In the same year the Governor of the Philippines called a Congress of local officials and ecclesiastics, amongst whom it was agreed that to send missionaries to Japan was to send them directly to death, and it was thenceforth resolved to abandon Catholic missions in that country.
Secret missions and consequent executions still continued until about the year 1642, when the Dutch took Tanchiu—in Formosa Island—from the Spaniards, and intercepted the passage to Japan of priests and merchants alike. The conquest of Japan was a feat which all the artifice of King Philip IV.ʼs favourites and their monastic agents could not compass.
In 1862, during the Pontificate of Pius IX., 620 missionaries who had met with martyrdom in Japan, in the 17th century, were canonized with great pomp and appropriate ceremony in Rome.
[1] Now the suburb of Paco. Between 1606 and 1608, owing to a rising of the Japanese settlers, their dwellings in Dilao were sacked and the settlement burnt.
[2] Portugal was forcibly annexed to the Spanish Crown from 1581 to 1640.
[3] Philip II.ʼs persecution of religious apostates during the “Wars of the Flanders” was due as much to the fact that Protestantism was becoming a political force, threatening Spainʼs dominion, as to Catholic sentiment.
[4] Religious intolerance in Spain was confirmed in 1822 by the New Penal Code of that date; the text reads thus: “Todo él que conspirase directamente y de hecho á establecer otra religion en las Españas, ó á que la Nacion Española deje de profesar la religion Apostolica Romana es traidor y sufrirá la pena de muerte.” Articulo 227 del Código Penal presentado á las Cortes en 22 de Abril de 1821 y sancionado en 1822.”
[5] “Hist. Gen. de Philipinas,” by Juan de la Concepeion Vol. III., Chap. viii.
[6] This hospital was rebuilt with a legacy left by the Gov.-General Don Manuel de Leon in 1677. It was afterwards subsidized by the Government, and was under the care of the Franciscan friars up to the close of the Spanish dominion.