The
Ninth of August: Christians Killing Christians in the Name of
Christ
By Gary Kohls, M.D.
On the 9th
of August, 1945, an all-Christian B-29
bomber crew, took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with
the blessings
of its
Catholic and Protestant chaplains. In the plane’s hold was the
second of the only two nuclear bombs to ever be used against human targets
in wartime. The primary target, Kokura, Japan, was clouded over, so the
plane, named Bock’s Car, headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.
St. Mary’s Cathedral, located in Nagasaki City’s Urakami
River district, was a massive structure and a landmark easily visible
from 31,000 feet above. The cathedral was one of the landmarks on which
the Bock’s Car’s bombardier had been briefed for weeks
before the mission. The cathedral was briefly seen through a break
in the clouds,
and the drop was ordered. The bomb exploded in a searing fireball
as hot as the sun 500 meters above the church.
The legendary Urakami Cathedral was Ground Zero for the Nagasaki bomb
on August 9
The Urakami Cathedral was Ground Zero for the second
atomic bomb ever used against civilian populations in war time,
and most Nagasaki Christians
who lived in the area did not survive. 6000 of the church members
died instantly, including all who were at confession at 11:02 am
that morning.
Of the 12,000 members of the church, eventually 8,500 died as a direct
result of the bomb. Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s
school were incinerated. Tens of thousands of innocent people died
instantly and hundreds of thousands were mortally wounded, some of
whose progeny
are still living in agony as a result of the cross-generational contagiousness
of the deadly plutonium. An irradiated crucifix was photographed
in the days following the blast, lying helpless and forlorn and lying
on its
back, a deeply profound symbol of a religion gone wrong.
The Urakami Cathedral was the oldest and largest Christian
church in the Orient, and Nagasaki was the oldest, largest and
most influential
Christian community in Japan, having been founded by the Jesuit missionary,
Francis Xavier, in 1549. The Nagasaki Christian community is legendary
in the history of Japanese Christianity because of its two centuries
of catacomb-like existence during the horrible persecutions by the
Imperial Japanese government—including mass crucifixions of faithful
Christians
who refused to give up the faith. Despite the persecutions and the
formal outlawing of the religion (it was a capital crime to be a
Christian—as it was for the original nonviolent form of Christianity—for
over 2 centuries), Nagasaki Christianity survived and ultimately
flourished—until
11:02 am, August 9, 1945.
What Imperial Japan could not do for over two centuries
of brutal persecution and the arbitrary use of the death penalty, fellow
Christians from America
did in 9 seconds. The Cathedral was totally destroyed by the plutonium
bomb and thousands of Nagasaki Christians were instantly boiled, incinerated,
carbonized or vaporized. Radiation-induced disease and deformities among
the “surviving” victims and their progeny continues to this
day as a gruesome testament to the horrors of nuclear war.
Franz Jaegerstaetter was killed on August
9 for refusing to join Hitler’s
military
On the 9th of August, 1943, Franz Jaegerstaetter,
a devout Austrian Christian pacifist, was beheaded by German Christians
for refusing to
join Hitler’s army. Because of his gospel-based conscientious objection
to war and killing, he had been abandoned by his spiritual leaders, as
well as by his family and friends, all of whom had tried to convince
him to do his patriotic duty and kill for “Volk, Fuhrer und Vaterland.” They
all tried to convince him that his commitment to gospel nonviolence was
futile – and, in the context of the national militarism operating
at the time, also fatal. Instead, being obedient to the God of love rather
than to men, he refused to relent and was murdered at Brandenburg Prison,
at the hands of obedient baptized Christian soldiers, whose belt buckles
read “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us).
The Jewish Carmelite Nun, Sister Teresia Benedicta of the Cross was
murdered at Auschwitz on August 9
On the 9th of August, 1942, Sister Teresa Benedicta
of the Cross, a Jewish Catholic Carmelite nun, was murdered by
fellow German Christians
at Auschwitz. “Gott Mit Uns” was also stamped on their belt
buckles. Most of German Christianity had, by its collaboration and/or
by its silence, endorsed the Nazi’s ruthless forms of nationalism,
militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and its “legal” right
to kill the enemies of the state.
On the 9th of August, 1945, Lutheran Chaplain William
B. Downey, of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. MN,
prayed for the safety
of the crew and for world peace just before the Nagasaki bombing mission.
(Downey was attached to the US Army Air Force’s 509th Composite
Group, whose major responsibility on Tinian was the delivery of the atomic
bombs.)
Pastor Downey’s prayer on August 9
“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we pray
Thee to be gracious with those who fly this night. Guard and protect
those of us who venture
out into the darkness of Thy heaven. Uphold them on Thy wings. Keep them
safe both in body and soul and bring them back to us. Give to us all
courage and strength for the hours that are ahead; give to them rewards
according to their efforts. Above all else, our Father, bring peace to
Thy world. May we go forward trusting in Thee and knowing we are in Thy
presence now and forever. Amen.”
