Oura Catholic Church　(大浦天主堂)

Oura Catholic Church
This Roman Catholic church in Nagasaki was one of the first churches to be established after the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the legalization of Christianity. It was founded in 1864 by French Missionary Bernardo Petitjean, and was dedicated to the 26 Martyrs of Japan and faces the hill they were martyred on.
This was also the church that discovered the hidden Christians that retained faith through the Edo Period. Shortly after the completion of the cathedral, on March 17, 1865, Father Petitjean saw a group of people standing in front of the cathedral indicating that they wanted inside. As the priest knelt at the alter, an elderly woman from the group approached him and said “We have the same feeling in our hears as you do. Where is the statue of the Virgin Mary?”. Petitjean soon discovered that these people came from the nearby village of Urakami and were actually descendents of early Japanese Christians who had went into hiding after the Shimabara Rebellion in the 1630s. To commemorate this even, a white marble statue of the Virgin Mary was imported from France and erected in the church. The ban on Christianity was officially lifted in 1873, after 250 years of persecution.



Statue of the Virgin Mary
It is the oldest wooden church in Japan, and the only Western-style building to be designated a national treasure.Unfortunately, most of the French stained glass that was installed in the interior over 100 years ago was severely damaged in the atomic bomb blast and has since be restored with some pieces of other stained glass from that period.

Websites: http://www.at-nagasaki.jp/foreign/english/spot/010.html, http://web-japan.org/atlas/architecture/arc25.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ōura_Church (Francisque Marnas, La Religion de Jesus Ressuscitée au Japon dans la seconde moitie de XIX siècle., 2 vols. (Paris: Delhomme et Briguet, 1897), 487-490.), http://www.flickr.com/photos/mshades/238938231/









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