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Inspiration and Institution in Catholic Missionary Martyrdom Accounts: Japan and New France, 1617–49

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

Rhiannon Teather
Rhiannon Teather*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
*
*E-mail: rt1702@my.bristol.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This article focuses on the martyrdoms of the French Jesuit Antoine Daniel in New France and the Spanish friars Alonso Navarrete and Hernando Ayala in Japan. Drawing upon the accounts written by the missionaries Paul Ragueneau and Jacinto Orfanel, it shows how they adapted apostolic teaching and the Tridentine vision of the priesthood to interpret the acts of their brethren as sources of inspiration and models of renewed institutional identity. It argues that martyrdom was viewed as a pastoral responsibility in the missions to New France and Japan. Martyrs were portrayed as divinely inspired to lay down their lives for their communities, while the act of martyrdom was viewed as a literal, semi-liturgical sacrifice imbued with the sacramentality of the priesthood. Martyrdom was perceived both to fulfil an urgent pastoral need within communities and to model the apostolic vision of the Roman Catholic Church.

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Research Article
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Studies in Church History , Volume 57: INSPIRATION AND INSTITUTION IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY , June 2021, pp. 142 - 162
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society

On the eve of Corpus Christi 1617, Alonso Navarrete, the vicar provincial of the Dominicans in the Japan mission, announced his intention to travel from the relative safety of Nagasaki to Omura, a hotspot of recent executions.Footnote 1 Navarrete's friend and fellow missionary, Hernando Ayala, the lone Augustinian in Japan and vicar provincial of that order, volunteered to accompany him.Footnote 2 Traditionally the year 1614 marks the beginning of the end of Japan's ‘Christian Century’ (c.1549–1649) with a gathering storm of persecution.Footnote 3 Edicts were published across the country mandating the expulsion of missionaries and influential Japanese converts. It became a capital offence for European missionaries to operate or to proselytize for their religion.Footnote 4 By 1617, the enforcement of anti-Christian measures had gained pace, with fresh executions of European missionary priests, and so the friars’ trip to Omura was fraught with danger.Footnote 5 When challenged about the risks, Navarrete and Ayala explained that they felt moved to offer pastoral support to the bereft Christians of Omura. On arrival, Navarrete and Ayala tonsured themselves, donned their habits and were swiftly arrested. They were then taken to the island of Koguchi (Takashima) in Omura Bay, where they were beheaded on 1 June 1617. Leo Tanaka (b. c.1590), a Japanese lay catechist, was executed alongside them.Footnote 6

On other shores, the Jesuit missionary Antoine Daniel was killed in the mission to the Huron (also Wendat, meaning ‘Islanders’ or ‘Dwellers on a Peninsula’) in New France, North America.Footnote 7 In the 1640s, this remote French mission had been devastated by escalating inter-tribal conflict.Footnote 8 With weapons supplied by the Dutch, the neighbouring Iroquois League (also Haudenosaunee, or ‘people of the Longhouse’), had been waging war against the Huron with increasing intensity.Footnote 9 In early July 1648 at the village of Teanaostaiaë, Daniel had just celebrated mass with his congregation when he found himself in the midst of an Iroquois raid. He urged the Christians to flee and went forward to meet the raiders. Moments later Daniel was slain and his body was thrown into the burning church.

Navarrete, Ayala and Daniel were swiftly recorded as martyrs in the writings of their brethren. For Navarrete and Ayala, this article focuses on the account written by the Spanish Dominican missionary Jacinto Orfanel (1578–1622), in his Historia eclesiástica de los sucesos de la Christiandad de Japón (1633).Footnote 10 In comparison to their Jesuit and Franciscan contemporaries, the Dominicans and Augustinians in Japan have received little detailed attention since the accounts of Boxer, Cummins and Hartmann in the 1960s, so this article seeks to incorporate their stories into the global picture of Catholic missions.Footnote 11 The death of Antoine Daniel was recorded by the Huron mission superior and French Jesuit Paul Ragueneau (1608–80) in his private correspondence to the superior general, published in the Jesuit Relations for 1648–9. The latter were popular serialized annual letters, published almost continuously in Paris at the printing house of Cramoisy between 1632 and 1673.Footnote 12 The martyrdom accounts from these Relations have not been compared systematically with those from other missions or regions.Footnote 13 This article will demonstrate that the interplay between the themes of inspiration and institution in these martyrdom accounts is brought into sharp relief by the use of a global comparative approach.

Traditionally martyrs represent one of the most ancient synergies of inspirational faith and institutionalized religion. With the Passion at the heart of Christianity, martyrdom functioned as a conduit that conveyed the central teachings of the Scriptures in a simple evocative form. Martyrs served as a fulfilment of Christianity's promises of transformation and resurrection, as well as a manifestation of its principal spiritual gifts of faith, hope and love.Footnote 14 The word ‘martyr’ in the original Greek meant ‘witness’, and in the period of persecution between the first and the fourth centuries, martyrs came to embody Christianity's distinctive identity.Footnote 15 The heroic stories of early martyrs bore witness to the religion's unique claim to divine revelation through Jesus Christ. The essential role of the martyr in bonding inspiration and institution was even formalized by a decree of the Fifth Council of Carthage (401), which specified that two relics (of a martyr and of a saint) must be buried in the altar of every church building, institutionalizing the maxim famously attributed to Tertullian that ‘the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church’.Footnote 16 From the early church, right through to the sixteenth century (and indeed beyond), institutional expression evolved to accommodate the role of martyrs. Likewise the concept of martyrdom, be it ‘white’ (spiritual) or ‘red’ (with bloodshed), continued to be a source of inspiration that was adapted by the Christian community.Footnote 17

