Abstract
Since 1945, official Catholic discourse around nuclear weapons has condemned their existence on the one hand and supported them as deterrents on the other. This paper argues the largely abstracted discourse on nuclear weapons within the World Church has been disrupted by voices of Urakami in Nagasaki since at least 1981, as the Vatican has re-considered both memory and Catholic treatments of the bombing of this city since the end of World War II. On 9 August 1945, a plutonium A-bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man’, was detonated by the United States over the northern suburb of Nagasaki known as Urakami. Approximately 8500 Catholics were killed by the deployment of the bomb in this place that was once known as the Rome of the East. Many years on, two popes visited Nagasaki, the first in 1981 and the second in 2019. Throughout the period from John Paul II’s initial visit to Pope Francis’s visit in 2019, the Catholic Church’s official stance on nuclear weapons evolved significantly. Pope John Paul II’s contribution to the involvement in peace discourses of Catholics who had suffered the bombing attack in Nagasaki has been noted by scholars previously, but we should not assume influence in 1981 was unidirectional. Drawing upon interviews conducted in the Catholic community in Nagasaki between 2014 and 2019, and by reference to the two papal visits, this article re-evaluates the ongoing potentialities and concomitant weaknesses of religious discourse. Such discourses continue to exert an influence on international relations in the enduring atomic age.
Highlights
The Catholic Church’s official position on nuclear weapons throughout the atomic era has evolved from a tacit acceptance of deterrence during the Cold War to today’s outright rejection of all such weapons in any circumstances. Those discourses from within the Catholic Church which supported nuclear weapons as deterrents most often focused on the abstract, tending to elide those people who have been negatively affected by atomic weapons, testing or nuclear fallout
Between the first papal visit in 1981 and the second in 2019, the Urakami hibakusha joined those testifying at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, told their stories, went to the United Nations to speak of their experiences and supported a new grass roots campaign for a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)
While JP II had avoided any speech against nuclear weapons here, the way had been exemplified by the local Catholics to protest the bombing
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The memory of Urakami Ground Zero incorporated more than the bombing, and a worldview and communal understanding which remembered the persecution which had come before. This memory would eventually influence the pope(s) and the Vatican. One of my interviewees in 2016 in an oral history project carried out in Urakami was Ozaki Tōmei Ozaki was both a hibakusha and a religious in the Catholic community, and he explained that a prophecy remembered by the community was that after seven generations, the arrival of the pope’s boat from Rome would herald a new-found freedom for the Christians (Ozaki 2016).
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