The Japanese Cardinal Whose Ancestors Were “Hidden Christians”

Source: FSSPX News

Bishop Manyo Maeda

The martyrdom of the Japanese Catholics in past centuries is truly a part of the new Japanese cardinal Manyo Maeda, archbishop of Osaka.

The porporato comes from a family of fishermen from the island of Goto, where the “hidden Christians” lived for several centuries.

The famous kakure kirishitan were believers who, in the face of shogun Tokugawa’s fierce persecution in the early 17th century, preserved and passed on the flame of the Faith in the silence of their hearts, allowing it to reappear at the end of the 19th century, when the laws against Christianity were abolished.

One of them was Archbishop Maeda’s great-grandfather. As a child, the future Japanese cardinal loved to hear his story, that played an important role in his priestly vocation, recalls Paolo Affatato in the columns of Vatican Insider.

The archbishop of Osaka even conducted a thorough study on these “hidden Christians”, hoping to find enough materials for a beatification process.

Archbishop Maeda is 69 years old and pastor to 51,000 Catholic faithful on the diocesan territory that includes the cities of Osaka, Hyogo and Wakayama, with a total population of 5.5 million.

The 150 priests, 600 nuns and 500 catechists devote their pastoral and social work to a small community, as is the case with all the faithful in the Land of the Rising Sun, where baptized Catholics scarcely represent 1% of the population.

Japan has become a country where secularism, religious indifference, moral subjectivism, and a loss of the sense of the sacred are very widespread. The Gospel was brought to the archipelago for the first time four and a half centuries ago, but the Christians are still a small minority, and most Japanese continue to consider Christianity as foreign to their culture.

In Osaka, the Priestly Society of St. Pius X celebrates Mass and the sacraments once a month, according to the same rite the kakure kirishitan attended 400 years ago…

Relevant Links:

http://immaculata.jp/massinfo/bbs29.cgi

https://fsspx.asia/en/tokyo