Rome (AsiaNews) – Card Thomas Aquinas Manyo Maeda, 76, Metropolitan Archbishop of Osaka-Takamatsu, began his life consecrated to God in the Gotō Islands in a family of fisherfolk.
Members of the community of kakure kirishitan, Christians who "hid" for centuries, they held on to the faith during the brutal persecution under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan's last feudal regime, until tolerance came at the end of the 19th century.
When Pope Francis created him a cardinal in the consistory of June 2018, it came as a surprise. “I don't think I'm the most suitable person to be a cardinal, and I still find it hard to believe," he said upon hearing the news.
Maeda is one of the 133 cardinal electors who will isolate themselves from the world tomorrow in the Sistine Chapel to vote for the new pontiff. He is one of two cardinals from Japan; the other is Archbishop Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo.
Card Maeda was born on 3 March 1949, in Tsuwasaki, Kami-Goto, Nagasaki Prefecture. Growing up, he listened to the stories of his great-grandfather, one of the Christians who came out of the cold following the abolition of the laws against Christianity in Japan.
Family stories played a key role in his priestly vocation, making him the heir to those Christians who hid, keeping the faith alive in their hearts. This led him to conduct extensive studies on the "hidden Christians," especially among exiles in Tsuwano, in present-day Shimane Prefecture.
After completing his early education, he entered the Saint Sulpitius Major Seminary in Fukuoka. Ordained a priest in 1975, he was incardinated in the Diocese of Nagasaki. As a priest he played numerous roles: parish vicar, parish priest (often going fishing on his boat), and secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan (CBCJ) from 2006 to 2011.
Benedict XVI appointed him bishop of Hiroshima in 2011, while Francis moved him three years later to the Archdiocese of Osaka. From 2016 to 2022, he also served as CBCJ vice president. In 2023, Francis expanded his archdiocese and renamed it Osaka-Takamatsu. The area is home to 19 million people, with just over 51,000 Catholics or 0.27 per cent.
Card Maeda has been concerned about people with disabilities, while at the CBCJ he was a member of the committees for education and ecumenism. He is also a master of haiku, a short form of poetry that originated in Japan (with three phrases composed of 17 morae), and his poems often appear in his homilies and articles.
A staunch foe of nuclear weapons, he oversaw Pope Francis’s 2019 visit to Hiroshima, a city devastated by the atomic bomb in 1945. At the memorial park, Pope Francis said, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral”.
Recently, the archbishop said that at the conclave he intends to support a candidate for the papacy with convinced positions against war and nuclear power. His family history also underscores this since his mother is a survivor of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
He hopes to see the election of a pontiff who will continue in Pope Francis’s path, a pontiff who “will have the courage to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and ask for peace," he said a few days before his departure for Italy to take part in the conclave to elect the 267th pope.
Card Thomas Aquinas Manyo Maeda is firmly convinced of the importance of "disarmament", citing Pope Francis’s final words entrusted to the world on Easter Day, shortly before his death.
The 76-year-old cardinal represents yet another periphery of Christianity, which counts more than ever in this College of Cardinals.
Although the Catholic community in Japan is small (about 0.3 per cent of the population), the history of the Catholic Church in the East Asian country goes back quite a while, a troubled but very poignant history, the product of the seed sown by Francis Xavier in 1549.
