Note 9 — THE RECOLLECT MISSIONS, 1625–40
Reading edition
The blessed father Fray Francisco [de Jesus] was not satisfied with giving spiritual life to those whom he was converting and baptizing [in Japon], but he also gave them the girdle of our father St. Augustine, making them confriars and religious of the fourth order (as the confriars of the said girdle are),9 so that enlisted under the banner of so great a captain and doctor they might be armed to fight and to suffer even to the point of giving their lives to the Lord who gave them rebirth in baptism. And from this circumstance it happened that the blessed father could write from the prison of Bomurà in a letter to the father provincial of Filipinas under date of October six, 1630, that more than three hundred confriars of the girdle had suffered, besides many others whom the Observantine fathers have.