St. Paul Miki & Companions

A Japanese Jesuit seminarian and twenty-five companions — six Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen lay Christians, three of them young boys — crucified together at Nagasaki on February 5, 1597. Paul Miki preached his last sermon from the cross, forgiving his executioners. The Christianity they witnessed to went underground for two and a half centuries before being rediscovered in 1865.

Paul Miki was born into a wealthy Japanese family and educated by the Jesuits from an early age. He became one of the most effective preachers of the Gospel in Japan, renowned for his ability to explain Christian doctrine in terms that resonated with Japanese culture. When the regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered a sudden crackdown on Christians, Miki and his companions were arrested in Kyoto and Osaka, their left ears were cut off as a mark of shame, and they were marched six hundred miles through winter to Nagasaki.

The twenty-six were canonized in 1862 by Pope Pius IX. When Catholic missionaries returned to Japan in the 1860s, they discovered in the village of Urakami thousands of "hidden Christians" — the Kakure Kirishitan — who had preserved their faith in secret for over two hundred years, passing down prayers, baptismal rites, and devotion to "Santa Maria" from generation to generation without any priest.