How the Catholic Faith went underground for centuries in Japan and was preserved by the lay faithful

Sandro Magister, "The 'Hidden Christians' of Japan ..." (Settimo Cielo, October 17, 2017):

Pope Francis has repeatedly expressed his admiration for the “hidden Christians” of Japan, who miraculously reappeared with their faith intact in the second half of the nineteenth century, after two and a half centuries of centuries of ferocious annihilation of Christianity in that country.

But few know the real story of this miracle on the brink of the incredible. It was reconstructed on Thursday, October 12 in a fascinating conference in the aula magna of the Pontifical Gregorian University, by the Japanese Jesuit Shinzo Kawamura, professor of Church history at Sophia University in Tokyo and an author of the most up-to-date studies on the issue.

The complete text of his conference, given at the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Holy See, is reproduced on this other page of Settimo Cielo:

>> Pope Pius IX and Japan. The History of an Oriental Miracle

An extensive extract from this is published below. From reading this - which is a must - it can be gathered that what allowed the intact transmission of the Catholic faith, from generation to generation, among those Christians devoid of priests and entirely cut off from the world was essentially an oral tradition made up of a few decisive truths concerning the sacraments and in the first place confession, according to what was taught by the Council of Trent.

It is “Tridentine” Catholicism, therefore, that nourished the miracle of those “hidden Christians.” With its doctrine of sin and of sacramental forgiveness, anticipated in them by repeated acts of perfect contrition, in the absence of a confessor but also in the prophetic vision that one day he would finally arrive.

These were acts of contrition that followed, at times, the sin of apostasy, which involved publicly trampling on the “Fumie,” the image of Jesus, as they were forced to do by their persecutors in order to prove that they abjured the Christian faith, on pain of death....

"HIDDEN CHRISTIANS" IN JAPAN. THE HISTORY OF AN ORIENTAL MIRACLE
by Shinzo Kawamura, S.J.

On January 8, 1867, His Holiness Pope Pius IX dispatched a special message to Fr. Bernard Petitjean of the Paris Foreign Mission Society, who at the time was involved in missionary work in the city of Nagasaki. The purpose of His Holiness was to personally bless an event, which he exuberantly described as a “Miracle of the Orient.”

What he referred to as a “Miracle of the Orient,” was the fact that three years before this message was dispatched, that is, on March 17, 1865, an incident had occurred within one of Japan’s oldest churches, namely the “Oura Tenshudo" of Nagasaki, which is also known as the Basilica of the Twenty-Six Holy Martyrs of Japan.

A group of approximately 15 people, descendants of the Hidden Christians of Nagasaki Urakami, visited the Oura Tenshudo that had just been built, and engaged in a dialogue with Fr. Petitjean.

They spoke to Fr. Petitjean saying: “We are of the same faith as you. Where can we find the image of Saint Mary?”.

No sooner had these Hidden Christians ascertained the fact that Catholic priests had entered Japan, more and more of them began to come out of hiding, and their numbers in course of time exceeded ten thousand.

After having duly confirmed the fact that the faith of these priests was the same as that which had been adhered to by their ancestors 400 years ago, these Hidden Christians returned to the Catholic Church.

Three keywords

These Hidden Christians had endured about 250 years of persecution, due to the prohibitions imposed upon them by the Tokugawa government. Even so, they faithfully continued to preserve their faith, and when they eventually felt that the time was appropriate to do so, they rejoined the Catholic Church. This was indeed a miracle, but my question is, what was it that made this miracle possible?

I now wish to present three keywords that I consider most vital, with regard to the possibility of this Oriental Miracle....

Kawamura goes on to discuss in detail the "three keywords" to understanding the survival of the underground faith in Japan. Essentially, they come down to (1) lay communities that had been organized for the governance of the Catholic faithful in diverse territorial regions of the country since the time of St. Francis Xavier's mission in Japan; (2) the prophecy of a martyred catechist that after seven generations, black ships would arrive and Catholic "confessors" with the authority to forgive sins would return to Japan; and (3) hope of forgiveness in the absence of sacramental Confession through the Tridentine provision that "reconciliation between the individual and God can be attained by true contrition."

In these far-from-ideal conditions, how these Japanese "hidden Christians" were able to preserve and sustain their faith at all is indeed an "Oriental Miracle."

[Hat tip to JM]

A faithless retired Episcopal priest's demythologized Easter 'homily'

Harry T. Cook, "On Easter, an alternative approach to resurrection" (Detroit Free Press, April 15, 2017):

The Easter story is not the work of journalists. No good can come from torturing it into news, good or otherwise. It is a story with meaning. What is its meaning? It cannot be that a convicted revolutionary who was executed on a Friday walked out of his grave on Sunday to the profound amazement of his followers. Is it possible that the meaning of the story is that while you can kill a human being, you cannot kill what he or she has been or done?

