Word: secte
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...secretive and apocalyptic sect shuns a former leader...
...sect tried to deal with the situation diplomatically by creating the Peace Pig, which has yellow and pink stripes and is linked to the number 20--the average of 17 and 23. Shorter fads were green pigs (the number 6) and blue pigs (the number...
Neither does anyone else. The men at prayer are among 10,000 surviving Kakure Kirishitan (crypto-Christians)-members of a fossilized faith that is unique in church annals. The poignant tale of the sect begins in 1549, when Jesuit Missionary Francis Xavier brought Roman Catholicism to Japan. The new creed soon gathered 300,000 followers, including most of the inhabitants of Ikitsuki, but its success also spelled its doom. Fearing the Christians' growth and foreign links, the warlord ruler Hideyoshi and later shogun mounted terror campaigns in which tens of thousands perished, often gruesomely. Christianity was all but stamped...
...Kakure population, there are 80 house churches with their closet god. At such public ceremonies as Kakure funerals, a Buddhist priest is always asked to officiate, but, says one of them, "these people make sure to give a prayer in secret to erase the effect of ours." The sect's leader, the Ojisama (Revered Uncle), conducts a baptism-like ceremony with water drawn from a site of 17th century martyrdom...
...lost on them." Nonetheless, the church would like to bring its long-sundered sons and daughters home again. During the first papal visit to Japan last February, John Paul II pointedly embraced four Kakure who turned out to greet him and held a meeting with a number of the sect's chief priests. But one of those who greeted the Pope, Dominico Hayakichi Masuyama, 73, says they had come only to "register the fact that we exist. We have no interest in joining his church." After all, he adds solemnly, "we, and nobody else, are true Christians...