Ōura Cathedral

Why Go

The church that was built for foreigners and answered by Japanese Catholics

Ōura is the hinge of Catholic Nagasaki. Everything before it is martyrdom and suppression; everything after it is the rebuilding of a church that had gone almost three centuries without clergy. The building itself is small, white, and plain by European standards, and that is not the reason to come. The reason is what happened inside it one month after it opened, and the fact that the men who built it had already decided to name it for the twenty-six people killed on the hill it faces.

Built in 1864, answered in 1865

The treaty ports opened Nagasaki to foreign residents, and priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society came with them. Father Louis Furet acquired land at Minamiyamate in 1862. Father Bernard Petitjean arrived in August 1863, and Father Joseph Marie Laucaigne followed. The church was finished at the end of 1864 and dedicated on February 19, 1865. It was built for the foreign settlement, because Christianity was still forbidden to Japanese people, and it was dedicated to the twenty-six killed at Nishizaka in 1597, whom Pius IX had canonized in 1862. It was set on its hill facing that site.

On March 17, 1865, a group of about fifteen people from Urakami came in. Accounts of the day record that they asked where the statue of the Virgin Mary was, and that one of them, Yuri Sugimoto, a midwife from Hamaguchi-machi, told Petitjean that their hearts were the same as his. What Petitjean found was not a handful of survivors. Over the following months it became clear that thousands of people in the villages around Nagasaki and on the islands had kept a Christian identity through the whole period of the ban, organized among themselves, without priests, sacraments beyond baptism, or contact with Rome.

What followed was not relief. In 1867 the Urakami Christians told their village headman that they intended to bury their dead as Catholics. Sixty-eight were arrested and tortured. The Meiji government that came to power the next year kept the prohibition, and more than three thousand people from Urakami were deported to domains across Japan, where many died. The edict boards banning Christianity were not taken down until 1873, and then largely because the persecution was damaging Japan's standing abroad. The exiles came home that year to a burnt-out village. Only then does the rebuilding of Catholic Nagasaki actually begin.

A small three-nave church with a Gothic front of three gables, a slim octagonal spire, and pointed windows, built in wood and finished in white plaster. It was designed under the direction of the missionaries and built by Japanese carpenters, and it reads as a European plan executed with local technique. A statue of Our Lady stands in the niche above the central door. The interior keeps ribbed vaulting in wood and colored glass, some of it French. The scale is domestic rather than monumental, which is the honest scale of a mission church built for a few hundred foreign residents.