Pitiful. Pitiful that good people ever come to believe such complete nonsense. Pitiful in the way St. Paul says that we would be of all people most to be pitied if Jesus hadn't been raised from the dead as claimed (providing an intricate logical syllogism to that effect in 1 Corinthians 15).

Even on empirical grounds, how pitiful is it to believe that miracles "can't happen" because, well, just because "miracles don't happen." Even if all the stars in the heavens arranged themselves so as to spell "Jesus saves," such individuals would probably respond: "Why, goodness me! What a remarkable coincidence! It almost looks as if someone has played some sort of optical trick on us."

There are accounts of other resurrected deities? Like Dionysus? Yeah, so what? Where have they left a paper trail of witnesses and martyrs like Jesus has? The Apostles must have been deceived about Jesus' resurrection? You think? One can be deceived about lots of things, but some things are just too big to be deceived about. A resurrected man is one of these. I doubt one could be anymore deceived about a man being resurrected from the dead than be deceived into thinking that exactly 37 pink pigs with wings are hovering in the air like hummingbirds just outside one's window.

But it could have been in the Apostles' self-interest to believe the Jesus rose from the dead. True. But it could also be in your own self-interest to believe that exactly 37 pink pigs with wings are hovering in the air like hummingbirds just outside your window if I offered you $1 million to believe that. Trouble is, our honest beliefs aren't quite under our control the way our ordinary choices are. I can't really bring myself to believe something just because someone offers to pay me money to believe it.

If course, I could say I believed it, even if I didn't. So maybe the Apostles conspired to lie about Jesus' resurrection? You think? When each of them (except for John) went to his martyrdom knowing that all he'd have to do is refuse to go along with the lie anymore, to just break and tell the truth and admit that Jesus didn't rise from the dead? Furthermore, each of these conspirators would have known that each of his fellow conspirators was lying through his teeth in the face of terrible persecution, torture, and the threat of death, and all that would have to happen if for one of them to break and tell the truth, and the whole resurrection story would go down in flames as a failure not worth being martyred for.

So we have a story people just can't be mistaken about of someone rising from the dead, and a story that the Apostles' couldn't possibly have conspired to lie about, given the fact that each of them (except John), knowing that it is human nature to break under torture, nevertheless willingly gave his life as a martyr for the authenticity of the story with not one of them throwing in the towel and denying its authenticity. Not to mention centuries of martyrs and witnesses to lives changed, relationships redeemed, bodies and souls healed in expectation of life eternal.

Pray for Harry T. Cook. Poor man. Pitiful.

A Christmas Reflection: What if the Biblical Narrative were True?

It's time to reconsider the reason for the season and the challenges offered by the drive-by "experts" of the day who intend to cast the entire Biblical narrative concerning the Blessed Nativity into doubt. Consider again the Biblical narrative:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another,

Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pas, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. (The Gospel According to Luke, Chapter Two, Verses 13-20)

Here we are again, on the first day of the Christmas season. It has become something of a Christmas tradition for me to engage the following text by C.S. Lewis in connection with the above quoted Scriptures. The reason will be obvious.

Nearly every Christmas, it seems, NEWSWEEK or TIME or some television special will feature the "latest scholarship" questioning the "authenticity" of the Christmas story. I am not concerned with the question about whether the Nativity of our Lord occurred on December 25th. That's a matter of Church tradition and incidental to my concerns here. What concerns me is how the Biblical narrative itself is invariably called into question or even dismissed as mere "myth" -- the account of the shepherds, the Angelic host, the Christ Child in a manger, the Star and the Magi from the East, Herod's slaughter of the innocents, the flight of Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child into Egypt, etc.

The scholarly authorities typically interviewed, whether Catholic or Protestant, are consistently and incorrigibly one-sided, quite thoroughly corrupted by the Humean and Kantian philosophical presuppositions undergirding the historical-critical reading of the Biblical narrative. Typical is the About.com website, where Internet browsers frequent to learn "the facts" about this or that -- a site where one finds this sort of thinking gone to seed in an article by Austin Cline, "Nativity vs Gospels: Are the Gospels Reliable About Jesus' Birth?" (About.com), where the partisan skepticism of such historical critical assumptions is abundantly evident in his suggestions that all the key ingredients of the Nativity story in the Gospels were concocted fictions of various kinds.

