When Archbishop Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi, S.V.D., receives the red hat and cardinal’s ring from Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica on the afternoon of Dec. 7, he will be the seventh Japanese cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church and one of 22 Asian cardinals with a right to vote in the next conclave.
In this exclusive interview with America’s Vatican correspondent on Oct. 16 during the Synod on Synodality in Rome, the 66-year-old archbishop spoke about his service in Ghana as a member of the Divine Word Missionaries, after which he joined the Japanese branch of Caritas Internationalis. He later became president of Caritas Asia and now heads Caritas Internationalis. Pope John Paul II appointed him as bishop of the Diocese of Niigata in 2004, and Pope Francis named him archbishop of Tokyo in 2017.
He told me he was “very surprised” when Pope Francis read out his name in the list of 21 new cardinals after the midday Angelus on Sunday, Oct. 6, “because on the Friday prior to the announcement, I met the Holy Father when he came very early to the synod hall. I went to greet him and chat, and we took photos together. He looked at my [synod] I.D. card, started to read my name, but didn’t say anything. Then on Sunday, I went to the Japanese Mass [in Rome], and when I came back somebody told me there was this announcement. I couldn’t believe it.”
People back home in Japan were surprised at his nomination, he said, “because there is already an active cardinal in Osaka,” Cardinal Thomas Aquino Manyo Maeda. At the same time, they were happy, especially in Tokyo, which has not had a cardinal since the retirement of Cardinal Peter Shirayanagi as archbishop in 2000. Cardinal Shirayanagi died in 2009.
Kikuchi will be the third archbishop of Tokyo to receive the red hat. The first was Peter Tatsuo Doi, who was named a cardinal by Pope John XXIII in 1960 on the eve of the Second Vatican Council.
In Tokyo, a city of 37 million people, he leads “an international diocese” consisting of 90,000 native Japanese Catholics and around 100,000 foreign-born migrants, including 40,000 Filipinos.
Archbishop Kikuchi first met Pope Francis in May 2013 as a member of the executive committee of Caritas Internationalis. Recalling that first encounter, he said it was so different from his meeting with Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 when the Japanese bishops came for their “ad limina” visit: “It was a solemn occasion, and we had to go one by one to see the Holy Father, Benedict, to explain the things we were doing. I was so tense.”
But, he said, “when in 2013 I met Pope Francis for the first time, it was in the Casa Santa Marta. We all went to the chapel, and the Holy Father just came and sat down [to] chat, chat, chat. It was totally different [from the audience with Pope Benedict XVI]. The atmosphere was very different.” Since then, he has met Pope Francis several times as a member of the Caritas Internationalis board.
His involvement with Caritas began after he ended his missionary work in Africa. In an interview with Vatican Media in October, Archbishop Kikuchi explained his vocation story. He was raised by a Swiss missionary priest, who taught him to pray and to be an altar boy. “My spirituality, my belief, is really based on this encounter with the foreign missionary,” he said. “That’s why when I became a priest, I really wanted to be a missionary, so I went to Africa.”
He studied for the priesthood in Japan, took his vows as a Divine Word Missionary in March 1985 and did additional studies at the Spiritual Institute of the Sacred Heart in Melbourne, Australia. After being ordained priest in March 1986, he went to Ghana.
On arrival in Ghana, “I was sent to a mission station where there is no electricity, no water supply, but the people were very happy. There, I met so many happy people, even though there are so many difficulties. But I was wondering why the people are so happy there,” he told Vatican Media. “Sickness, poverty, all kinds of difficulties, but the people are happy. Then I found out why. They said that happiness is because they know that when there is a difficulty, somebody will come to help you. You will never be abandoned. You will never be forgotten.”
“From then on, since I began working for Caritas for many years, that is my principal concept of supporting others: ‘I don’t forget you. I will not forget you. I will always support you.’”
He returned to Japan in 1992 and worked in various roles for the Divine Word Missionaries. In 1999 he was elected as the S.V.D. provincial of Japan, a position he held until Pope John Paul II named him a bishop in 2004. The S.V.D. order administers secondary schools and parishes in Japan as well as Nanzan University in Nagoya, where today half of the order’s 120 members in Japan teach. Archbishop Kikuchi also served as executive director of Caritas Japan.
