Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

The reunion of the hidden Christians of Nagasaki

Nagasaki (Japan) (1865)

Christianity had arrived in Japan with St. Francis Javier in 1549 and blossomed especially in Kyūshū. But at the beginning of the 17th century the Shogunate forbade him, expelled the missionaries and harshly persecuted the faithful. Among them are the twenty-six martyrs crucified in Nagasaki in 1597. From then on Christianity disappeared from public life, and those who persevered went into hiding: kakure kirishitan, the hidden Christians.

En 1864 se levantó en Nagasaki la Church of Ōuradedicated to those twenty-six martyrs, and the French father came as chaplain. Bernard Petitjean. On 17 March 1865 a group of peasants from the Urakami He approached the temple with caution. What happened there is documented in the historiography of Nagasaki's hidden Christian sites: those people revealed to the priest that they had kept the Christian faith secret for generations, when they all believed that there was no Christian left in Japan.

Catholic tradition has preserved the scene with tenderness: a woman, after assuring herself that the priest was celibate and recognized the Pope, whispered to him that their hearts were one and the same and asked him if he venerated the Holy Mary. The exact literary form of the dialogue belongs to later missionary tradition, as no contemporary verbatim transcription exists; but the historical core is solid: devotion to Mary was the criterion for recognizing each other as brothers and sisters in faith.

After that day, thousands of hidden Christians began to emerge from their villages. It is estimated that in the Nagasaki region alone, there were nearly ten thousand. The persecution continued for several more years, with banishments and punishments, until the prohibition was lifted at the end of the 19th century. Local Catholic memory interprets this as the devotion to Mary and the prayers learned from the early missionaries sustaining the faith without priests for more than two centuries: a pious interpretation, but consistent with the central role Mary played in those communities. It is worth noting that isolation led to adaptations and highly distorted forms of prayer; there is no evidence that all of them preserved the Rosary as we pray it today, although it is likely that many maintained a repetitive, Rosary-like prayer.