Members of Pax Christi England and Wales, London Catholic Worker, and Justice and Peace Southwark and Westminster gathered outside Westminster Cathedral last Saturday for Hiroshima Day and Tuesday for Nagasaki Day, for vigils to pray for an end to nuclear weapons. They ran a stall and handed out fliers of information to cathedral visitors, marking 77 years since American B-29 bombers dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, devastating both of them.
On 6 August Coventry Cathedral hosted Hiroshima day 2022, organised by the Lord Mayor of Coventry’s Committee for Peace and Reconciliation. It involved a remembrance service and a performance of Taiko drumming. Representatives of the Japanese embassy and the Japanese community in Coventry were present. Friendship messages were exchanged between the cities of Coventry and Hiroshima and messages of greeting received from the Catholic Bishop of Hiroshima and the Anglican Bishop of Kobe and Hiroshima.
Hiroshima Day vigils and stalls were organised by Pax Christi and Justice and Peace groups in Abingdon, Conwy, and Liverpool.
Hiroshima Day also saw an on-line vigil organised by Christian CND and Anglican Pacifists.
The previous day, Christian CND, along with 100 Faith groups concerned with nuclear weapons presented an interfaith statement against nuclear weapons to the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons conference in New York.
In Scotland, Archbishop William Nolan of Glasgow released a video lamenting the “the very notion of deterrence”. He deplored the money, resources and personnel spent on nuclear weapons and said: “They could be better used building up peace than on weapons of war.”
At the Edinburgh Festival, the Peace Cranes project, a two-year project by Justice and Peace Scotland, is culminating with “Consequences: Art and Activism in the Nuclear Age”, an in-person exhibition and events at Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Edinburgh, running 16 August to 3 September. The Mistake, a play by Michael Mears, is showing in Edinburgh. The dropping of the first atomic bomb is referred to on the peace memorial in Hiroshima as “the mistake”. The play explores personal stories surrounding that event.
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