Friends of Ignatius: Blessed Julian Nakaura

There are a lot of famous Jesuit saints, many of whom you know by just one name: Ignatius, Xavier, Canisius, Gonzaga, the list goes on. But there are countless holy Jesuits (and other Ignatian-inspired women and men of faith) whose incredible stories aren’t as well-known. Despite their lower profiles, their lives of heroic virtue can inspire us today as we seek to follow Christ more closely. So we asked the writer Meg Hunter-Kilmer to introduce us to 10 of these “friends of Ignatius.”

Hunter-Kilmer is a renowned American Catholic writer whose work on saints has been featured in her books “Saints Around the World” and “Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness.” She picked 10 women and men from the wide Ignatian family whose causes for sainthood have officially been opened.

Each essay in this series, which will run monthly, is accompanied by an original artwork of the featured friend of Ignatius.

Blessed Julian Nakaura

Bl. Julian Nakaura spent his adolescence feted by the most powerful men in Rome.

He spent the rest of his life in hiding, in poverty and in fear.

He’d appreciated the former, but the latter? That was worth dying for.

Julian Nakaura (Japan, 1567-1632) was the son of a Christian samurai lord and his devout wife. Raised by his mother after his father’s death when Nakaura was just a toddler, the boy entered seminary at only 12. He was very early in his formation when it was decided that a group of young Japanese Christians should be brought to Italy in order to increase European support of the Japanese missions. Fourteen-year-old Julian was among those selected, beginning a three-year journey to Rome that lasted from February 582 to March 1585 and was filled with seasickness and seemingly endless journeys, with terrifying storms and nights that all aboard thought would surely end in shipwreck, with dangerous ports and forays into deadly jungles.

Artwork by Emily Sherlock, oil on wooden panel

Finally they were almost there, but only three days before their arrival in Rome Julian contracted malaria. When the group assembled the day after their arrival in order to make their way to the Vatican for their long-awaited audience with the Holy Father, Julian was in the throes of his illness, suffering from extreme fatigue and high fevers. But he refused to stay in his room and recuperate. After all he’d been through, nothing would keep him from meeting the pope.

Pope Gregory XIII by Bartolomeo Passarotti (public domain)

When Pope Gregory XIII heard of the young seminarian’s precarious health, he invited Julian to a private audience so he could be spared the longer audience the rest of the party would have. Julian was brought to the Holy Father before the formal audience began. There, Pope Gregory embraced him, tears running down his cheeks as he marveled at the filial love of this desperately ill child from the other side of the world. Pope Gregory then blessed Julian and encouraged him to go back and rest. Obediently, Julian did just that.

Though the Holy Father soon fell ill himself, he continued to inquire after Julian’s health until his own death a week later. Julian’s illness prevented him from attending the coronation of Pope Sixtus V, but he was able to meet with the new pontiff several times before the delegation began their return trip to Japan. And in between papal audiences, the four Japanese boys were swarmed by mobs of adoring fans who had never seen an East Asian person and were fascinated by them. They met the king of Spain and were wined and dined by the wealthiest families in Southern Europe. It would have been beyond easy to let such adulation go to his head, but Julian kept his eyes fixed on Jesus and on the vocation he was sure he’d been given. Rather than stay in Europe as the darling of every court, Julian began the arduous journey home to serve his people as a priest.

But while Julian had been in good health until the very end of the journey to Rome, the return voyage was something else. He was desperately ill again and again, but still he persevered in his journey home — his journey to serve his people. After the group finally returned home to Japan in 1590, they were surprised to find that the region where so many had become Catholic was now experiencing increasing persecution of Catholics, beginning with the 1587 ban on Christianity. Rather than being celebrities, as they had been in Rome, the young seminarians were under threat — a threat they had never imagined when they’d left a country with hundreds of thousands of Catholics in it.

But Julian wasn’t put off by this new threat; he officially entered the Jesuit order, beginning nearly 20 years of preparation for ordination to the priesthood — formation that was plagued by spies and informers and often left the seminarians scattered through the forest in hiding from the authorities.