Much of our conversation focused on his work with Caritas, which had been active in Japan for many years, he said, “but was not much known.” Its biggest operation was during the Vietnam War, assisting refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, and running camps for refugees in cooperation with the United Nations’s refugee agency. After that, “we did charitable work, collecting donations and sending this to African or Asian countries.”
In March 2011, an earthquake triggered a powerful tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and Caritas provided assistance to many victims. “We established volunteer stations based on coastal area parishes, and we called people to join as volunteers,” Archbishop Kikuchi said. “We stayed there, while many N.G.O.s that came at the beginning just disappeared after some time. We served for 10 years. This was the biggest impact Caritas has made on the general public in Japan.”
The cardinal-elect has worked with Caritas for 30 years. His involvement began after the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when huge numbers of refugees fled that country and sought refuge in neighboring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Caritas Internationalis began operating more than 30 camps there and asked all its member organizations to send volunteers or staff to support them. For the first time in history, Caritas Japan decided to send volunteers, too. “At that time, I was not a member of Caritas,” he recalled. “I had just returned from Ghana where I had been a missionary since 1986, and those working in Caritas Japan said, ‘You know Africa, so you are the best one to be sent to the camps.’”
At the beginning, he said, “I was in charge of a refugee program in Zaire, and I went a number of times to Rwanda to support the orphans. Then, in 1999, they asked me to be a member of the Japan Caritas Committee and executive secretary for Caritas Japan. So I went back to Japan, and since then I have been working with Caritas. I became president of Caritas Asia in 2011, and president of Caritas Internationalis in 2023.”
Since his primary role is as archbishop of Tokyo, I asked if being president of Caritas Internationalis is a part-time job. He smiled broadly and said:“Everything is part-time! When I became executive director of Caritas Japan, my real job was as provincial of S.V.D. in Japan. When I became president of Caritas Asia, I was bishop of Niigata diocese. Now I am president of Caritas Internationalis and archbishop of Tokyo.”
I asked if he has any concerns about Caritas’s work that he wished to express. His answer was striking, and I quote in full:
Caritas has been talking about partnership because there are more than 160 member organizations and each member is independent, but directly under the bishops’ conferences. But there is not what they call equality; some, like the European or American Caritas [organizations] have plenty of funds, and other Caritas [organizations] in Asia or Africa don’t have anything. So there is always a tension between those who have and those who don’t. Money is not only temptation, money is also power, and money sometimes speaks and money dictates. So while we say that we are members of the Caritas organization and we are supposed to be [equal partners], in actual fact we are not.
I say this because I have been witnessing this kind of relationship between those who have and those who don’t. So that is one of the main concerns for me if we want to remain a Catholic charitable organization, the arm of the bishops to do charitable work. We have to think seriously about equality among the members, and also to be serious about the partnership. We are talking about synodality, but right now synodality does not exist in the Caritas organization.
I noted that the question of how to address the inequality between rich and poor churches was raised at the Synod on Synodality, with appeals for greater solidarity. The cardinal-elect said: “It was in the first week, and I made an intervention on this point; [I said] there is no equality among the member Caritas organizations even though these are under the bishops’ conferences. I said bishops’ conferences should seriously think about how to cooperate and also how to introduce a smoother way of cooperation.”
He said he also drew attention to the fact that “many of the Caritas member organizations which have money are receiving the funds from their governments.” He added that he thinks it is fine to receive funds from the government, but it runs the risk of church organizations becoming professionalized in ways that can cause them to lose their Catholic identity. “Sometimes they don’t even want the bishops to say anything over their policies,” he said. “If we are saying that Caritas is a Catholic charitable agency, then we have to seriously think about how to maintain our Catholic identity. I think that is a must right now for Caritas.”
“When we talk about Catholic identity, we start to think about organizing a retreat, or saying Mass, or introducing the prayers before meetings,” he said. “This is—let me say—a very cosmetic issue, which is good, but it is not the essential element in our understanding of the spirit of Caritas.”
