Nagasaki
Atlas / Nagasaki
Japan's oldest standing church, and the place where two and a half centuries of hidden faith stepped into the light.
Ōura Church was completed in 1864 by French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society for the foreign residents of Nagasaki, and dedicated to the Twenty-Six Martyrs who had been crucified on Nishizaka Hill in 1597.
On 17 March 1865 a small group of villagers from Urakami came to the church and quietly told Fr. Bernard Petitjean that they shared his faith. The moment, remembered as the "Discovery of the Hidden Christians", revealed that Catholic belief had survived in secret, without priests, since the early 1600s.
The church is a National Treasure of Japan and a component of the UNESCO World Heritage property "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region" (2018). It was named a minor basilica in 2016.