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a bloody resurgence of martyrs. The traditional focus of studies has been on the martyrological revival in Europe, where some five thousand Christians of all confessions were killed and commemorated as martyrs.Footnote 18 In contrast, the martyrs from the missions to Asia and the Americas have been treated as a ‘third distinct group’, separate from Protestant and Catholic martyrs within Europe, and distinguished by the ‘remote theatre’ of their executions and the ‘different’ relationship with perpetrators, who tended to be non-Christians rather than adherents of a rival confession.Footnote 19 However, in the seventeenth century, Japan was the site of one of the most systematic persecutions of Christians in any country anywhere in the early modern era: the lower estimates are that 2,128 were recorded as having died during the persecutions, including 71 Europeans who were executed or died in prison; the higher figures suggest that almost double this number were killed.Footnote 20 Some scholars have likened the scale of the martyrdoms in Japan to that under the Roman Empire.Footnote 21 This suggests that, in terms of numbers and historical significance, a principal centre for Christian martyrdom was located beyond Europe rather than within it.Footnote 22

This article explores how the martyrs Navarrete, Ayala and Daniel, and their martyrologists Orfanel and Ragueneau, interpreted acts of martyrdom in their missions. The first part contextualizes these martyrdom accounts briefly, emphasizing both the significance of apostolic precedent and the Tridentine view of the priesthood as providing important interpretative frameworks for missionaries. The second part explores how the missionaries applied Christ's teaching to their own circumstances and argues that they viewed martyrdom as an aspect of pastoral responsibility. The third part shows how martyrdom was interpreted in light of the sacramentality of priestly identity as well as confessional beliefs about relics and the intercessory role of saints.Footnote 23 The article argues that martyrdom was interpreted as a literal, semi-liturgical sacrifice, a gift of self-sacrificing love to meet the specific needs of mission communities and advance the Roman Catholic Church.

Interpreting Martyrdom in Missions

Martyrdom accounts by missionaries such as Ragueneau and Orfanel were raw material in, as well as products of, a vast martyrological culture within and beyond the Society of Jesus and the mendicant orders. The indipetae letters, or petitions to be sent abroad, were full of expressions of a willingness to die in the mission vineyard and included references to Christ himself, early martyrs and missionary saints as their inspiration.Footnote 24 Martyrs were the subject of annual letters (cartas annuas), private correspondence, histories, art and plays.Footnote 25 Martyr relics, too, were a form of currency across the ‘horizontal networks’ of missions.Footnote 26 A prominent example of the scale and global reach of Catholic martyrdom in the early modern era is the Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitæ profusionem militans, by the Jesuit Mathias Tanner (1630–92), published in Prague in 1675.Footnote 27 This martyrology was organized by continent, and recorded the stories of some 304 Jesuits who died in the Catholic mission fields in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas during the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries.Footnote 28 Tanner's patchwork of martyr stories reflects a matured perception of missionary martyrs that was well established toward the end of the seventeenth century. Martyrs were seen as embodiments of the apostolic spirituality and mission of religious orders, reflecting a missionary world view as well as an increasingly global Tridentine church.Footnote 29

Ragueneau and Orfanel, like many other missionary martyrologists, drew upon ancient traditions to interpret their experiences and those of their brethren. The apostolic example in Scripture and the early church was critical to their perception of the role of martyrdom. In the gospels, Christ himself had emphasized the relationship between love and sacrifice, and in particular its expression in laying down one's life for others: ‘I am the good shepherd. … The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’ (John 10: 11, 16). This was underlined by his later teaching that ‘[n]o one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’ (John 15: 13), and reinforced by his own Passion. In addition to Christ's example, the apostle Paul, who was himself martyred, articulated the clear importance of self-sacrifice in his exhortation in his letter to the Romans, instructing all Christians ‘to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (Rom. 12: 1). Thus the reality of martyrdom as an act of spiritual or physical sacrifice was inherent to this apostolic example. The Scriptures offered a ‘biblical blueprint’ for martyrdom.Footnote 30

The example of the sacrificial, apostolic life found in the New Testament was a primary inspiration for the founders of the Franciscan and Dominican orders in the thirteenth century, and for their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.Footnote 31 This was also true of the early Jesuits, who believed that the establishment of their own order, like that of earlier religious orders, was the result of divine inspiration and an institutional vocation which was truly an ‘imitation and revivification of the lifestyle of the first disciples of Jesus’.Footnote 32 The apostolic model, combined with these institutionalized vocations, had an intensified application on the early modern frontiers of mission. Andrew Redden has shown, with reference to Jesuits in Chile, that the New Testament ‘Good Shepherd’ and ‘Lost Sheep’ parables combined with the ‘Great Commission’ (Matt. 28: 19–20) to form a ‘step-by-step’ biblical ‘blueprint for missionary work’ in Catholic missions.Footnote 33 This involved imitating Christ's example by going out into the world to seek ‘the lost sheep’ (unbelievers), to convert and baptize them, thereby offering them salvation.Footnote 34 These activities were works of charity which also prepared the missionaries for death and furthered their own salvation.Footnote 35 The role of martyrs in the creation of these new churches was pivotal in how the missions were viewed. The Jesuits frequently ‘made a direct causal link between martyrdom and missionary success’, in enterprises from England to Chile.Footnote 36 As we shall see, martyrdom was seen as a necessary, purified act of sacrificial love, and one which articulated the deepest aspirations of mission.

Similarly the papal apostolic succession had long institutionalized Christ's commission: bishops were believed to be the successors of the apostles, and the pope the successor of Peter, ‘the rock’ upon which the Church was to be built; who was given the keys to the kingdom.Footnote 37 The belief that Christ's evangelizing mission was assigned to ‘Mother Church’ could not have been more important during the intensive missionary activity of the sixteenth century and beyond.Footnote 38 In particular, it was the Catholic vision of the priesthood that would also shape the way in which missionaries viewed themselves and their martyrs. The priest, through the power vested in him during ordination, was believed to be able to stand in the place of Christ at the mass and in his administration of the other sacraments. In addition, the Council of Trent reaffirmed clerical celibacy and standardized professional training in the seminary, which combined with traditional views to make the priesthood a vocation set apart in service and reasserted priests’ importance as paternal leaders of the laity.Footnote 39 Missionary priests were seen as a special apostolic task-force, sanctified through ordination and the missionary oath, for the assignment of converting the non-Catholic world.

