Michael de Aozaraza

Michael de Aozaraza, known in Spanish as Miguel de Aozaraza, was a Basque Dominican priest and missionary who died in the anti-Christian persecutions of seventeenth-century Japan. He was born in 1598 in Oñati (Oñate) in Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country of northern Spain. He entered the Order of Preachers, completed the usual Dominican formation in philosophy and theology, and was ordained a priest. He was then assigned to the missionary territories of the Spanish East Indies and went to the Philippines, which served as the principal base for Catholic work in East Asia.

By the 1630s the Tokugawa shogunate had forbidden Christianity, expelled foreign clergy, and punished Japanese believers who would not recant. Aozaraza volunteered for the clandestine Japan mission nonetheless and succeeded in entering the country in secret. He ministered to remaining Christians, administered the sacraments, and cooperated with other Dominican missionaries working in hiding.

He was discovered, arrested, and tortured in an effort to make him apostatize. Condemned to death, he was executed by tsurushi (suspension head-downward in a pit) at Nagasaki in late September 1637, in the same persecution that claimed the Filipino layman Lorenzo Ruiz and several other Dominican priests and Japanese Christians. He did not recant.

Pope Pius IX beatified him on 7 May 1867 among a large group of martyrs of Japan. Pope John Paul II canonized him on 18 October 1987 together with Lorenzo Ruiz and fourteen companions (the Sixteen Martyrs of Japan). Their liturgical commemoration is 28 September. Surviving records concentrate on his missionary work and martyrdom; little independent detail is known of his family or his years before leaving Spain.