{"id":2677,"date":"2006-04-26T08:52:18","date_gmt":"2006-04-26T08:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/on-pilgrimage-1.html"},"modified":"2006-04-26T08:52:18","modified_gmt":"2006-04-26T08:52:18","slug":"on-pilgrimage-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/on-pilgrimage-1.html","title":{"rendered":"On pilgrimage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Young Japanese Catholics:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Shibata Yoko, 23, from Shizuoka parish, said she came with joy because since high school \u201cno matter how much I thought about it [martyrdom], I could not understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all began when she read Endo Shusaku’s novel Silence<\/em>, a story of the persecution of Christians in Japan. \u201cI know that to die a martyr is splendid but I feel it is necessary to study the historical facts one by one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shibata and four friends along with two priests spent two weeks in March on a pilgrimage that took them to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Shizuoka and Nagasaki to retrace the path taken by the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, whom John Paul II compared to the early martyrs of Christianity for their fortitude. They travelled to places where the first Kirishitan<\/em> (Japanese converts to Christians) lived in the second half of the 16th century.<\/p>\n

At the Historical Materials Museum in Yamaguchi, 21-year-old Mana Ide of the Saku Church in Nagano saw for the first time a letter written by a martyred missionary. She was surprised to find the missionary writing that he had no fear, describing martyrdom as something magnificent.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Young Japanese Catholics: Shibata Yoko, 23, from Shizuoka parish, said she came with joy because since high school \u201cno matter how much I thought about it [martyrdom], I could not understand it.\u201d It all began when she read Endo Shusaku’s novel Silence, a story of the persecution of Christians in Japan. \u201cI know that to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOn pilgrimage - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/on-pilgrimage-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On pilgrimage - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}