Martyrdom as a Pastoral Responsibility

The martyrologists Orfanel and Ragueneau emphasized the importance of the relationship between missionaries and their communities as the primary concern for the would-be martyrs. Orfanel included in his account the letter the Dominican missionary Alonso Navarrete had written to his superiors, which highlighted his anxiety about the spiritual welfare of Omura's Christians. Navarrete told his superiors: ‘Already Your Reverences see how this Christian community is being gradually extinguished, and so it is necessary to set a good example … I will go to Omura to confess, and comfort those Christians, because now is a good time, since with the fresh blood of the martyrs they will be more encouraged’.Footnote 40 Ayala's letter, also included by Orfanel, further elaborated on the situation and noted the current attitudes of Japanese Christians towards the missionaries: ‘some Christians have complained that the Fathers persuade them to become martyrs, while they themselves shun the opportunities’. He argued that he and Navarrete must go to Omura to prove that they, like their Jesuit and Franciscan counterparts, would fulfil their pastoral obligations regardless of personal risk.Footnote 41

This was an acknowledgement of the fact that, until the martyrdom of two European missionaries in May 1617, almost all the recent martyrs had been lay Japanese.Footnote 42 In the account this is presented as a point of contention between converts and priests, with the laity seen as taking on a disproportionate burden of sacrifice in the community. This tension was only resolved by the priestly martyrdoms of Navarrete and Ayala.Footnote 43 The symbolic importance of the martyrdom of priests was grounded in Christ's teaching about leadership (the greatest among believers as the one who serves), combined with the institutionalized vision of the priesthood as acting in persona Christi.Footnote 44 While lay Christians could certainly be martyrs, it was the priesthood who were believed to be consecrated for the purpose of paternal leadership and were endowed with the pastoral function of following Christ in ministry (and, if required, martyrdom). Without priests, Japanese Christians were described as ‘sheep in the midst of wolves’.Footnote 45

In this context, Navarrete and Ayala viewed martyrdom as nothing less than a pastoral obligation defined by the specific political and religious context in Omura. The act of martyrdom would boost morale and would also make the commitment of the priesthood indisputable. Later in the account, when the moment came for their arrest, Orfanel compared the scene to that of the apostle Paul's goodbye to the Christians at Ephesus (Acts 20: 36–8): there was ‘great feeling and weeping among the Christians, similar to the Christians of Ephesus, to whom Saint Paul bid farewell in walking to martyrdom, and said to them, that he would not see them any more’.Footnote 46 This parallel served to reinforce the message of the missionaries’ apostolic self-sacrifice for the community, reflecting the roots of their inspiration as well as their hopes for the missions.

In 1640s New France, with the rise in violence against Huron villages, Paul Ragueneau's account emphasized the loving sacrifice of missionaries for their community even more explicitly. Ragueneau first reported the death of the Jesuit missionary Antoine Daniel in a letter to the Jesuit superior general Vincent Caraffa. He wrote that as the attack began, Daniel ‘hastened wherever he saw the danger most threatening … intent upon the gain of souls, – mindful of the safety of others, but forgetful of his own, – he hurried into the cabins to baptize the sick, the aged, and children’.Footnote 47 Daniel also took a leading role in the evacuation of the village. Ragueneau recorded his final moments:

That he may delay the enemy, and, like a good shepherd, aid the escape of his flock, he blocks the way of the armed men and breaks their onset; a single man against the foe … At last he fell, mortally wounded by a musket-shot; and pierced with arrows, he yielded to God the blessed life which he laid down for his flock, as a good Shepherd, calling upon the name of Jesus.Footnote 48

Ragueneau thus termed Daniel ‘a good Shepherd’ who ‘laid down’ his own life for the flock to aid their escape, sacrificing his own life to delay the raiders. Later, in the published account of the year 1648–9, Ragueneau emphasized Daniel's twofold sacrifice: he behaved ‘truly as a good Pastor, who exposes both his soul and his life for the salvation of his flock’.Footnote 49

Both accounts stressed that missionaries were inspired to sacrifice themselves in, and for, their respective communities. Orfanel's references to Paul, and Ragueneau's to Christ as the Good Shepherd, asserted that the missionaries were divinely inspired in the act of martyrdom. It was a traditional belief, stemming from the earliest accounts in the church, that in their suffering and dying, Christians manifested the real presence of Christ himself: the martyr became ‘a sacrifice in the one sacrifice of Christ’.Footnote 50 The presence of the Holy Spirit enabled priestly martyrs to behave as model ‘good shepherds’ during the hour of need in their communities. In line with Christ's teaching that the greatest act of love was to lay down one's life for one's friends, the suffering and death of missionary priests were presented as acts of martyrological, sacrificial service to, and on behalf of, their flock.

Bodily Sacrifice and Priestly Identity

In missionary accounts the scriptural model of sacrifice and the liturgical role of the priesthood combined to present the act of martyrdom as a form of quasi-eucharistic sacrifice. This reflected the overlapping identities of the missionary priest as leader and servant, and the perceived sacramentality of the role. The focus on worship also encapsulated the deeper functions of the act of martyrdom, which included spiritual warfare, voluntary sacrifice and consecration. For missionaries, worship not only included prayer, the singing of psalms and the preaching of Scripture (all of which were shared with Protestants) but also the use of devotional items (crosses, rosaries) and specific forms of prayer and behaviours which echoed the mass. In Orfanel's account of the execution of Navarrete and Ayala, when they were finally brought to an island known as the place of ‘thorns’, they were shown as sanctifying the space with devotional objects and prayer. Navarrete bid a spectator, a Christian who had disguised himself as a sailor and earlier received the missionary's crucifix for a future relic, to make him a cross from a stick to hold when he died.Footnote 51

Orfanel described how ‘the guards placed them in order for the sacrifice, Father Fray Alonso in the middle, and on either side his saintly companions [Ayala and Tanaka], and the three of them kneeled’. This evoked Christ's crucifixion at Calvary between two thieves, although in this case, all three were Christians.Footnote 52 Ayala, the Augustinian, held a rosary in one hand and a candle in the other, and turned toward the katana with which he was to be executed in order to kiss it.Footnote 53 The kissing of the katana was itself highly significant, since in the early church it was not only the remains of martyrs which were revered but the objects with which they had made contact, including possessions or instruments of execution.Footnote 54 This katana was later purchased from the executioner and, together with a cloth soaked in Navarrete's blood, was sent to the Dominican priory of San Pablo de Valladolid, Spain.Footnote 55 From a liturgical perspective, Ayala's kiss evoked the practice, dating back to the fourth century, of kissing the altar at mass. The altar was the focus of the eucharistic ritual, symbolic of Jesus and of the supernatural family of the church represented by the relics contained therein. In this case, the martyr's body was to become an altar, of both physical and spiritual sacrifice.

