CNA Staff, Jul 29, 2025 / 15:29 pm (CNA).
Eighty years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, several Catholic cardinals and archbishops will visit Japan for a pilgrimage of peace this August.
Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago; Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C.; Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle; and Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, will be part of the pilgrimage coordinated by the Partnership for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (PWNW).
Throughout the five-day visit, the clergy, along with a delegation of pilgrims, will celebrate Mass, participate in dialogue on Catholic ethics and nuclear weapons, and visit historical sites and museums. The delegation will include staff and students from several U.S. universities.
The pilgrimage will begin by bringing together Catholic bishops from Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. alongside “hibakusha,” or atomic bomb survivors, for a panel discussion at the World Peace Memorial Cathedral in Hiroshima on Aug. 5. On Aug. 10, the pilgrimage will conclude with an ecumenical dialogue and academic symposium at Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki.
The pilgrimage — a joint effort between Japanese and U.S. bishops as well as various Catholic universities — centers on the theme of the Catholic Church’s jubilee year: “Pilgrims of Hope.”
“We are pilgrims of peace and hope, crossing continents and histories to remember the past and transform the future,” Wester said in a press release. “This journey to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not only a remembrance but a recommitment to the Gospel call for nonviolence and the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
Archbishop Peter Michiaki Nakamura of Nagasaki and Bishop Alexis Mitsuru Shirahama of Hiroshima worked with the Santa Fe and Seattle archdioceses to sponsor the pilgrimage. The archdioceses of Chicago and Washington are also supporting the pilgrimage, along with the U.S.-based Catholic universities of Georgetown University, Loyola University Chicago, and University of Notre Dame, as well as the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in North America and the Japanese universities of Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University and Sophia University, Tokyo.
Views on nuclear warfare
Views on nuclear weapons are still mixed in the U.S., though approval for the bombings has dropped since 1945. A 2025 Pew Research Survey found that 35% of Americans say the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, while 31% say that they were not; another 33% say they are unsure. But the bishops and cardinals who are heading to the pilgrimage in August are outspoken against nuclear warfare.
Cupich — a leading Catholic voice on disarmament — recently wrote a column in the Chicago Catholic reflecting on the bombings where he noted that “the Church has a special responsibility in helping people resist ideas of retribution, hatred, ethnocentrism, and nationalism and in clearly presenting to the world an ethic of solidarity which gives priority to peace-building.”
“Politicians and the military have their roles in building peace, but so do all citizens,” Cupich wrote. “The entire population must be engaged in discussing and agreeing on the limits to warfare with a commitment that acts of intentionally killing innocents is unthinkable and never to be regarded as a regrettable but useful way to shorten a war.”
An estimated 150,000 to 250,000 people died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of the deaths were instantaneous, while others died years later due to the radiation.
Etienne of Seattle, who will be attending the pilgrimage for the second time, has worked with other leaders to promote the PWNW and its mission. The partnership is united around one purpose: “to protect all life and the environment” from nuclear harm.
Wester, who will be making the pilgrimage for the third time, is also a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. Wester, whose Archdiocese of Santa Fe is home to the nuclear weapons facilities of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, penned a pastoral letter in 2022 advocating for nuclear disarmament.
Wester also commemorated the anniversary of the testing of the first nuclear bomb in his home state of New Mexico. On July 16 — the anniversary of the detonation of the first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Test Site in the Jornada del Muerto desert — Catholic churches rang their bells at 5:29 a.m., the exact time of the first atomic explosion, as a call to prayer for peace.
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All good, but hopefully for today as an instructive footnote to moral witnessing, can we also get further into the weeds of bureaucracy, slogans and creative data, and so many familiar instances of incremental momentum: “just moving things along”? These demons, rather than the Cupich gloss of “retribution, hatred, ethnocentrism, and nationalism.”
Instead, a sampling of significant details, a reflection, and a question:
DETAILS:
Did the slogan “unconditional surrender” prolong the war in the Pacific (and Europe) more than the bombings are said by some to have shortened it? Why, after the urging of the religious and secular press and others, did the Administration decline to clarify to a foreign (monarchic) culture what “unconditional surrender” meant, and what it did NOT mean? How real were the peace feelers through the Vatican and through Moscow?
Within silo bureaucracy why did army, navy, air force and state department leaders and others including Churchill, dissenting even at the time but not directly included, not have a say in the “decision”? Why did the undocumented claim of a million averted military casualties surface (in Harper’s magazine, February 1947) only the year after John Hersey, especially, had published his on-the-ground and eye-opening testimony as “Hiroshima” (August 31, 1946)?
Of the “decision” to drop the bombs, why did the opposing letter from nuclear scientists (the Szilard Letter, July 19, 1945, Einstein included) never reach President Truman—and which argued that rather than ending a nearly ended war, use of the no-longer-hypothetical weapon would trigger a precarious and decades-long nuclear arms race (say what)? And by what stretch of the imagination did the head of the Manhattan Project believe that what he had masterfully achieved in three years still would take the infiltrating Soviet Union another twenty years?
Why, when the Nagasaki bombing was accelerated to August 9, did Truman not even hear about it until after the event (David McCullough, “Truman,” 1992)? And, earlier, why did the West give Stalin permission, at the Yalta Conference (February 1945), to invade the Far East—more likely causing the Japanese surrender. Was Russian advance stopped by the bombs which are sometimes rationalized as preventing a Soviet partition of Japan as was already happening in Europe?
REFLECTION:
As an armchair observer, yours truly tilts toward the likely minority opinion that the Truman “decision” was not a decision, but that it was more the result of half-decisions, compounding communication missteps, and industrial momentum once set in motion. When anticipating the bureaucratization of the technocratic 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber was finally crippled by psychic illness. Asked what his intense studies meant to him, he could only answer: “I want to see how much I can endure.” We sometimes settle for cover stories, or painting the complicated past with today’s slogans (Cupich?).
QUESTION:
At our compact point in very long history, how might the Eucharistic Catholic Church propose (not impose) the unique and even “alarming” (Benedict XVI) historical event of the Incarnation—not as one mere tradition or synodal “idea” among many—but as the central “fact” of universal human history?