Saint Magdalene of Nagasaki is a Japanese martyr, patron saint of the Augustinian Recollect Secular Fraternity. Her life story, her testimony in death and her faith are today a ray of light for many people, so many years later.
They went these most holy men
To Japan led by supreme desire,
Inspiring weak hearts
With the arm of God and a willing hand.
The Japanese receive them not as strangers
And with them in approaching martyrdom
Such is the desire that they proliferate,
That thousands go to God
Making of such souls a thousand altars.
The person who wrote these verses is a Spanish woman from the seventeenth century, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto. They form part of her poetic piece, The relation of the feasts for the Japanese Martyrs, which makes reference of the twenty-six martyrs crucified in Nagasaki on the 5th of February in 1597. It is possible to think that is she had received news about the young tertiary martyr Magdalene, she would have dedicated to her one of her most enlightening poems.
Whilst it is does not seem to be the case, Magdalene of Nagasaki was not a passive woman who in order that she would better able to love chose to be killed. Her behavior was always dynamic. She chose to be the one who loves in order to receive the prize of being loved. In this way we see how she how she put on the habit of the third Order of the Augustinian Recollects, with its following obligations and promises, precisely so that she would exercise an active apostolate as a Catechist; a task that she maintained with singular efficiency and energy, without sparing any necessary effort. There is also the impulse of character which operates in order that years later she would hand herself over to her persecutors. In another way, her behavior throughout the martyrdom is impressively dynamic.
If there was a sign of a common characteristic of the peculiarity of the Japanese people it would be their capacity of incorporation. The message of Westernized Christianity, notwithstanding its purely Eastern roots, could and did find a fully appropriate place with the Japanese spirit, evidently impermeable to the western world.
The blood of so many Japanese martyrs, men and women alike, necessarily has to contribute so that the Augustinian “City of God” would be extended though wide territories from this eastern country which is so close to the western countries politically, socially and technologically.
But the message of Magdalene of Nagasaki, in that of Catechist – which is to say Apostle – amongst her countrymen and women, is maybe that she is notable still more in this task of evangelization close to her own people. It is precisely this consideration when brings the accusation of the mea culpa of passivity. For save in some honorable exceptions which always opposes this type of generalization, it would seem as if many Tertiaries and Catechists have fallen into a type of paralysis that can lead us for many years into a comfortable religious routine, more attentive to sentimentality than sensibility, to the outer appearance than the foundations.
It is probably necessary to make a serious reflection about the actual depreciative use of concepts like “charity”, “apostolate”, “virginity”, “humility”, “heroism”, and the convenience to underline what is positive in these values only when they have a function or meaning for us. Magdalene of Nagasaki lived these values from the perspective of spiritual salvation for her and her people.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- 1. 1584-1632: The First Augustinian martyrs: Francis of Jesus and Vincent of St. Anthony
- 2. 1632-1637: The fire continues: Martin of Saint Nicholas and Melchior of Saint Augustine
- 3. Magdalene
- 4. The last act
- 5. The world in which she lived
- 6. The martyr, for St. Augustine
- 7. A very large process
- 8. Recollect or Dominican? A disputed Saint
- 9. The Augustinian Recollect Secular Fraternity
- 10. What does Saint Magdalene tell us today?
- 11. A life of traveling around, to die singing