After a brief speech in which Ayala outlined their evangelizing mission, declared his ‘hope to deserve eternal life’ and promised the advent of more missionaries from Europe, he asked for some time for meditation.Footnote 56 In what seems an extraordinary request, indicating his control over events, and as if presiding over his own semi-liturgical sacrifice, he instructed his executioner to strike him once he had indicated that his prayer was finished by raising his hand. He was beheaded with one blow and ‘in this way triumphant he entered heaven’.Footnote 57 Similarly, Navarrete held ‘a cross in one hand, and in the other a rosary, and a candle, and from the beginning he had been quietly in a very deep contemplation, and then he raised his hand’; the first blow missed his neck and he fell to the ground and ‘looked at the sky, as if he was praying’.Footnote 58 The candle evoked the traditional meaning of the light of Christ and at least two were commonly placed on the altar; in this case the martyr's body. Traditionally a candle was also given at baptism and so the martyrs’ holding a candle at the point of their deaths likewise indicated a cyclical fidelity to their faith. The rosary, too, referenced the Dominican's Confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary (established in Nagasaki in 1609), as well as being symbolic of the private devotion of both men.Footnote 59

In New France, the act of martyrdom was also presented as a direct extension of the priest's role in the mass. This was made clear in the language of liturgical sacrifice used to describe Daniel's death as well as the circumstances of his death, which occurred during the raid shortly after the conclusion of mass. Ragueneau described the disposal of Daniel's body after he was shot with arrows and an arquebus:

The fire meanwhile was consuming the cabins; and when it had spread as far as the Church, the Father was cast into it, at the height of the flames, which soon made of him a whole burnt-offering. Be this as it may, he could not have been more gloriously consumed than in the fires and lights of a Chapelle ardente.Footnote 60

The fact that Daniel's body was literally thrown into the burning church was clearly dramatic in its symbolism, with his body consumed in the sacred space where the eucharist had been celebrated. His burning body was a vivid extension of the daily sacrifices of prayer and thanksgiving conducted there. These examples show that in the representation of the act of martyrdom itself, there was a fusion of inspired apostolic tradition and the institutional vocation of the priesthood.

Significantly, the reference to Daniel's death as a ‘burnt-offering’ was an expansion of Ragueneau's reflections in his private correspondence, where he wrote: ‘his naked body cast into the midst of the flames was so completely consumed that not even a bone was left: indeed, he could not have found a more glorious funeral pyre’.Footnote 61 Ragueneau's later comparison to a Chapelle ardente elaborated Daniel's martyrdom on the frontier not only as a ‘burnt offering’ to God but also as a more glorious commendation than was possible at the most exalted funerals of popes and monarchs.Footnote 62 Both accounts also recorded the effect of the sacrifice of their missionary martyrs. In this, the doctrinal assumptions that distinguished the Catholic confession become more apparent. The emphasis on the role of works in justification, saints and relics, echoed points of confessional dispute and asserted the Catholic perspective. For Catholics, salvation was a project of the universal communion of saints, with each individual, living and dead, playing a reciprocal part in God's plan of reconciliation. This belief helped to shape the way Catholics interpreted the role of the martyrs in missions.

Ragueneau viewed Daniel's martyrdom as a gift which would provide the mission with an intercessor: ‘He is the first of our Society who has died in this Mission of the Hurons … We hope that in Heaven all this country will have in him a powerful intercessor before God.’Footnote 63 This was especially significant in a mission which had previously had few ‘red’ martyrs. In 1639, some nine years prior to Daniel's martyrdom, the then superior of the Jesuits at Quebec, Paul Le Jeune, expressed his concern that it would appear a ‘sort of curse if this quarter of the world should not participate in the happiness of having contributed to the splendour of this [God's] glory’.Footnote 64 In addition to Daniel's role as an intercessor for the mission, the merits inherent in the act of martyrdom were also seen as having benefited souls in purgatory. In an apparition after his death, Daniel appeared ‘in a state of glory’ and was asked by the individual who saw him how ‘the divine goodness had permitted the body of his servant’ to be reduced to even less than ashes. The martyr replied that God had given beauty for his ashes in death, and by way of reward had ‘given me many souls which were in Purgatory, – who have accompanied my entrance into Heaven and my triumph there’. In his second apparition, Daniel ‘was seen to be present at an assembly that we held in regard to means for advancing the Faith in these countries, when he appeared, strengthening us with his courage, and filling us with his light, and with the spirit of God with which he was completely invested’.Footnote 65 According to Ragueneau, then, Daniel's martyrdom had a twofold supernatural power. In heaven, the suffering of his martyrdom merited the reward of freeing souls from purgatory, while on earth his intercessory role strengthened the missionaries in the evangelizing cause.

The references to relics and the burial of the martyrs’ bodies articulated the central meanings and purposes ascribed to the physical sacrifice. Traditionally relics were significant as symbols of the miraculous powers of healing and, in the wake of the Reformation, came even more to embody Catholic confessional identity. Trent affirmed that relics, like images, were physical representations of the intercessory powers available through the saints in heaven.Footnote 66 As we have already seen, Tertullian's maxim that the blood of martyrs is seed had a literal application, with all newly established church altars requiring the relics of both a martyr and a saint. The actual killing of Christians on terrain yet to be christianized therefore had a symbolic equivalence: it was a first step in establishing an altar on new ground.

