Francisco of Saint Michael

Francisco of Saint Michael, known in Spanish as Francisco de San Miguel, was a Franciscan lay brother and one of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born in the town of La Parrilla in the province of Valladolid in Castile, Spain, in the mid-sixteenth century. He entered the Order of Friars Minor as a lay brother rather than as a candidate for the priesthood, taking the religious name Francisco de San Miguel. He belonged to the austere observant current of the Franciscans associated with the reform of Saint Peter of Alcántara. Lay brothers in that tradition devoted themselves to prayer, manual labor, and the domestic support of the friary. He was later sent to the Spanish Philippines, where Franciscans of the Province of San Gregorio Magno had established houses after the Spanish settlement of Manila.

In 1593 he was chosen to accompany Fray Pedro Bautista Blásquez and a small Franciscan party from Manila to Japan. The expedition combined diplomacy and evangelization: the friars were to thank Toyotomi Hideyoshi for earlier gestures toward the Spanish and to live among the Japanese according to the Franciscan rule of poverty. Francisco served the community in the Kyoto region as cook and gardener and assisted in the care of the sick and the poor, including people with leprosy. The Franciscans built a modest church and convent in the capital area and attracted Japanese converts, working in the same islands as the longer-established Jesuit mission, though not without tension between the two orders over method and jurisdiction.

The relatively open climate for Christianity collapsed after the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe off the Japanese coast in 1596. Hideyoshi, already wary of Spanish colonial power after the conquest of the Philippines and influenced by charges that missionaries were a vanguard of conquest, ordered a crackdown. Francisco was arrested with his Franciscan brethren in the Kyoto–Osaka region in late 1596. The prisoners had a portion of an ear cut off as a mark of infamy and were then forced to march in winter from the capital region to Nagasaki, a journey of hundreds of kilometers intended as a public warning against the Christian faith.

On 5 February 1597 Francisco of Saint Michael was crucified with twenty-five companions on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki. The group comprised six Franciscans, three Japanese Jesuits led by Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese lay Catholics, among them children. They were bound or nailed to crosses and killed by spear thrusts. Francisco died as an unordained lay brother, sharing the same sentence as priests and Japanese faithful. The twenty-six were beatified together by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862. The Catholic Church commemorates them on 6 February. Francisco is venerated especially by Franciscans and by the Church in Japan as one of that country’s protomartyrs.