Biography | Adolfo Nicolás — The Funeral Mass Streamed from Kojimachi

People expect a former superior general to be buried from the Gesù in Rome.

The body was in Tokyo.

Adolfo Nicolás died on 20 May 2020 in the city where he had spent most of his adult life.

He was eighty-four.

Jesuit English notices place him in the Loyola House community at Kamishakujii, where he had lived since August 2018 after illness cut short a return to Manila and Madrid.

Japanese reports name Sakuramachi Hospital as the place of death.

The public rite was not held at either address.

On 23 May 2020, at 5 p.m., the funeral Mass was celebrated at St Ignatius Church, the Jesuit parish at Kojimachi 6-5-1, next to the Sophia campus where he had studied and taught.

Renzo de Luca, provincial of Japan, presided.

Pandemic rules kept the church closed to the public; the parish streamed the liturgy on YouTube.

Arturo Sosa, his successor, preached by recorded video.

Pope Francis sent condolences that were read at the Mass.

The same day Sosa celebrated a memorial in the Church of the Gesù in Rome.

St Ignatius is the building a visitor can still enter from Yotsuya Station.

The hospital and the rest house are not pilgrimage pins.

Stand here for the farewell that the Society actually offered, on the same block where his Japanese life had begun.

Photo: St Ignatius Church, Tokyo, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Hannes Heinsar, CC BY-SA 3.0, 2008.