History of the Catholic Kiyose Church
The past of the Kiyose Church will go back to the church which Fr. Joseph Flo Jack of the Paris Foreign Missions Society founded on the background of the present Akitsu Church which the Sisters of Bethania owned in July, 1936.
In 1936, it was the year in which that February 26th Incident from which Japan became a turning point which begins to run the way of militarism occurred.
However, the outskirts of Kiyose of those days are an agricultural area peaceful with disregard to public noise, and the village was only dotted with Tama Zenshoen Sanatorium in which it separates and receives a sanitarium for tuberculosis and a sufferer of Hansen’s disease.
The Society of Mary (land of about 8,000 tsubos) built the Kiyose noviciate in 1940 at the south of Seibu Railway Kiyose Station, and the place of about 100 meters, and it was dotted with the cowhouse or the barn in the pine grove.
Although the Kiyose Novitiate was a big building where 80 persons can live and it was the only institution which escaped the war of the Society of Mary, it has been burned down with the fire by short circuit in June, 1947.