The lack of critical circumspection, if not patent fantasy, in all of this would be amusing if it were not so destructive. The upshot is always the same: that the Gospel writers are unreliable and not to be trusted, and certainly not to be taken at face value. Just how ludicrous this all is, however, can be seen easily by anyone with a modicum of familiarity with literature, mythology, and history. One of the best examples of a powerful antedote to this kind of foolishness -- and one I keep using because it is simple -- is a little essay by C.S. Lewis entitled "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," which is available in a collection of essays by Lewis entitled Christian Reflections (1967; reprinted by Eerdmans, 1994). The following are some excerpts from Lewis' essay, which begins on p. 152 and contains four objections (or what he calls "bleats") about modern New Testament scholarship:

1. [If a scholar] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour...

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one [of the stories in the Gospel of John, for example] is like this... Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative...

2. All theology of the liberal type involves at some point - and often involves throughout - the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars... The idea that any... writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.

3. Thirdly, I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur... This is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'if miraculous, unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing.

4. My fourth bleat is my loudest and longest. Reviewers [of my own books, and of books by friends whose real history I knew] both friendly and hostile... will tell you what public events had directed the author's mind to this or that, what other authors influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of audience he principally addressed, why - and when - he did everything... My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of these guesses has on any one point been right; the method shows a record of 100 per cent failure.

The 'assured results of modern scholarship', as to the way in which an old book was written, are 'assured', we may conclude, only because those who knew the facts are dead and can't blow the gaff... The Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead. When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to discuss.

However... we are not fundamentalists... Of course we agree that passages almost verbally identical cannot be independent. It is as we glide away from this into reconstructions of a subtler and more ambitious kind that our faith in the method wavers... The sort of statement that arouses our deepest scepticism is the statement that something in a Gospel cannot be historical because it shows a theology or an ecclesiology too developed for so early a date...

Such are the reactions of one bleating layman... Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar; he now tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more...

Lewis, of course, was hardly a naive ignoramus. He knew all the critical objections to Christianity because for the first part of his life he was himself a confirmed agnostic. He was anything but "soft-minded," to use the Jamesian idiom. He taught philosophy at Oxford briefly before going on to teach Medieval and Renaissance literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and conclude his prolific academic career teaching at Cambridge. An account of his conversion can be found in his Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life,in which we find the following quotation:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. (emphasis added)

Lewis, an Anglican, was a man of deep Catholic habit of mind, probably because of his immersion in medieval literature; and many have wondered why he never himself crossed the Tiber. Walker Percy even compared him to Moses, who led many others to the Promised Land, though never himself crossing over. A number of books have been written about this, like Joseph Pearce's C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church,and Christopher Derrick's C.S.Lewis and the Church of Rome.The most probable reason is cultural: his father was an Ulsterman. Whatever the reason, his common sense criticisms of those Biblical "experts" who attempt to dismantle the entire Biblical narrative under the influence of Enlightenment prejudices, can be accepted with gratitude.

For further reading:

• Jesus Seminar critically examined (edited by Pertinacious Papist)
• C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections,edited by Walter Hooper.
• If you're interested in reading the relevant chapter from Lewis's book online, click on: "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" (Lewis on Biblical Criticism, posted June 10, 2005)
• Hurd Baruch, "The Crisis in Biblical Scholarship" (New Oxford Review, December 2014).
• Mark Giszczak, "The Early Responsa of the Pontifical Biblical Commission" (Catholic bible Student, March 20, 2008)
• J. C. O'Neill, The Bible's Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann(T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1991) - fantastic book offers a critical and scholarly overview of Bible deconstructionists and their abusive use of the historical-critical hermeneutic.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Inspiring! -- a "scandalous miracle" of grace!

Andre Gingerich Stoner, "Scandalous Miracle" (Mennonite World Review, September 28, 2015):

It was a miracle. Jun Yamada [pictured right], suffering from an aggressive leukemia, was on his death bed. He lost consciousness and went into cardiac arrest. The doctors told the family he was unlikely to live more than half a day. They began to make funeral plans.

Then, to everyone’s amazement, including the team of doctors, Jun’s marrow started producing normal blood cells again. There was no medical explanation. Over time, Jun made a full recovery. The family and friends were awestruck. Yet this healing was too scandalous to talk about for decades.
 
Jun was a Japanese Mennonite and a student at a Catholic university. His father was a Mennonite pastor. When Jun became ill, many Japanese Mennonites prayed for him. One of Jun’s professors, Catholic priest Alfonso Fausone, also prayed for Jun and mobilized members of his order to pray. They petitioned Joseph Freinademetz, one of the founders of their order who had lived 100 years earlier, to intercede on Jun’s behalf. Freinademetz is often quoted as saying, “The language that all people understand is love.”

From the hospital bed, one could see the light in the monastery tower that was lit each night as priests and students prayed.

