Paper short abstract:

My aim is to analyze the emergence of a narrative of providential features and legitimization purposes in the midst of the Jesuit province of Japan that dealt on the outcome of Tokugawa's persecutions of Christianity in Japan from the early 1630s to 1650.

Paper long abstract:

During the rule of Tokugawa Iemitsu the Jesuits still present in Japan experienced an aggravation of the conditions under which they provided spiritual assistance to Japanese Christians. It became increasingly difficult to rely on Japanese Christians' networks for the support of the Jesuits living in secrecy on the islands, as well as on the financial backing from the Portuguese merchants of Macao that came to Nagasaki every year. When it became clear that the Society of Jesus couldn't provide a response that was able to meet the challenges of Japanese persecutions (prison, torture, death, and even apostasy of the missionaries) and that it wouldn't be able to renew the presence of its members on the islands, Jesuits from the province of Japan devised a narrative of self-legitimacy aimed at promoting the expectancy of a general turn of events, while at the same time reinforcing the special ties that linked the Society to the conversion of the archipelago.

Drawing from topoi of Biblical texts and historical models of Ancient Christianity, these Jesuits generated a series of accounts that pointed to the providential delivery of Japanese Christians and the Restoration of its Church, on the one hand, and to the role that the Society of Jesus would play in that event (either through the intercession of Jesuit saints, such as Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola, or through the agency of its missionaries), on the other hand. In this paper, my aim is to analyze the several Jesuit accounts of martyrdom and of divine intervention concerning the missionaries of Japan (such as Sebastião Vieira, Marcello Mastrilli, Mateo Cebrián) and to outline the shifting strategies through which the Jesuits tried to accommodate several unrelated events in an underlying narrative of the redemption of the Church of Japan.