Marega Papers are "important not only for the Church but for the whole of Japan"
Rome, January 30, 2014: An agreement has been signed between the Vatican Library
and the Japanese government to translate and inventory the Marega Papers which are
a compilation of around 10,000 documents chronicling the persecution of Christians
in Japan between the 17th and the 19th centuries.
This agreement "is important
not only for Catholics, but also from a historical point of view," said Teruaki Nagasaki,
Japanese ambassador to the Holy See. "I am very happy with this decision," he told
AsiaNews. "I think that in Japan many researchers are just waiting for these texts
to shed a better light on that period. And of course it is very nice that such collaboration
has emerged."
An Italian missionary, Rev Mario Marega, took the papers to Rome
in the 1940s, where they were left untouched until researcher Delio Proverbio found
them in the Vatican Archives in 2010.
For the prefect of the Vatican Apostolic
Library, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, they are "the largest collection of its kind." The
agreement to translate and inventory the documents was signed by the Vatican Library
and four Japanese institutions and will cover a six-year period.
The rice-paper
scrolls are so delicate that they can only be touched with special gloves. The first
one is dated 1719, and mentions the arrival of Christianity in Japan in 1549 thanks
to Jesuit missionaries.
As evidence of how far the Christian faith had spread
in the country, one of the documents mentions four Japanese noblemen who travelled
to Rome in 1585 to attend the election of Pope Sixtus V.
Obviously, many of
the documents refer to the persecution ordered by the Shogunate against the new community,
and describe in detail the martyrdom of 26 Christians in Nagasaki, which led to the
ban of Christianity in 1612.
Pope Francis recently mentioned Japanese Christians
in the general audience of 15 January. "That community," he said, "suffered a severe
persecution in the early seventeenth century. There were many martyrs, members of
the clergy were expelled and thousands of people were killed. Not a single priest
was left in Japan: they were all expelled. The community then went underground, keeping
the faith and prayer in hiding. And when a child was born, the father or the mother
baptized him, because we can all baptize. When, after about two and a half centuries
- 250 years later - the missionaries returned to Japan, thousands of Christians came
out of hiding and the church could flourish. It had survived by the grace of their
Baptism".
For Ambassador Nagasaki, these words "are very beautiful and very
important. We were very happy to hear the Pope's remarks concerning Japanese Christians!
Among other things, next year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the re-emergence
of the ' hidden Christians,' the kakure Kirishitan that Francis mentioned.
"The
Catholic community and Japan more generally will be very happy to receive a visit
from the pope, and this anniversary is very important. We know that he received many
invitations, but we hope all the same that he will visit Japan."