Today is the Feast of St. Paul Miki and Companions, the Protomartyrs of Japan.

On 5 February 1597 a group of 26 Catholics—six foreign Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and 17 Japanese members of the Third Order of St. Francis—were martyred by crucifixion. They were raised on crosses and pierced with spears, like the Lord they served.

Among these saints are St. Felipe de Jesús, the first canonized saint from Mexico, and St. Gonsalo Garcia, born to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother in what is today known as Vasai, an exurb of Mumbai, the first canonized saint from India.

The youngest martyr was a mere 12 years old: St. Louis Ibaraki, an altar boy and Franciscan tertiary. Accounts of the martyrdom say that, as onlookers shouted that today he would be in Heaven, his whole body strained upward and his face was enraptured with joy.

Some say the persecution of Japanese Christians worked. That Christianity and the Church are not and may never be what they might have been to Japan before the first blossoming of Faith was cut off and stomped down.

Yet when Japan reopened to the world in the 19th century, missionaries found believers who had been baptized, who knew their prayers, who were waiting for priest to come and teach them anew of Christ, to forgive their sins, to bring them the Eucharist.

If this is defeat, then how glorious will the final victory, when death is no more and God is all in all?

St. Paul Miki and Companions, Protomartyrs of Japan, pray for us. Pray that the seeds first scattered by St. Francis Xavier, the seeds watered with your blood and the blood of so many martyrs, might bear fruit for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.