Dear Parishioners:
The new movie, "Oppenheimer," has sparked greater interest in a moral examination of U.S. nuclear weapons policies, especially the suffering and death the August 1945 atomic bombs caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A danger of modern warfare is that it allows those who possess modern scientific weapons—especially nuclear, atomic, biological, or chemical weapons—to commit war crimes. We have seen this happen in Syria. Both North Korea and Russia have threatened to use nuclear weapons.
Under the Catholic understanding of just war, not only must the cause of war be just, but the acts of war used in combat must also be just. Using weapons to destroy civilian populations, such as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is an unjust act of war. Terrorizing the civilian populations to force surrender was part of the U.S. strategy in dropping the atomic bomb in Japan. It is considered an unjust act of war. It is very problematic for Catholics to try to justify the U.S. decision.
In dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, the second atomic attack was a near-direct hit on Asia's largest cathedral in Japan's renowned Catholic settlement, Urakami. It was a residential district of Nagasaki located significantly north of the city's commercial center and shipyard.
Nagasaki and the Catholic Church have deep historical roots. St. Francis Xavier arrived in the West of Japan in the 1540s and traveled through Nagasaki. A Japanese lord donated land in the area to Jesuit missionaries from Portugal in 1580. The Catholic Faith spread so quickly that it was outlawed as a threat to local rulers. Twenty-six martyrs were crucified in the city's hills in 1597. Nagasaki, the only port continuously open to foreign trade, was a stronghold of secret faith during Japan's two-hundred-fifty-year suppression of the faith.
The atomic bomb, "Fat Man," detonated over Urakami, killing 40,000 people instantly and another 40,000 by the end of the year. It decimated 70 percent of the Catholic community, many descendants of the Kakure Kirishitans, the "Hidden Christians," who concealed their Catholic faith in fear of persecution.
Dr. Takashi Nagai, a Catholic lay leader in Nagasaki known as "the Saint of Urakami," wrote "The Bells of Nagasaki.'" It vividly describes his experiences as a survivor of the bombing. The title refers to the bells of Urakami Cathedral. At the destroyed Cathedral, Dr. Nagai called the bombing an act of divine providence: the sacrifice of innocent blood atoned for the sins of a world at war. This reassured Christian survivors of the bombing but also had a silencing effect—reinforcing the self-suppression of the faith they practiced for 250 years.
Tomorrow is V.J. Day which commemorates the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War. My late Father was a World War II combat veteran who served in Italy and always observed this holiday. He told me that as the Second World War in Europe ended, he believed that he and his comrades in arms would have to invade Japan. Such an invasion never happened because President Truman decided to drop the atomic bombs, which led to the Japanese surrender.
Tomorrow is also the Feast of St. Maximillian Kolbe, known as "the Saint of Auschwitz." He was a Polish Franciscan Friar who the Nazis took prisoner. He was killed in Auschwitz after volunteering to replace another man, one of ten condemned to die in the starvation bunker as punishment for a presumed escape. In the 1930s, St. Maximilian Kolbe lived and worked as a missionary in Japan and founded a monastery on the outskirts of Nagasaki. Four years after his martyrdom, on August 9, 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, but the monastery the saint founded miraculously survived.
Pope St. John Paul II declared him "a martyr of charity" who represents light in the darkness of the evil of World War II and hope amidst the despair of the Holocaust and other unjust war crimes. Come to Mass on VJ Day and pray for the intercession of St. Maximillian Kolbe. May he inspire world leaders to work to end all wars, reduce nuclear weapons and strive to establish a just and lasting peace among all nations and peoples.
Do good. Be well. God Bless. Go, Sox!!