Twenty-six martyrs of Japan

The twenty-six are marched from Kyoto to Nagasaki — a journey of nearly a month in the middle of winter. They are six Franciscan missionaries and twenty Japanese converts, including three young boys aged twelve, thirteen, and fifteen.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi has ordered the execution as a warning: Christianity is a foreign religion, its missionaries are spies for European colonizers, and Japan will not become another Philippines.

The martyrs walk calmly. Contemporary accounts record them singing psalms and praying aloud as they are led through towns and villages whose populations are ordered to watch. At each stop, crowds gather — some hostile, some moved, some secretly Christian.

At Nagasaki they are crucified on crosses set up on a hillside overlooking the harbor. The crosses are different from the Western form — each person is tied and their feet supported on a bracket, then a lance is thrust through the side.

One of the boys — Luis Ibaraki, aged twelve — is asked at the cross whether he is afraid. He replies: In a short time I shall be in paradise.

All twenty-six die on February 5, 1597. They are canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862. The hill where they died is now the Nishizaka martyrs' monument, one of the most visited Christian sites in Japan.

The church that Xavier planted in 1549 produces its first martyrs within fifty years, and the martyrs produce the hidden church that will survive for two and a half centuries after.

A twelve-year-old boy crucified on a hillside above a harbor, asked if he is afraid, says: In a short time I shall be in paradise.

This is not bravado. It is the answer of a child who has been taught something true and believes it completely — who has received the faith as a genuine inheritance and not merely a cultural identity.

The faith that produces that quality of dying in a twelve-year-old was planted fifty years earlier by a man in a borrowed boat from the edge of Europe.

The chain holds. Even here. Even this.