Pedro Bautista Blásquez

Pedro Bautista Blásquez was born in 1542 in the village of San Esteban del Valle in the province of Ávila, in Castile, Spain. He entered the Order of Friars Minor and was ordained to the priesthood. After a period of Franciscan life in Spain he was assigned to the missions of New Spain, where he worked in Mexico during the later sixteenth century. From there he was sent onward to the Philippines, which served as the principal Spanish base for evangelization in East Asia. In the islands he held offices of trust among the Franciscans and gained a reputation for personal austerity, preaching, and the care of the sick and poor.

In 1593 he was selected to head a Franciscan embassy dispatched by the Spanish governor of the Philippines, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the military ruler of Japan. The embassy combined diplomacy with missionary aims: it sought protection for Spanish shipping and subjects and permission for the friars to live and work in Japan, where Jesuit missionaries had been present since the mid-sixteenth century. Hideyoshi received the party and allowed the Franciscans to remain. Pedro Bautista, as superior, founded residences and churches in Kyoto (then called Miyako), Osaka, and Nagasaki. The friars emphasized ministry to the poor and to people afflicted with leprosy and gathered a community of Japanese converts and Franciscan tertiaries. For several years the mission operated with a degree of official tolerance, even though Hideyoshi had earlier issued edicts against Christianity.

That tolerance collapsed after the Spanish galleon San Felipe was wrecked on the Tosa coast in 1596. Reports that a ship's officer had described Catholic missionaries as forerunners of Iberian conquest reached Hideyoshi and inflamed his distrust of the Spanish friars, whom he distinguished from the longer-established Jesuits. He ordered the arrest of the Franciscans in the capital region. Pedro Bautista and his companions were taken into custody, subjected to public humiliation—including the cutting of a portion of an ear—and compelled to make the long overland journey to Nagasaki as a warning to others. On 5 February 1597 they were crucified on Nishizaka Hill above Nagasaki harbor. The group numbered twenty-six: six Franciscans (Pedro Bautista among them as their superior), three Japanese members of the Society of Jesus, including the preacher Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese lay Catholics, three of them boys in their early teens. They were bound to crosses and killed with spears. Pedro Bautista died in his mid-fifties.

The twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki were beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Pius IX on 8 June 1862. In the General Roman Calendar they are commemorated on 6 February under the title of Saint Paul Miki and Companions, and they are venerated as patron saints of Japan. Pedro Bautista Blásquez is remembered in Franciscan hagiography, in his native San Esteban del Valle, and in the Catholic communities of the Philippines and Mexico, as a missionary superior, an envoy between the Spanish Philippines and Japan, and a martyr of the first great persecution of Christians in that country.