The events which followed such martyrdoms were reportedly dramatic in their immediate effect on spectators. These effects were believed to reflect phenomena in the spiritual realm: the martyrs’ blood unlocked spiritual strongholds in missions, staking out the territory for Christ and dealing a tangible blow to the devil's dominion over the people previously in ‘darkness’. After the martyrdoms of Navarrete and Ayala, Orfanel recorded that Christian spectators, the executioners and ‘the renegades’ were all affected by the martyrdom of the missionaries: ‘[They] bathed their handkerchiefs and many papers in the blessed blood; and they cut their habits from them, and kept everything as great relics, saying, that by them one day they would be converted to the Lord.’Footnote 67 Even a sea burial did not prevent boats coming from Nagasaki ‘with hooks and nets to try to obtain the bodies’, an initially unsuccessful operation by local Christians which reportedly lasted for days.Footnote 68

In the case of the martyrdom of Navarrete and Ayala, the fate of their bodies was interpreted as a providential message from God about his vision for the church.Footnote 69 It was viewed as the fulfilment of a blood-red lunar eclipse the previous year, which Orfanel believed had signalled the beginning of the persecution of the priesthood in Japan.Footnote 70 The Jesuit and Franciscan martyrs executed in May 1617 had been disinterred in order to prevent their bodies being stolen by the Christians. Orfanel considered it an act of Providence that a martyred member of each order would be buried at sea together:

When the martyrs died, they opened the coffins of the other two martyrs, that as it was said before the guards had brought, and they put the body of the blessed Father fray Alonso Navarrete [Dominican] with that of the blessed Father Juan Bautista [Jesuit], and the body of Father fray Hernando [Augustinian] with that of Father fray Pedro de la Asunción [Franciscan]; And tying many stones to the coffins, they threw their bodies into the sea, where it seems God wanted to make a close fraternity between these four Orders.Footnote 71

The mission had been plagued at its outset with jurisdictional battles between the religious orders. The martyrdom of the four men, one from each order, was, in Orfanel's view, a message that underpinned God's vision for the church in Japan, in which missionaries overcame ‘the world’ and ‘the flesh’ of inter-religious pride and rivalry. Navarrete's body was paired with the Jesuit João Baptista, while Ayala's was paired with the Franciscan Pedro. In stressing the permanence of this collective sea burial, Orfanel was able to make the point that God had shown his people that he wanted to make a ‘close fraternity’ between the four religious orders. In a comparable way to Daniel's example in New France, the martyrdom of Navarrete and Ayala allowed them to join the church triumphant in heaven and benefit the church militant on earth.

Conclusion

Martyrdom represented not only one of the most ancient synergies of inspiration and institution but one of the most enduring. In the ideal, martyrs distilled the most fundamental of Christ's teachings on love, faith, leadership and sacrifice. Martyrs also modelled for other Christians, at the moment of their death, the fulfilment of the biblical promises about God's love, redemption and salvation. Through the examples of Navarrete, Ayala and Daniel, this article has demonstrated the influence of scriptural teaching on the way missionary martyrologists explained and interpreted the act of martyrdom. Missionary martyrs were presented as inspirational because they embodied the principle of sacrifice for others as the ultimate act of love, made new for a new generation. They were seen as good shepherds, reflecting a renewed apostolic model for the priesthood, relived in the context of early modern frontiers.

This article has also shown that the act of martyrdom was imbued with the meaning and symbolism associated with the Tridentine priestly vocation. The themes of their ministry shaped the accounts and infused their deaths with a sacramentality characteristic of their role. By the seventeenth century, the priesthood also reflected a distinctive force in the wider reformed Roman Catholic Church; combined with its expanding missions, this highlights the missionary character of the age. It was these themes that made them a still deeper source of inspiration for their brethren. Missionaries viewed martyrdom as a literal, semi-liturgical sacrifice, a logical extension of the priest's administration of the sacraments. In the case of Daniel, his body became a burnt offering in the very same church where he had just celebrated mass. The acts of worship and prayer which characterized the final moments of Navarrete and Ayala likewise prepared them for the final sacrifice of their lives to God.

The act of martyrdom was believed to have transformative effects which fulfilled specific needs in the mission communities. In New France, Daniel was seen as a much-needed intercessor. In Japan, Navarrete and Ayala were two examples of a long-awaited priestly constancy. The men were joined with their Jesuit and Franciscan counterparts in the permanence of a sea burial. In both cases, Orfanel and Ragueneau viewed the missionaries as inspirational for their respective missions and religious orders. In the still wider context of confessional conflict, the sacrifice of missionary martyrs likewise underlined the central contention of the Roman Catholic Church that it alone could lay claim to an unbroken apostolic lineage, made manifest in contemporary sacrifices across the world. These martyrs have since received institutional recognition in the Roman Catholic Church. Alonso Navarrete and Hernando Ayala were among the 205 Martyrs of Japan beatified by Pope Pius IX in May 1867, and Antoine Daniel was canonized by Pope Pius XI in June 1930. He was one of eight Jesuits killed in Canada who received this status. Thus these men were seen as martyrs; divinely inspired and worthy representatives of their institutional church.

Footnotes

I am very grateful for the feedback, support and encouragement of my doctoral supervisors, Kenneth Austin and Fernando Cervantes. They nurtured the ideas in this article and helped to bring them to fruition. The research was made possible by a PhD scholarship funded by the University of Bristol Alumni. I am also grateful to the two reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improvement. Scripture quotations in this article are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

1 Alfonso Navarrete Benito was born on 21 September 1571 in Logroño, Spain. A Dominican missionary priest originally based in the Philippines, Navarrete arrived in Japan in August 1611. He remained after the edict of expulsion in 1614 and was made vicar provincial in 1615. For these biographical details, see Cummins, J. S. and Boxer, Charles, The Dominican Mission in Japan (1602–1622) and Lope de Vega (Rome, 1963), 71; de Medina, Juan G. Ruiz, El martirologio del Japón, 1558–1873 (Rome, 1999).