When he was finally ordained at age 32, Fr. Nakaura was able to serve in relative freedom for six years. Persecution made things difficult, then nearly impossible after the government of Japan banned all foreign missionaries in 1614. Though he knew that torture and certain death awaited him, Fr. Nakaura remained in Japan with 26 other Jesuit priests. Like them, he was unwilling to leave Japan without the sacraments. Unlike many of them, his Japanese features enabled him to remain undercover for many years.

He spent nearly two decades on the run, always aware that one wrong move could be the death of him. He was an undercover priest, disguised in lay clothes and regularly fleeing across the channel to sparsely populated islands while he waited for trouble to blow over. But though his defection from the priesthood could have won him honor and wealth unlike any he’d known since his time in Rome, Fr. Nakaura continued to pour himself out for the God who had poured out his blood for him, for all Japan, for all the world.

When he was finally captured, Fr. Nakaura had been a priest for 25 years, nearly 20 spent in hiding. Where many European priests survived for only weeks, Fr. Nakaura made it almost two decades. Two decades of hiking, of hiding, of fleeing, of fearing. And so when he was arrested, he did not falter. When he was told that his superior Fr. Christovaõ Ferreira (of “Silence” fame) had apostatized, he remained unmoved. The God who had held him fast through undercover seminary and persecuted priesthood, who had taken him safely to Rome and back, who had kept him humble amid all the adulation and kept him faithful amid all the threats — this God would be with him through torture and death and beyond.

St. Paul Miki and Companions, artist unknown (public domain). Fr. Nakaura was martyred on the same hill that St. Paul Miki and his companions had been killed 35 earlier.

So when they made him climb the hill where St. Paul Miki and his companions had been murdered 35 years before, Fr. Nakaura ignored the agony of trudging up the hill on feet that could barely walk after so many years of arduous service. The young man who had dragged himself out of bed despite a high fever to meet the pope now dragged himself up the hill to meet his God. He wasn’t cowed by the pain; instead, when he reached the top, he looked at his executioners and proclaimed defiantly, “I am Julian Nakaura who went to Rome.”

A 1633 illustration of “the pit” torture method (public domain)

Try though they might, they would never rob him of his dignity. Even when they hung him upside down sealed in a pit filled with human waste, Nakaura clung to Jesus. “I accept this great suffering for the love of God,”1 he said — his last words, but they could have been spoken at any time in his long and difficult life. When he struggled to persevere on his interminable voyage to Rome; when he was admired, but perhaps more as a sideshow than as a man; when he was desperately ill again and again on the return trip; when his ordination was delayed; when he was sent into hiding, either as a seminarian or as a priest; when his companions were forced into exile and he was left with so little community in the midst of an unimaginably difficult vocation. Always, “I accept this great suffering for the love of God.” Though he might have chosen a far easier life, Jesus was worth it all.

And so Julian Nakaura who went to Rome, who was honored and lauded, who could have had an easy life of comfort, Julian died a horrible death — a glorious death — a meaningful death. And though thousands knew his name in his life, now it will echo down through the ages as generation after generation pray, “Bl. Julian Nakaura, pray for us.”

1 https://www.jesuits.global/saint-blessed/blessed-julian-nakaura/

Meg Hunter-Kilmer is a missionary and storyteller who travels the world telling people about the fierce and tender love of God. She is the author of four books about Scripture and the saints and currently works as a campus minister at the University of Notre Dame. When she’s not obsessively googling obscure saints, trying to convince people to read Scripture, or driving appalling distances while listening to audiobooks on double speed, she loves watching the Olympics and spending time with her nieces, nephews and godchildren.

Emily Sherlock is a Toronto-based artist. Her favorite subjects are portraits and figures, which she explores in various mediums, from watercolor to oil. In her portraits and figurative work, she frequently explores themes of isolation and longing. Emily teaches art classes for adults and finds the experience very rewarding. You can find examples of her artwork on her Instagram account @emilysherlockart.

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