was Nagasaki that guarded, over the following 200 years, a secret kakure, or “hidden,” Catholic community. These men and women had neither churches nor priests, celebrations nor sacraments. But they had faith. From one generation to the next, families passed down the teachings and traditions, clinging tenaciously to their religion in the midst of terrifying peril.
In 1865, after Japan had reopened itself to Westerners, it was a French missionary, Father Bernard Petitjean, who was astonished when a group of these “hidden Christians” emerged from the underground...READ MORE