2 Hernando Ayala (also Hernando de San José) was born in 1575 near Toledo, Spain. He entered the Augustinian order in 1593 and made his profession on 19 May 1594. He was chosen to go to the college of the order at the university of Alcalá de Henares. As a missionary, Ayala arrived in Japan in 1605. He founded an Augustinian monastery in Nagasaki in 1612 and was nominated as its prior. Ayala remained in Japan after the edict of expulsion in 1614. For a detailed biography and account of his martyrdom, see Hartmann, Arnulf, The Augustinians in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Marylake, ON, 1965), 43–73.

3 For a recent overview of the Catholic mission to Japan, see Ucerler, M. Antoni J., ‘The Christian Missions in Japan in the Early Modern Period’, in Hsia, Ronnie Po-chia, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions (Leiden, 2018), 303–43. The standard works in English on the development of anti-Christian policy and the mission to Japan remain Elison, George, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA, 1973); Boxer, Charles R., The Christian Century in Japan 1549–1650 (Lisbon, 1951).

4 Prior to 1614 there had been sporadic episodes of anti-Christian violence, of which the most famous is the martyrdom of twenty-six Christians in Nagasaki in 1597. For a recent analysis of this episode, see Hélène Vu Thanh, ‘The Glorious Martyrdom of the Cross: The Franciscans and The Japanese Persecutions of 1597’, Culture & History Digital Journal 6 (2017) [online journal]), at: <https://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2017.005>, accessed 19 May 2020; eadem, Devenir japonais. La Mission jésuite au Japon (1549–1614) (Paris, 2016). Also see Rady Roldán-Figueroa, ‘Father Luis Piñeiro S.J., the Tridentine Economy of Relics and the Defense of the Jesuit Missionary Enterprise in Tokugawa Japan’, ARG 101 (2010), 209–32; Timon Screech, ‘The English and the Control of Christianity in the Early Edo Period’, Japan Review 24 (2012), 3–40.

5 The Franciscan Pedro de la Asunción (b. c.1570) and the Jesuit João Baptista Machado de Távora (b. c.1580) were executed in Omura on 22 May 1617.

6 Tanaka is introduced in the account as a Dojuku (a term used in the Japan mission to refer to a type of lay catechist and preacher) to the martyred Jesuit João Baptista Machado de Távora; Tanaka was captured with João Baptista Machado on the Goto Islands but was not executed with him in May 1617. Tanaka's actions, including at the moment of his death, are not reported in detail in Orfanel's account which focuses principally on Navarrete and Ayala. Tanaka is referred to as ‘blessed Leon’, and from the time he is brought to be executed with Navarrete and Ayala is presented (albeit fleetingly) as a willing evangelist alongside the missionaries. For example, Tanaka was recorded as mirroring the actions of Navarrete and Ayala in his treatment of his executioners (‘y el bendito Leon con sus dos verdugos’): Jacinto Orfanel and Diego Collado, Historia eclesiástica de los sucesos de la Christiandad de Japón, desde el año de 1602 (Madrid, 1633), 78r. However, his actions are not given the same narrative weight or symbolism, given the focus of Orfanel's account: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 77v–78r, 79r–v.

7 Antoine Daniel was born on 27 May 1601 in Dieppe, France. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at Rouen on 1 October 1621, later studied theology at Clermont College in Paris, and was ordained in 1631. He crossed the Atlantic in the spring of 1632, joined the mission to the Huron in 1634 and began work the following year. In 1647, he was assigned to the village of Teanaostaiaë (also Teanaustayé): Tylenda, Joseph N., Jesuit Saints & Martyrs (Chicago, IL, 1998), 200–1; Pouliot, Léon, ‘Daniel, Antoine’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 1: 1000–1700 (Toronto, ON, and Laval, QC, 2003; first publ. 1966), online at: <http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/daniel_antoine_1E.html>, accessed 19 May 2020.

8 New France was a vast territory claimed by the French Crown which stretched from north-eastern Canada down to what is now the mid-western United States of America. This article uses the historical names ‘Huron’ and ‘Iroquois’ to retain a clear connection to the source material. For a substantive account of the Huron and their history, see Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, QC, 1976). For a recent overview of the mission in New France, see Dominique Deslandres, ‘New France’, in Hsia, ed., Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, 124–47; Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire. Les Missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (1600–1650) (Paris, 2003).

9 For an account of the Iroquois and their history, see Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992).

10 Jacinto Orfanel (also Pedro Orfanell Prades) was himself executed a few years later, during the ‘Great Martyrdom’ of Nagasaki on 10 September 1622: Orfanel and Collado, Historia. I am grateful to Fernando Cervantes and Diego Navarro-Tapia for their advice and assistance with my translations. I have modernized the original spelling for clarity.

11 Cummins and Boxer, Dominican Mission; Hartmann, Augustinians. For full references, see nn. 2 and 3 above.

12 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols (Cleveland, OH, 1896–1901; hereafter: JR). For a more recent transcription of the original texts, see Lucien Campeau, ed., Monumenta Novæ Franciæ, 9 vols (Rome, 1967–2003).

13 For a recent analysis of these ‘North American Martyrs’, see Anderson, Emma, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA, 2013). While martyrdom was not the focus of his work, Takao Abé has usefully compared the evangelization strategies and methods of the missions to New France and Japan in The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden, 2011); idem, ‘What Determined the Content of Missionary Reports? The Jesuit Relations Compared with the Iberian Jesuit Accounts’, French Colonial History 3 (2003), 69–83.

14 1 Cor. 13: 13; Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, CA, 2012; first publ. Munich, 1986).

15 The literature on this subject is vast, but key authorities include Frend, W. H. C., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965); Baumeister, Theofried, Die Anfänge der Theologie des Martyriums (Münster, 1980); von Campenhausen, Hans, Die Idee des Martyriums in der alten Kirche (Göttingen, 1936); Bowersock, G. W., Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995); more recently, Moss, Candida R., Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven, CT, 2012).

