Blessed Angelo Orsucci, Lucchese martyr in 1600s Japan
In the wake of Missionary Martyrs Day on March 24, we present the life of one of them each day this week
Today, Blessed Angelo Orsucci, a native of Lucca, recounted by Lorenzo Maffei, of “Toscana Oggi”
It is difficult not to be fascinated by the figure of a missionary like Blessed Angelo Orsucci. Unknown to most, now little known even in his city and church of origin: Lucca.
Indeed, we are talking about a figure who lived between 1500 and 1600, at a time of fervor for the evangelization of the New World.
But while the history of what took place, even with violence, in South America is quite thorough, the peaceful and nonviolent evangelization that took place in Japan and much of East Asia should be reevaluated. And Blessed Orsucci does not fail in this.
Born in Lucca on May 8, 1573, the son of a wealthy and aristocratic city family, he entered the city’s Dominican convent of San Romano at a very young age. After his studies in Rome, showing great gifts, he chose not the quiet life of a man of letters and studies. Rather, he devoted himself to mission, looking to the area of the world at the time considered as far away as possible.
But let us go step by step. He left via Genoa in 1600, he was 27 years old. He never returned to Lucca or the Italian peninsula. He stopped first in Spain, where he learned the rudiments of Spanish, then embarked in Cadiz on June 25, 1601, for the Americas, after a stop in Guadeloupe, he landed in Mexico, October 4, 1601.
On February 4, 1602, from Acapulco, on the Pacific Ocean, he sailed to the Philippines where he arrived, after a stop at the Thief Islands, now the Mariana archipelago, on April 30, 1602.
He stayed several years in and around Manila, showing in his poverty and missionary afflatus, great spiritual and human gifts, as well as a great facility in learning the language of the local people.
For sixteen years he traveled extensively, both within the Philippines and also returning to Mexico and then reappearing in his beloved Philippines: he was also father provincial of the Dominicans.
It was after his final return to the Philippines, so far from his homelands, that in 1618 he realized his desire to go and take the Gospel to Japan: aware that he was putting his own life at risk.
In fact, Christianity in the Land of the Rising Sun, arrived peacefully with the Jesuit St. Francis Xavier in 1549, later also supported by Franciscans and Dominicans.
At first it was widely accepted and spread mainly in southern Japan in the area around Nagasaki. There was no military pressure on the territory by the Christians: either because Japan’s millennial structure provided for a large state and therefore military apparatus, or because in the wake of other experiences in Asia, the choice pondered by the missionaries was only that of witness and proclamation.
But in the late 1500s, the Emperor triggered a violent persecution of Christians whose presence undermined the “country structure.” Killings of missionaries and Japanese converts or even forced exile to other countries began.
Our Orsucci, then, when he left Manila for Nagasaki on July 12, 1618, knew that he was facing persecution and the risk of death. He lived for five months as a guest of a Japanese family converted to Christianity, disguised as a Spanish merchant. But then he was captured and kept in prison for four years until the day of his martyrdom.
During his missionary experiences, he also wrote several letters to family members in Lucca, and surprisingly, he also wrote some from imprisonment, probably with the help of some compliant guards.
From his written testimony flows his desire to give his life for Jesus; in one of these letters he wrote, “I am most happy for the favor Our Lord has done me and I would not exchange this prison for the greatest palaces and cardinalates of Rome.”
He died, burned alive, on September 10, 1622 in Nagasaki. He was beatified with others in 1867 by Pope Pius IX.
(Article by Lorenzo Maffei – Toscana Oggi )
Source and images
- Toscana Oggi