Nagasaki bell a gift of ‘compassion’ from US to Japanese Catholics

James Nolan gave a series of lectures on Nagasaki and Japanese Christianity in parishes and schools across the US, to raise $125,000 for the new bell for the city’s Urakami Cathedral.

The newly-installed bell in Nagasaki’s Catholic cathedral expresses “compassion and respect” between US and Japanese Catholics, according to the academic who led the project to fund it. The bell will ring for the first time on Saturday, the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

James Nolan Jr, a professor of sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts, raised $125,000 in just over a year to pay for the new bell, prompted by the suggestion of Kojiro Moriuchi, a parishioner of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the son of a survivor of the bombing on 9 August 1945.

Nolan told The Tablet the new bell – called the Kateri Bell of Hope – was “a very tangible gift” and a symbol of “solidarity between US and Japanese Catholics”. Four US prelates were to attend the ringing of the bell on Saturday at 11:02 a.m., the moment the bomb detonated, as part of a series of commemorations for the anniversary.

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle were visiting Japan this week to mark the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August and of Nagasaki three days later.

In an address in Nagasaki on 7 August, Cardinal Cupich said that while most of the US public now oppose the bombings of 1945, the majority still support “winning a war quickly and saving the lives of US soldiers, even if it means killing large numbers of foreign civilians”.

He called for “integral disarmament”, using the intellectual tradition of just war theory “for the moral formation not only of the military but the general population of a nation”, to help people “resist ideas of retribution, hatred, ethnocentrism, and nationalism”.

Cupich said the work of the Hibakusha, the community of survivors of the atomic bombs and their descendants, “is precisely what we need to foster a public climate of peacebuilding and integral disarmament”.

Nolan, whose grandfather was a doctor for the Manhattan Project, gave a series of lectures on Nagasaki and Japanese Christianity in parishes and schools across the US to raise funds for the new bell, reaching the final sum from more than 600 individual donations.

“People were very keen to give once they heard of the project,” he told The Tablet, explaining that it introduced audiences to the history of Japan’s “Hidden Christians” and the legacy of the bomb in Nagasaki. Some donors were descendants of those who fought in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Nagasaki was one of Japan’s chief ports and a centre of Christianity from the arrival of St Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century. The authorities expelled missionaries later in the century and Christians suffered persecution, culminating in the official ban of the faith in 1614.

The 26 Martyrs of Japan were crucified in Nagasaki in 1597, and it was in the same city in the 1860s that French missionaries made contact with “Hidden Christians” from the village of Urakami, whose ancestors had kept their faith disguised for more than 250 years despite their isolation from the wider Church.

Urakami, now a suburb of the city, was where the Catholic community built the twin-towered Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception after the end of the centuries-old ban on Christianity. Completed in 1925, it was completely destroyed 20 years later when the atom bomb detonated less than half a mile away.

Survivors later recovered one of its bells from the ruins along with other artefacts, and hung it in one of the two towers of the rebuilt cathedral completed in 1959, but the second belfry remained empty.

Speaking at the ceremony where the new bell was installed on 17 July this year, Nolan said the Christians of Nagasaki “were for years silenced, both by centuries of persecution and then by the destruction of the American-made bomb that was dropped on this cathedral and this community”.

The new bell, modelled on an original destroyed with the cathedral in the bombing, retains a Latin inscription commemorating “the place where so many Japanese martyrs with honour have worshipped and have, by their example, called their brothers and sisters and their descendants to the fellowship of the true faith and of heaven”.

In his remarks to The Tablet, Nolan described the city’s distinct response to the legacy of the atom bomb, expressed in the phrase: “Hiroshima rages, Nagasaki prays”.

It focused, he said, on “prayer, peace and quiet rebuilding, accepting God’s providence”, and the restored bell belonged to this tradition with its emphasis on peace before anything else. He made “an effort not to be political” with the project, conscious that the bell should be a gift from American Catholics rather than the US government.

“I like to think it’s deeper than that,” he said, noting that Urakami Catholics “have not appreciated, and even resented, their ideas and practices being used” for others’ causes. Instead, the project was based on a connection to the community and inspired by Kojiro Moriuchi’s suggestion.

“He remembers his dad speaking about the resonance and the beauty of the two bells ringing together.”

Pope calls for courage to disarm on Hiroshima anniversary

The bells ring out in praise of God, even when the people are silenced

Stay updated — add us as a preferred news source on Google: