Martin of the Ascension

Martin of the Ascension (Spanish: Martín de la Ascensión), born Martín de Aguirre, was a Basque Franciscan friar of the Order of Friars Minor and one of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born in 1567 in Vergara (now Bergara) in Guipúzcoa, in the Basque Country of Spain. He entered the Franciscan order, taking the religious name Martín de la Ascensión, and is described in the tradition of the order as a priest of some learning who had taught before leaving for the overseas missions. Surviving evidence for his childhood, family, and the precise course of his studies is thin; later hagiography supplies pious detail that cannot always be checked against contemporary records.

In the last decade of the sixteenth century he went out to the Spanish colonial world in the Pacific. Like other Franciscans bound for East Asia, he passed through the Philippines, from which the order had opened a mission to Japan in 1593 under Pedro Bautista. Martín de la Ascensión was among the friars working in Japan in the mid-1590s, in a Christian community that had grown since the Jesuit arrival in the 1540s but that lived under the increasingly hostile policy of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had already issued an edict against Christianity in 1587. The Franciscans ministered in Kyoto and related centres, in a climate of suspicion toward Iberian missionaries.

The immediate occasion of the 1597 executions was the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe in 1596 and the subsequent report to Hideyoshi that Catholic missionaries served Spanish imperial designs. Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of Franciscans in the Kyoto–Osaka region and of Japanese Christians associated with them. Twenty-six people—six Franciscan friars (European and Mexican), three Japanese Jesuits including Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese laity, among them three boys—were condemned. They were mutilated, forced on a long overland march to Nagasaki, and crucified on Nishizaka Hill on 5 February 1597. Martín de la Ascensión died with that group. He was still a young man, about thirty years of age. The bodies were left on the crosses for a time; relics were later recovered and dispersed, and no single verified tomb for him is recorded here.

Pope Urban VIII beatified the twenty-six in 1627. Pope Pius IX canonized them on 8 June 1862. In the General Roman Calendar they are commemorated together on 6 February under the title of Saint Paul Miki and Companions (the liturgical date having been moved from the anniversary of the crucifixion because 5 February is the feast of Saint Agatha). Martín de la Ascensión is therefore venerated as a Catholic martyr and, with his companions, as a patron of Japan. His identity among the Nagasaki martyrs and his Franciscan vocation are firmly attested; much of the colour of his early life remains a matter of later tradition rather than of richly documented biography.