16 Tertullian actually wrote: ‘The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed’: Apology 55 (ANF 3: 50).

17 St Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) first suggested that God provided two ‘crowns’ of martyrdom, ‘white’ for the physical and spiritual suffering of confessors, and ‘crimson’ for bloodshed: see Cyprian, Ep. 10.5 (CSEL 3: 494–5); Clare Stancliffe, ‘Red, White and Blue Martyrdom’, in Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick and David Dumville, eds, Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, 1982), 21–46, at 32. For a helpful general introduction to the rich Christian tradition of martyrdom and its development over time, see Diana Wood, ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies, SCH 30 (Oxford, 1993); also Danna Piroyansky, ‘Thus may a man be a martyr’: The Notion, Language and Experiences of Martyrdom in Late Medieval England’, in Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer, eds, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c.1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007), 70–87.

18 For a comprehensive approach to Christian martyrdom in this context, see Brad S. Gregory's seminal Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 6; also Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). For a detailed analysis of Catholic martyrs in Tudor England, see Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002).

19 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 252.

20 Boxer, Christian Century, 448; Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2005; first publ. 1998), 208. More recent studies tend to cite higher estimates, including some 4,000 martyrs, from a baptized Kirishitan population of between 200,000 and 300,000 in the period 1614–40; for these figures, see Haruko Nawata Ward, ‘Women Martyrs in Passion and Paradise’, World Christianity 3 (2010), 47–66, at 52–3.

21 Ucerler, ‘Christian Missions in Japan’, 334; Liam Brockey, ‘Books of Martyrs: Example and Imitation in Europe and Japan, 1597–1650’, Catholic Historical Review 103 (2017), 207–23, at 210.

22 Simon Ditchfield has argued for a ‘decentering’ of Eurocentric perceptions of the Christian world and a reorientation of our historical frames of reference: ‘De-centering the Catholic Reformation: Papacy and Peoples in the Early Modern World’, ARG 101 (2010), 186–208, at 191, 187.

23 These themes appear in other contexts, for example the letters and writings of the English Cardinal William Allen, especially An apologie and true declaration of the institution and endeuours of tvvo English colleges [Rheims, 1581]; see also Rhiannon Teather, ‘Traitors, Invaders and Glorious Martyrs: Attitudes toward the Execution of Catholics in England, Japan, Paraguay and New France (c.1580–1650)’ (PhD dissertation; University of Bristol, 2019), 153–81.

24 Camilla Russell, ‘“Imagining the “Indies”: Italian Jesuit Petitions for the Overseas Missions at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century’, in Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci and Stefania Pastore, eds, L'Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Andriano Prosperi, vol. 2 (Pisa, 2011), 179–89, at 182.

25 A play loosely based on the story of Alonso Navarrete was penned by Lope de Vega: Cummins and Boxer, Dominican Mission, 28–46, 60–70; see also Carmen Hsu, ‘Martyrdom, Conversion and Monarchy in Los primeros mártires del Japón (1621)’, in Julia Weitbrecht, Werner Röcke and Ruth von Bernuth, eds, Zwischen Ereignis und Erzählung. Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit in (Berlin, 2016), 217–34. On Jesuit martyrological culture, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, 2008), 81–3, 120–7; Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 7, 227–32; Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 147–71.

26 Luke Clossey, The Early-Modern Jesuit Missions as a Global Movement, UC Berkeley: UC World History Workshop, Working Papers (2005), online at: <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h45m0jw>, last accessed 3 January 2021; Simon Ditchfield, ‘Martyrs on the Move: Relics as Vindicators of Local Diversity in the Tridentine Church’, in Wood, ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies, 283–94. Many relics were sourced from the Roman catacombs, as well as the ‘Golden Chamber’ of Cologne which contained those of St Ursula and her 11,000 Companions. The cult of the latter was spread around the world by the Jesuits in the 1540s; for a detailed account, see Hermann Crombach, Vita et martyrium S. Ursvlæ et sociarum undecim millium virginum, 2 vols (Cologne, 1647). For recent analysis, see Scott B. Montgomery, St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2010); Jaime Ferreiro Alemparte, La leyenda de las once mil vírgenes. Sus reliquias, culto e iconografía (Murcia, 1991); Simon Ditchfield, ‘St Ursula and her 11,000 Companions: A Global Microhistory of the making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion’, in Wietse de Boer, Vincenzo Lavenia and Giuseppe Marcocci, eds, La ghianda e la quercia. Saggi per Adriano Prosperi (Rome, 2019), 125–34.

27 Mathias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitæ profusionem militans, in Europa, Africa, Asia, et America contra gentiles, Mahometanos, Judæos, Hæreticos, impios, pro Deo, fide, ecclesia, pietate (Prague, 1675), especially 278–81, 531–3, for accounts of the martyrs featured in this article.

28 For a recent brief discussion of this work and its place in Jesuit martyrological discourse, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, ‘Mission Frontiers: A Reflection on Catholic Missions in the Early Modern World’, in Alison Forrestal and Seán Alexander Smith, eds, The Frontiers of Mission: Perspectives on Early Modern Missionary Catholicism (Leiden, 2016), 180–93, at 182–5.

29 Teather, ‘Traitors, Invaders and Glorious Martyrs’, abstract. For an analysis of the martyrological views of the early Jesuits, see also Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘“Ad militandum”: Sacrifice and the Jesuit Mode of Proceeding’, in Vincenzo Lavenia et al., eds, Compel People to come in: Violence and Catholic Conversion in the Non-European World (Rome, 2018), 29–48.

30 Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 105–11 (quotation at 109).

31 Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady (New York, 1982), 17–20; Early Dominicans: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Simon Tugwell, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ, 1982), 1–47.

32 John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 66–7.

33 Andrew Redden, ‘Not-So-Good Shepherds: Reluctant Jesuit Martyrs on the Seventeenth-Century Chilean Frontier’, in Forrestal and Smith, eds, Frontiers of Mission, 90–114, at 98–9.

