Tokyo (AsiaNews) – Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, archbishop of Tokyo, a metropolis with more than 30 million residents, began his priestly ministry as a missionary in a village in Africa.
The prelate, who is now 66, is another of the cardinals who will enter the conclave just five months after receiving the scarlet biretta in the last consistory, held by Pope Francis on 7 December 2024.
For the past two years, he has chaired Caritas Internationalis, picked somewhat surprisingly in the 2023 assembly by the delegates of the confederation of 162 Catholic charities, who chose this prelate from the small Japanese Church as their leader at a sensitive moment in the organisation’s history.
Born in Iwate on 1 November 1958, Archbishop Kikuchi is a missionary of the Congregation of the Divine Word (Verbites).
Ordained a priest in 1986, he carried out the first years of his ministry in Ghana, Africa, where he served as a parish priest at a mission in a rural area for eight years. In Africa he began working with Caritas in the 1990s as a volunteer in the Bukavu refugee camp, in what was then Zaire.
Upon returning home, he served as executive director of Caritas Japan from 1999 to 2004. Appointed by Benedict XVI as bishop of Niigata, he was president of Caritas Japan from 2007 to 2022 and in this capacity he coordinated the actions undertaken by the Catholic charity in response to the triple catastrophe of 11 March 2011, when a devastating earthquake triggered a tsunami and the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, sowing death, destruction and fear in a large area of the country.
In 2017 Pope Francis chose him to lead the Archdiocese of Tokyo. His cathedra is in the modern Cathedral of St Mary, a building designed by Kenzō Tange and built on the rubble left behind by the bombings of the Second World War. It is no coincidence that peace is a central theme in his magisterium.
Speaking about the services Caritas provides all over the world, Card Kikuchi said that while it must be “a professional international humanitarian aid agency but, at the same time, it should proclaim the good news of Jesus through its actions. It should create hope and not disappointment. It should be means of unity but not of disparity. It should promote [a] synodal church involving everyone. No one should be excluded and no one should be forgotten".
From this perspective, amid the loneliness and demographic winter that afflict the great Japanese metropolis, the cardinal turns regularly to the question of safeguarding the life and dignity of every person.
"Life, a gift of the Father in his mercy and love, must be protected from its beginning to its end, without exception," he said a few days ago in his homily on Easter Sunday.
Kikuchi is a prelate who is also very active in the digital world. He loves to share pictures on social media. Recently, he even recounted in a very personal way his experience of the world's tribute to Pope Francis and the present life of the cardinals marked by celebrations and general congregations.
To the question addressed to him at the last synod on the appointment of so many cardinals from the peripheries of the world, he gave an interesting answer in view of the conclave.
“The mission today is an exchange of gifts between Churches, between those who have and those who have not,” the prelate said. “Before, it was from West to East, now many countries in Asia and Africa give missionaries to the world. The very concept of periphery is changing, and even Europe today is becoming a periphery.”
