IT has been 75 years since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, three days later the second was dropped on Nagasaki and since then the world has rushed to the brink of total destruction several times but has pulled back. Someday someone is going to go too far and life on this planet will be over unless we do away with nuclear weapons. From Sojourners.....
Seventy-five years ago this August, the Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki — built brick by brick by Japanese Catholics — was destroyed by a nuclear blast. Two priests — Fr. Nishida Saburō and Fr. Tamaya Fusakichi — and at least 10 parishioners were killed inside the cathedral immediately.
A conservative estimate is that more than 150,000 people were killed in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and more than 75,000 in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Those who didn’t die from the blasts died later of radiation-related cancers.
I first met folks from Sojourners at the Nevada nuclear test site in 1985 — on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Our conversations, while illegally “crossing the line” onto the military base built on unceded Shoshone land, changed the course of my life. Thirty-five years later I continue to be enlivened by the creative challenges of peace, nonviolence, and a holistic ecology rooted in my Catholic faith. The U.S. Catholic bishops, the Japanese Catholic bishops, as well as Pope Francis have taken a strong, theologically grounded, pro-life, and prophetic lead in teaching and demanding the reduction and abolition of nuclear weapons.
Why focus on abolishing nuclear weapons when there are so many other pressing issues driving us into the streets today?
Black Lives Matter intersects with nuclear abolition along the lines of Dr. Martin Luther King’s interconnected web of “racism, militarism, and materialism.” Each leg of the stool is connected to the whole. Most nuclear weapons tests occurred on Indigenous islands in the Pacific and Shoshone land in Nevada. To fight in solidarity with Indigenous communities is to fight against nuclear weapons. To link arms with the “Wall of Moms” in Portland interposing their precious unarmed bodies is to fight against nuclear weapons and the power of death.
This spring, with the COVID-19 pandemic looming and facing the biggest economic downturn in years, the Trump administration requested $44.5 billion “to sustain and modernize U.S. nuclear delivery systems and warheads and their supporting infrastructure,” a 19 percent increase in one year. To work for a just economy is to work for the end of the U.S. nuclear state.
At Sojourners we work for gospel nonviolence and just peace at a neighborhood, national, and international level. As people of faith, we draw on the gospel of peace, practices of nonviolence, prudent social ethics, and traditions of the church to make connections for one another — to make the moral fabric of the universe visible to all.
A few days after the Urakami Cathedral was bombed, Protestant minister Miura Seiichi visited the site. Amid the rubble he saw a statue of the Apostle Peter standing on a wall intact with the Bible in his right hand and his eyes watching the sky. His lips seemed about to emit a prayer. “What would Peter, the successor of the secret key between heaven and earth, have tried to say,” asks Seiichi. “Please, Peter, say something to the travelers of this world.”
In Faith,
Rose Marie Berger
Sources:
- https://books.google.com/
books?id=i6ckAQAAIAAJ&focus= searchwithinvolume&q=urakami - https://www.peace-nagasaki.go.
jp/abombrecords/b020202.html - http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/
200708230009.html - https://www.icanw.org/united_
states
 | Rose Marie Berger
Senior Editor and Peace & Non-Violence Issue Area Lead
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