34 Footnote Ibid. 99.

35 Catherine Ballériaux, Missionary Strategies in the New World, 1610–1690: An Intellectual History (New York, 2016), 12; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 246; The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. James J. Waterworth (London, 1848), 35.

36 Redden, ‘Not-So-Good Shepherds’, 100.

37 Matt. 16: 18–19; John W. O'Malley, Trent: What happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 19–20.

38 Footnote Ibid. 20–1.

39 Michael Mullett, The Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation in Early Modern Europe (London, 1984), 16–22.

40 ‘Ya vuestras Reverendísimas ven como esta Cristiandad se va acabando poco a poco, y así es menester dar buen ejemplo a estos Cristianos … Yo voy a Omura a confesar, y consolar aquellos Cristianos, porque ahora es buen tiempo, pues con la sangre fresca de los Mártires estarán más animados’: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 70v.

41 ‘[A]unque yo estaba determinado de no decir ninguna razón de las que nos movieron a ir (porque la principal que a mí me movió fue la obediencia que digo tengo dada en este caso) pero quiero dar una, y es, que algunos Cristianos habían murmurado que los Padres les persuadían a ellos que fuesen Mártires, y ellos huían las ocasiones’: ibid. 72r.

42 Prior to 1617, six Europeans (four Spaniards and two missionaries from Mexico and India) had been numbered among the twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki in 1597.

43 Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 72r, 79r.

44 Luke 22: 24–30.

45 ‘[C]omo ovejas en medio de los lobos’: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 72v.

46 ‘[E]ra el sentimiento y llanto grandísimo, semejante al de Los Cristianos de Epheso, cuando san Pablo se despidió dellos caminando al martirio, y diciéndoles, que no le habían de ver mas’: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 76r.

47 Paul Ragueneau to General Vincent Caraffa, 1 March 1649, in JR, 33: 261.

48 Footnote Ibid. 263.

49 Ragueneau, ‘Relation of 1648–9’, in JR, 34: 91; on the importance of ‘good shepherd’ imagery as applied to priests after the Council of Trent, see Richard Atherton, ‘The Catholic Priesthood: From Trent to Vatican II and beyond’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 1996), especially 29; available at Durham E-Theses Online: <http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5269/>, accessed 20 December 2020.

50 Geoffrey Preston, The Faces of the Church: Meditations on a Mystery and its Images (Edinburgh, 1997), 239.

51 Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 78v.

52 ‘[L]a qual el hizo, y luego les pusieron en orden para sacrifico, al Padre fray Alonso en medio, y a los dos lado sus santos compañeros, y los tres hincados de rodillas’: ibid.

53 Hartmann, Augustinians, 70.

54 Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL, 2015), 3.

55 For details, see Cummins and Boxer, Dominican Mission, 32 and n. 43.

56 ‘[E]stimamos la vida sobre todas las cosas, y el perderla ahora de nuestra voluntad es, porque por este camino esperamos alcanzar los bienes eternos’: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 78v–79r.

57 ‘[Y] hecho así, de un golpe le cortaron la cabeza, con que entró triunfante en el cielo’: ibid. 79r.

58 ‘El Padre fray Alonso tenía en una mano una Cruz, y en la otra el Rosario, y candela, y desde el principio había estado muy recogido en una profunda contemplación, y en levantando el la mano, levanto el verdugo la catana, y errando el golpe del pescuezo, se le dio tan terrible en la cabeza, que se la partió desde el colodrillo hasta las orejas; del cual, aunque cayó en tierra, levanto los ojos al cielo, como quien esta orando’: ibid. 79r.

59 On this confraternity, see Reinier H. Hesselink, ‘104 Voices from Christian Nagasaki: Document of the Rosario Brotherhood of Nagasaki with the Signatures of its Members (February 1622): An Analysis and Translation’, Monumenta Nipponica 70 (2015), 237–83; João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, ‘The Brotherhoods (Confrarias) and Lay Support for the Early Christian Church in Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34 (2007), 67–84.

60 JR, 34: 93.

61 JR, 33: 263.

62 A Chapelle ardente was an elaborate wooden structure decorated with many candles and coats of arms, which was frequently the focal point at a funeral. It also had the liturgical function of being the site where the deceased was granted absolution: Minou Schraven, Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration (Farnham, 2014), 1–2, 264.

63 JR, 34: 97; Robert Kolb, ‘God's Gift of Martyrdom: The Early Reformation Understanding of Dying for the Faith’, ChH 64 (1995), 399–411.

64 Le Jeune, ‘Relation, 1639’, in JR, 17: 13.

65 JR, 34: 97.

66 O'Malley, Trent, 243–4; Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (Philadelphia, PA, 2010), 114.

67 ‘Sus mismos matadores también con ser renegados bañaron los pañizuelos, y muchos papeles en la sangre bendita; y cortándoles de los hábitos, lo guardaron todo por grandes reliquias, diciendo, que por ellas algún día se habían de convertir al Señor’: Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 79v.

68 ‘[Y] de Nangasaqui fueron muchas embarcaciones con garfios, y redes a procurar sacar los cuerpos, que les duro muchos días’: ibid. For a discussion of the importance of relics in Jesuit narratives, see Roldán-Figueroa, ‘Father Luis Piñeiro’, 209–32.

69 Tanaka, who was martyred alongside Navarrete and Ayala, was also given a sea burial but this act was not afforded the same symbolism, which focused specifically on the martyrdom of the priesthood in Japan and the relationship between religious orders: see Orfanel and Collado, Historia, 79v.

70 Footnote Ibid. 80r.

71 ‘Muertos los Mártires abrieron los ataúdes de los otros dos Mártires primeros, que (como queda dicho) había traído, y pusieron el cuerpo del bendito P. fray Alonso Navarrete con el del bendito Padre Juan Bautista, y el del Padre fray Hernando con el del Padre fray Pedro de la Asunción; y amarrando a los ataúdes muchas piedras los arrojaron en la mar, donde parece que el Señor quiso hacer una estrecha hermandad entre estas cuatro Religiones’: ibid. 79v.

Ibid
Ibid
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