Explaining what he meant by “the spirit of Caritas,” Archbishop Kikuchi recalled that “when the Holy Father talks about next year’s Jubilee, the main theme of which is pilgrims and hope, he’s talking about hope all the time.” Hope is essential to the spirit of Caritas, he insisted. “I remember the first time I went to the refugee camp in Zaire. I spoke with some of the leaders in the camps and I asked them, ‘What do you need?’ And they didn’t tell me that they need money or house or clothing, they just told me that when I go back to Japan, I should tell the people that they are still existing because they feel that they are forgotten.”
He added: “this is because of the indifference of people to those who are in difficult situations, like the Holy Father said at Lampedusa when he spoke about the globalization of indifference to people in difficulties, when people are just thinking about their own selves, forgetting about others. So, this is the principle of the Catholic Caritas, telling those who are in difficulties that ‘we will never forget you. We are always with you.’”
Archbishop Kikuchi said he is also deeply concerned about the plight of migrants, not only in Europe and America but also in Asia. “There are so many migrants in the world today, and for many reasons, especially because of climate change or war or economic reasons,” he said. “People are moving around, but because of this massive influx of migrants in many countries, people in the receiving countries have started to feel threatened.” He cited the situation in Japan and Korea, where the population is aging and birth rates are declining. “To maintain the social structure, we need people to work, we need migrants to support us, and so the government is accepting many migrants with temporary visas. But the people started to feel threatened because Japan, like Korea, is a homogeneous country, and suddenly we started to see so many foreigners coming in.”
However, he said, migrants should be seen as a gift, not a problem. “They are human beings and should have the freedom to choose wherever they want to live. In Japan, there are many Filipinos coming to marry or to work or whatever.” Most of them, he said, are Catholics. “Maybe it’s God himself sending these people as missionaries to Japan,” he said, “because we don’t have churches in the villages and rural areas; but these Filipinos are staying in the rural areas, in the villages, so they are in fact missionaries. So maybe it’s God’s plan to send these people as migrants to other countries, to support [the local church] or to evangelize. So why do we not just say, ‘Be not afraid,’ because this migrant apostolate is among the priorities right now in the Catholic Church? And even if in a society the majority of people are against the influx of migrants, it is still happening.”
Archbishop Kikuchi also highlighted war as another major concern of Caritas Internationalis. “Wars, armed conflicts are killing people, and they are also killing the volunteers,” he said. “We lost some volunteer workers in Gaza, so that war is affecting not only the local people, but also N.G.O.s, including Caritas, who are working to help the people.” He added, “We have to talk to the politicians, [to call on] the political leaders, to stop the armed conflicts. And we have to remind them also of the importance of humanitarian principles, humanitarian law.” He said this issue had been raised at the Synod on Synodality, especially by participants from Syria and Lebanon. He has also participated in several Caritas meetings in Jerusalem and Jordan, and has organized many pilgrimages from Japan to the Holy Land.
Some days before I interviewed the cardinal-elect, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors. He rejoiced at this. “It is a great recognition,” he said. “I’m very happy. They have been working tirelessly for many years for the abolishment of nuclear weapons.” He recalled the “strong messages” delivered by Pope John Paul II in Hiroshima in 1981, where he called for “the abolition of nuclear arms,” and by Pope Francis in 2019, when he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and declared that “not only the use but also the possession of nuclear arms is immoral.”
While Japan does not have such arms today, Archbishop Kikuchi said some politicians in Japan seem to be using the threat from China and North Korea as an excuse to consider developing nuclear weapons. But, he said, “the bishops’ conference of Japan is against it” and “the giving of the Nobel Peace Prize to this group is a really a strong message from the international community to Japan.”
In this context, he said, he was pleased that some bishops from the United States—Cardinals Robert McElroy and Blase Cupich, and Archbishops John Wester and Paul Etienne—will join the bishops of Japan in Hiroshima next Aug. 6 for the 80th anniversary of the American nuclear attack there in 1945, to pray and to press for the abolition of nuclear arms. It is a cause that is dear to his heart, as it is to the pope that will make him a cardinal this week.
As a cardinal under the age of 80, he will have the right to vote in the next conclave. When asked about this in an interview with Catholic News Agency, Archbishop Kikuchi said: “If a conclave happens very soon, I think what we need is somebody to succeed the policy of Pope Francis. Because he started this synodal way to create the synodal church, and if somebody comes in with…a different agenda, then what we have been doing is just in vain.”
