Saint Paul Miki and companions

Paul Miki was Japanese, the son of a samurai, and he was baptized at five. At twenty-two he joined the Jesuits. He studied in the order’s colleges, and there’s a detail that makes him instantly human: **he struggled with Latin**. On the other hand, he studied Buddhist customs in depth, enough to hold debates with the scholars of his country and convince many Japanese to become Christians. He could never be ordained a priest, for a trivial and insurmountable reason: in Japan there was no bishop who could do it. Christianity in Japan had been tolerated for a while, then in 1587 the powerful Toyotomi Hideyoshi changed his mind and ordered the expulsion of foreign missionaries. Hostility exploded in 1596, after the incident of a Spanish galleon: Christians were considered traitors. In December of that year Paul Miki was arrested along with two other Japanese Jesuits, six Spanish friars and their seventeen local disciples, Franciscan tertiaries. All of them had their left ear cut off. They were taken to the prisons of Kyoto and then to Nagasaki, where they were crucified on the hill of Tateyama on February 5, 1597. There were twenty-six of them: Japanese and Spanish, Jesuits and Franciscans, religious and lay, all on the same hill. Pope Pius IX proclaimed them saints together. If your name is Paul, your days are January 25 or June 29, but today it’s worth remembering this Paul, who came from very far away. A young man who couldn’t manage to learn Latin and knew Buddhism better than his teachers did. Faith, when it really arrives, speaks the language of home.