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The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume 32, 1640 / Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century. cover

The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume 32, 1640 / Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 41: Chapter XXXI The state of affairs in Japon; and the martyrdom of father Fray Luis, Fray Mincio de la Cruz, Fray Pedro de Sancta Maria, and some other persons of the tertiary order of St. Dominic.
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About This Book

This volume concludes a Dominican provincial history that chronicles missionary work in the Philippine archipelago and adjacent regions. It traces the lives and labors of several friars, describing conversions, reported miracles and visions, emergency baptisms amid epidemics, internal elections and administrative matters, and the physical and spiritual hardships of mission life. It records escalating persecutions in Japan, orders for clergy expulsion, clandestine ministry, and many instances of suffering and martyrdom. The text is accompanied by editorial annotations, bibliographical notes, and facsimiles of maps and signatures that help anchor the narrative in contemporaneous documentary sources.

Chapter XXXI

The state of affairs in Japon; and the martyrdom of father Fray Luis, Fray Mincio de la Cruz, Fray Pedro de Sancta Maria, and some other persons of the tertiary order of St. Dominic.

[Besides father Fray Luis, father Fray Francisco de Sancta Maria, and brother Fray Bartholome Laurel,37 his companion in the Order of St. Francis, were captured, together with their landlords and others in their house. The bitterness of the persecution increased, and the ministers of the gospels went out into the fields, ascended the mountains, and hid themselves in the caves of the earth. Father Fray Lucas del Espiritu Sancto had no food for forty days except some boiled roots. The Christians were forbidden to assemble, and were brought in scores before the ministers of Satan, to recant or suffer martyrdom. The number of the holy martyrs cannot be counted. The poor were driven out from their houses, and were compelled to suffer the rigors of winter, from which many of them died. The persecution came to be so severe that this year of 1627 was adorned with martyrs. On the sixteenth or seventeenth of August, eighteen Christians of all ages and conditions received the palm of martyrdom, among them father Fray Francisco de Sancta Maria. Among those executed were some children of three and five years of age. Details are given of the martyrdoms of a number of Japanese, with the horrible tortures which were inflicted upon them. Father Fray Luis gave the habit to some of the Japanese who were confined with him; and on July 29, 1627, the father and the nine professed, and three poor women who rejoiced that the time had come when they were to be freed from their leprosy, were executed by burning at the stake.]