Philip of Jesus

Philip of Jesus, known in Spanish as Felipe de Jesús and born Felipe de las Casas, was a Mexican Franciscan friar who died in 1597 among the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born in Mexico City, in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, in 1572, to Alonso de las Casas and Antonia Martínez, Spanish immigrants of some means. Later lives describe him as restless in youth and little inclined at first to religion. He entered the Franciscan novitiate at the convent of Santa Barbara in Puebla but left before profession. He then went to the Philippines, a Spanish colony tied to Mexico by the Manila galleon trade, and there took up commercial work rather than remaining in the cloister.

In Manila he underwent a change of heart and entered the Discalced Franciscans, taking the religious name Philip of Jesus. After profession his superiors decided that he should return to Mexico to be ordained, since he was not yet a priest. In 1596 he sailed on the galleon San Felipe, bound for Acapulco. A storm wrecked the ship on the Japanese coast at Urado in Tosa, on the island of Shikoku, in October of that year. Japanese officials confiscated the valuable cargo. In a climate already shaped by Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s edicts against Christianity, a remark attributed to someone from the ship—that Spanish missionaries prepared the way for conquest—helped bring on a harsh response. Franciscans working in the Kyoto and Osaka region, Japanese Christians associated with them, and others connected with the wreck were arrested.

The prisoners were taken overland toward Nagasaki. On 5 February 1597 twenty-six Christians were crucified on Nishizaka Hill above the harbor. The group comprised six Franciscan missionaries (Philip of Jesus among them), three Japanese Jesuits led by Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese lay Catholics, including three boys. Philip, still unordained and about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, was bound to a cross and killed with a lance. He was the only Mexican-born member of the band. News of the executions spread quickly through the Spanish Pacific, and in New Spain he was claimed as a native martyr almost at once.

The Twenty-six Martyrs were beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Pius IX in 1862. Philip of Jesus is venerated as the first Mexican-born saint of the Catholic Church and as patron of Mexico City. In Mexico his feast is kept on 5 February, the date of the crucifixion; in the General Roman Calendar the companions are commemorated on 6 February. Devotion to him has been especially strong in Mexico City, where churches, processions, and images of the crucified friar in Franciscan habit have long tied him to the city’s Catholic identity. Memorials stand at the Nagasaki execution site, and relics associated with the martyrdom have been honored both in Japan and in Mexico.