For three months, the priests provided a place for the Yamada family to stay, since their home was 500 miles south. There was profound respect and affection between the Catholics and Mennonites who cared for and loved Jun. During the crisis, the Yamada family participated in eucharist at the seminary. When death seemed certain, Jun’s father asked Fausone if he would officiate at the funeral. All this was unheard of in 1987.

The father called Jun’s brother, Nozomu, then a student at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elk­hart, Ind., asking him to return home. Nozomu left the U.S. preparing to attend a funeral, but he found his brother still alive, although in extremely critical condition.

The father said, “Hope has arrived.” (Nozomu means hope in Japanese.) In those critical hours Fausone asked if he could offer the sacrament of anointing of the sick. The family welcomed this gift.

The next day, the doctors came with startling news that Jun was producing normal cells again. Six months later, Jun was discharged from the hospital. His doctors and other patients began to refer to him as a miracle man. Today, Jun is a professor of early church art.

The fervent prayers and the shared love of Catholic and Mennonite brothers and sisters that surrounded Jun were central to these events. Yet it was precisely this ecumenical boundary-crossing that made this healing too scandalous to talk about openly for decades.

Years later, first in the Catholic community, this miracle began to be told. The intervention of Freinademetz was credited with a role in Jun’s healing. In 2003 Freinademetz was named a saint. Jun traveled to Rome to meet the Pope and participate in the ceremony.

In August, about 90 people gathered at AMBS for an annual Mennonite-Catholic Bridgefolk gathering to hear the story of Jun’s healing and to celebrate the marvelous thing God had done through the shared love and intercession of Catholics and Mennonites. Some participants reflected that after years of quiet, going to Elkhart in 2015 was for Mennonites perhaps akin to going to Rome in 2003 for Catholics.

As I listened, I pondered the amazing healing God can bring when people who love Jesus and love each other work and pray together, despite profound differences.

Andre Gingerich Stoner is director of interchurch relations and director of holistic witness for Mennonite Church USA.

Related: Nozomu Yamada, "THE HEALING OF JUN YAMADA Mennonites and Catholics in Friendship Leading to the Canonization of St Josef Freinademetz, SVD" (Bridgefolk.net, October 27, 2012).

[Hat tip to Darvin Yoder]

Cardinal Kasper's earlier denials of the miracles and prophecies of Jesus gain new airing

Joe Sparks, "The Gospel According to Cardinal Kasper: Did the Miracles and Prophesies of Jesus Really Happen?" (The Catholic Household, February 4, 2015), reveals some disturbing realities about the Cardinal's perspective. Quoting from Walter Cardinal Kasper's Jesus the Christ (Paulist Press, 1976), Sparks offers a number of passages strikingly at odds with Church teaching. For example, about our Lord's miracles, he writes:

"The probability is that we need not take the so-called ‘nature miracles’ as historical.” (Jesus the Christ, p. 90-91)

Again,

"We must assume therefore that we are faced not with historical details but with stylistic devices intended to attract the attention and raise excitement in the minds of those listening….” (Jesus the Christ, p. 127)

All of which, of course, is brazenly at odds with Catholic teaching. For example, in the documents of Vatican II we find this:

“Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven.” (Dei Verbum, 19)

Which means that Kasper is more beholden to the currently ascendant and fashionable Biblical hermeneutics of the self-congratulatory post-Enlightenment establishment emanating from the erstwhile fevered swamplands of liberal Protestant "higher criticism" than he is with the teaching authority of his own Church. Should anyone be surprised?

Read Sparks' article. It's a good, solid exposé that deserves reading; and it goes far beyond the two bits I've quoted above.

For the record: miracles still do happen

All my life I've occasionally witnessed and had credible friends till me about impossible cures -- cures from cancer, tumours disappearing, escapes from injury and death, and the like.

Just occasionally. Not too often.

Life goes on "normally" for months in a pattern that any reductionistic materialist would find fully plausible, and then: Wham! It happens again -- almost like little reminders not to forget that the naturalistic (anti-supernaturalist) worldview is nothing but the most fragile bubble, entirely an illusion.

Today I received an email from a good friend with just such news. The details are confidential and cannot be shared, except for the fact that it involved a disease considered incurable. After repeated Novenas to the Blessed Mother, requests for intercession at daily Mass, one spouse called the other crying for joy. Their prayers had been answered. Miraculously.

"Good Lord...

"My Lord, I am without words for the first time in my life.

"I am beyond joy and stunned like never before. All this is due solely to Jesus and Mary and that they heard and answered the prayers of this serious sinner is a mystery beyond all understanding and certainly beyond all telling.

"Such love and compassion surpasses all understanding."

Thought you'd like to know. As Pascal says, God offers enough light to give hope to the humble, but enough darkness to forestall all pride. We walk by faith. And once in a while, it can surprise you.