ABSTRACT
The last chapter focuses on Takayama Ukon’s career as a martyr: a samurai converted to the Catholic faith by Jesuit missionaries, he became an actor of Catholic proselytism among his subjects, until his death in 1615 already in a reputation of sanctity, in exile in Manila, in the Philippines. Ukon’s trajectory appears to be an effective and instructive metaphor of a counter-reforming Catholicism capable, outside Europe, of elaborating techniques and strategies of accommodation and adaptation to the local culture in order to spread in a society perceived as culturally hostile and politically immune to the influence of Europeans. Even before his disappearance, the figure of Ukon was reworked in a hagiographic perspective and used for propaganda purposes in the letters and printed works of Ignatius’ followers, before becoming, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a theatrical character widely exploited in conversion or martyrdom tragedies staged in colleges across Europe. The Jesuits’ desire to promote an alternative and local type of holiness, through the valorization of a “prolonged martyrdom” without effusion of blood but based on constancy in the faith despite persecution – in fact a martyr without martyrdom – never achieved beatification during the modern age. Yet the persistence of a secular cult in the Far East has recently led the Church of the twenty-first century to officially recognize the blessed samurai, in line with a vast program to multiply a global holiness.
