In April 2026, Bishop Gerald Kicanas and Deacon Ed Sheffer led a group of pilgrims on a fifteen-day journey through Catholic Japan. It is a pilgrimage that takes some explaining to anyone who has not made it. Japan is not a Catholic country. Catholics are roughly three people in every thousand. What draws pilgrims there is not the number of the faithful but the cost at which the faith was kept.
Christianity arrived with St. Francis Xavier, who landed on 15 August 1549 and stayed three years. What he began grew quickly. By 1614 there were said to be well over a million Catholics in Japan. That was the year the Shogun banned Christianity outright and the persecution began, and it did not let up for more than 250 years.
What happened next is the reason this is a pilgrimage rather than a holiday. The Kakure Kirishitan, the Hidden Christians, kept the faith in secret across ten generations with no priests, no Mass and no public sign of what they believed, until religious freedom returned in the nineteenth century and they walked out of hiding. Their monuments, their relics and their churches are still there, and standing in front of them does something that reading about them does not.
The route took the group from Tokyo north to Akita and on to Nagasaki, the historical heart of Japanese Catholicism, where the Twenty-Six Martyrs are remembered and where the cathedral stood 550 yards from where the atomic bomb fell. Between the shrines there was the rest of Japan: the cherry blossom at the tail of its season, the castles and gardens, the kaiseki cooking that has been refined over centuries, and the quiet courtesy that every pilgrim on that trip came home talking about.
Deacon Ed wrote his own account of those fifteen days, including his visit with the Missionaries of Charity, his conversations with Japanese converts, and what the witness of the martyrs did to him. You can read it here: The Rising Son.
If this is a journey you have been considering, the next departure is the April 2027 Japan Pilgrimage with Fr. Elias Mills, F.I. You can also see how we build these journeys on our Japan pilgrimages page, along with the Akita and Nagasaki and Hidden Christians routes.
Groups travel on their own dates, with daily Mass, a tour manager on the ground and an itinerary shaped around the people making the journey. If you are thinking about leading one, call us on (800) 653-0017 or email hello@canterburypilgrimages.com.
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