Biography
Gabriel de Duisco
About Gabriel de Duisco
Gabriel de Duisco was a young Japanese Christian associated with Franciscan missionaries in Kyoto, then commonly called Meaco. A Franciscan account describes him as a servant in the governor’s household who chose baptism and joined the Franciscan Third Order. It reports that he was about nineteen when he died; the inferred birth year is approximate.
The account says Gabriel lived with the friars and began religious study, despite objections from his family and friends. He was among the Christians arrested during the campaign that ended at Nagasaki on 5 February 1597. Franciscan and Nagasaki church histories identify the twenty-six killed there as the first martyrs of Japan. Gabriel’s own story should be distinguished from the more extensively documented biographies of the friars in the same group.
The martyrs were beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862. A Franciscan liturgical proper names Gabriel among the lay Franciscan companions and remembers the group on 6 February, the day after their deaths. His individual vocation as a Japanese lay Christian matters even where the surviving account is brief.
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