St. Felipe de Jesús

Felipe de Jesús de las Casas was born around 1572 in Mexico City, then part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. He grew up in a family with a tradition of civic and religious life; his father is sometimes identified as a physician. As a young man, Felipe was known for a restless and somewhat worldly temperament, and he left home at least once to travel to the Philippines, apparently with uncertain motives. After an early attempt to enter religious life did not take, he eventually joined the Franciscan Order, reportedly while still in Manila, and was professed as a friar in the Order of Friars Minor. He later returned briefly to Mexico before heading back to the Philippines to continue his formation. In late 1596, Felipe set sail from Manila aboard the San Felipe as part of a Spanish trading expedition bound for Mexico. According to Franciscan and Japanese accounts, a severe storm drove the ship off course and it put in at the port of Shiki (Urado) on the Japanese island of Shikoku. There, the arrogant behavior of the pilot and the cargo's commercial value attracted the attention of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the ruler of a Japan increasingly hostile to Christianity. Hideyoshi accused the friars of being spies for an imagined Christian invasion, and he ordered the execution of those aboard who were in religious life. Along with Franciscan confreres, a Dominican, and Japanese catechists and lay faithful, Felipe was arrested, subjected to a forced march across Japan, and brought to Nagasaki in early 1597. On February 5, 1597, he and the others were crucified on a hillside in Nagasaki, in an event that became known as the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan. Felipe was the youngest of the Franciscan friars among the group, and tradition identifies him as the one who preached briefly to the crowd from the cross. Their deaths, witnessed by a large number of Christians, were reported in letters written by survivors and later sent to the Franciscan and Dominican provinces in the Philippines and Mexico. Felipe and his companions were beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Pius IX on June 8, 1862. The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan are commemorated jointly on February 5 in the General Roman Calendar. In Mexico, Felipe is honored as the country's first native-born saint, and he is widely invoked as a patron of Mexico City, where a major thoroughfare and parish bear his name. A persistent legend holds that a dried fig tree in his family's Mexico City home reportedly bloomed on the day of his martyrdom, a story passed down in hagiographic tradition though difficult to verify independently. His brief life and sudden death in a foreign land made him a symbol of the missionary reach of the early Catholic Church from the New World to Asia.