Pope in Hiroshima: Use and possession of atom bomb ‘immoral’
HIROSHIMA, JAPAN >> Pope Francis traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Sunday to demand that world powers renounce their nuclear arsenals, declaring the use and possession of atomic bombs an “immoral” crime and a dangerous waste.
Standing before survivors of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings, Francis denounced the steady erosion of arms control agreements and rejected the Cold Warera doctrine of deterrence that had been sanctioned by the Catholic Church for nearly three decades.
In the rain of Nagasaki and the silent darkness of Hiroshima, he urged political leaders to accept that true peace and international security cannot be built in a climate of distrust, but rather solidarity.
“The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral,” the pope declared during a nighttime prayer at Hiroshima’s peace memorial. He added offthe-cuff, “As is the possession of atomic weapons.”
“We will be judged for this,” he warned.
Francis visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the first full day of a threeday trip to Japan aimed at emphasizing his call for a global ban on atomic weapons. Nagasaki was the perfect place to begin, the birthplace of Christianity in Japan where he could honor innocents killed in war as well as Christian missionaries and martyrs killed for their faith.
The mood
there
was somber, darkened by the downpour that drenched the terraced fields and rice paddies and the hundreds of Japanese who came out in plastic raincoats to witness the second pope to pay his respects after St. John Paul II in 1981.
The scene was equally as restrained in Hiroshima, where a brief round of applause when Francis arrived punctured an otherwise quiet night. After a gong signaled a moment of silence and Francis lit a candle of peace, two survivors offered their testimony about the “demonic” atom bomb.
“No one in this world can imagine such a scene of hell,” said Yoshiko Kajimoto, who was 14 at the time and was working in a factory 2.3 kilometers (1.4 miles) north of ground zero when the blue light of the bomb tore through the windows, collapsing the building on top of her.
Standing solemnly before Francis, she described what she saw along the evacuation route:
“There were more and more people coming by. Their bodies were so burned and totally red. Their faces swollen to double size, their lips hanging loose, with both hands held out with burnt skin hanging from them. They no longer looked human.”
Kajimoto had two-thirds of her stomach removed in 1999 because of cancer, and now suffers from leukemia. “I work hard to bear witness that we must not use such demonic atomic bombs again, nor let anyone in the world endure such suffering,” she said.