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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:
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.
Sin and forgiveness. Curiously, however, at that same academic presentation on December 12 at the Gregorian, Kawamura’s conference was followed by that of another scholar of the subject, Adelino Ascenso, a Portuguese missionary in Japan, who approached the question of apostasy from an opposite perspective.
In fact, right from the title of his conference Ascenso spoke of “conflict and reconciliation” instead of sin and forgiveness.
He took as a paradigm the story of the Jesuit Rodrigo in the famous novel by Shusaku Endo “Silence,” recently made into a film by Martin Scorsese.
Rodrigo too - Ascenso explained - abjured by treading on the “Fumie,” but reconciled himself with that action of his by interpreting it as identification with a “weak” and “fragile” Jesus, entirely different from and more true to life than the “heroic” Jesus brought in by the first missionaries in Japan in deference to the “stereotypes” of Western Catholicism.
It is no mystery that this change of paradigm - under the banner of so-called “inculturation” - is today upheld by large sectors of the Church and by Pope Francis himself, as seen in the discussion that accompanied the release of the film by Martin Scorsese:
But it is all too easy to intuit that such a paradigm - much less Protestantism, as Kawamura pointed out - could ever have had the power to generate an “exceedingly Catholic” miracle like that of the “hidden Christians.”