Counter-Reformation (16th century)
Feast: February 6
A Japanese Jesuit who preached his last sermon from the cross on which he was about to die — with twenty-five companions beside him.
On February 5, 1597, twenty-six Christians were marched through the streets of Nagasaki and crucified on a hill overlooking the harbor. Paul Miki was the most prominent among them — a Japanese-born Jesuit seminarian from a wealthy family, educated at the Jesuit college in Azuchi, and known as one of the best preachers in Japan. As he hung on the cross, waiting for the soldiers' lances, he preached. He told the crowd he forgave the men who had condemned him. He said he had no reason to hide the truth: he was dying because he had preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and he was grateful. The twenty-six included three Japanese Jesuits, six Franciscan friars (four Spanish, one from Mexico City, one from India), and seventeen Japanese laypeople — among them three boys aged twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. The youngest, Louis Ibaraki, reportedly sang psalms on the cross. After the lances came, the hill fell silent. The bodies were left on display for months as a warning. It did not work — Christianity survived underground in Japan for 250 years without priests, handed down by families in secret, until missionaries returned in the 1860s and found communities still keeping the faith.