After the war ended, Downey, in counseling those
soldiers who still had their consciences intact and were therefore
troubled
by the mass
killing of innocent civilians by the bombs, said: ”The wrong was
the killing, whether by fire bombs from hundreds of planes, by one atomic
bomb or by a single rifle bullet. War itself is the evil that man must
conquer.”
Father Zabelka’s blessed the Nagasaki
mission on August 9
On the 9th of August, 1945, the 509th Composite Group’s
Catholic chaplain, Father George Zabelka, was just one of millions
of victims
of societal attitudes at the time: “The whole structure of
secular, religious and military society told me clearly that it was
all right
to ‘let the Japs have it.’ God was on our side.” Father
Zabelka knew what his bomber crews were doing to innocent civilians
and their defenseless cities with conventional incendiary bombs in
the spring
and summer of 1945, and yet “I said nothing.” He regretted
that silence for the rest of his life, but spent the remaining two
decades of his life working tirelessly for world peace and denouncing
militarism
as being clearly anti-Christian. A contrite Father Zabelka was in
Nagasaki on August 1995 asking for forgiveness from the Japanese
people for his
role in what is now recognized to be a crime against humanity and
an international war crime.
Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, the foremost apostle
of Christian nonviolence in America today, and the person most responsible
for Zabelka’s
conversion to gospel nonviolence, has dedicated his life and ministry
to raising the consciousness of the church to the truths of Jesus’s
nonviolent teachings. McCarthy says:
“Today, as for most of the last 1700 years, most
Christians continue to justify as consistent with the spirit of Christ
those energies, understandings,
and emotions which lead inevitably to August 9. Today most Christians
still do not unequivocally teach what Jesus unequivocally taught on the
subject of violence. Today most Christians still refuse to proclaim that
violence is not the Christian way, that violence is not the Holy way,
that violence is not the way of Jesus.”
Every July 1st, to call the Christian community to
repent and to return to the truth of the original form of Christianity,
i.e.,
that violence
is not the way of Christ, Father McCarthy leads a 40 day fast from
solid foods, solemnly breaking it on August 9th at the site of the
first atomic
bomb detonation at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test was blasphemously
code-named “Trinity”.
McCarthy suggests that sincere Christians remember
all the victims of past August 9ths (as well as other infamous dates
in
the history of war)
in their thoughts and prayers on Nagasaki Sunday, August 8, 2010
by attending any of the various anniversary commemorations that may
be available during
the Hiroshima/Nagasaki week of August 6—9, the 65th anniversaries
of the bombings. Those devoted to the truth of gospel nonviolence
hope that all ethically-conscious people, especially Christians,
consider
a day-long fast on August 9 lamenting the hundreds of millions of
war dead, the hundreds of millions of physically, psychologically
and spiritually
dead and dying survivors of war violence (especially those most severely
afflicted: the military veterans of war, their secondarily traumatized
families and their loved ones and their civilian—and soldier-victims
who were on the other side of the battle lines).
And, of course, we must remember the billions of those all over this
war-torn world who continue to suffer, generation after generation, from
the totally preventable, war-caused starvation, malnutrition, poisoning
from Agent Orange, depleted uranium, legal and illicit drugs and other
military toxins and the homelessness, joblessness, poverty, suicidality,
homicidality, domestic abuse, national bankruptcies and hopelessness
that follows all wars.
The War Prayer by Mark Twain
It seems appropriate to end this essay on Nagasaki
with the following excerpt from Mark Twain’s “The War
Prayer,” which, interestingly, Twain requested not
be published until after his death.
It is suspected that he felt that he would be castigated for a lack
of patriotism by writing such a deeply truthful allegory. The excerpt
starts
as the Pro-War/ Justified War Theory pastor was praying for the troops.
The pastor prayed:
"Watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid,
comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them,
shield them in the day of battle
and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong
and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the
foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor
and glory"—An aged stranger entered
and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes
fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed
in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair
descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face
unnaturally pale,
pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering,
he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's
side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious
of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished
it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms,
grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our
land and
flag!"
"The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to
step aside—which the startled minister did—and took his place.
During some moments he
surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned
an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne—bearing
a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with
a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. ‘He
has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant
it if such be your desire after I, His
messenger, shall have explained to you its import—that is to say,
its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men,
in that
it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of—except he pause
and think. ‘God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer.
Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two—one
uttered, and
the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications,
the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this—keep it in mind. If you
would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware, lest without intent
you invoke
a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the
blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are
possibly praying
for a curse on some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can
be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's
prayer—the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into
words the other part of it—that
part which the pastor—and also you in your hearts—fervently prayed
silently—and ignorantly and unthinkingly. God grant that it was
so! You heard the words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!'
That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into
those
pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed
for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results that follow
victory—must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening
spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth
me to put it into words. Listen!
"Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols
of our hearts, go forth into battle—be Thou near them! With them—in
spirit—we also
go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the
foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds
with our
shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms
of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with
the
shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste
their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the
hearts of
their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them
out roofless with their little children to wander friendless in the
wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports
of the
sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit,
worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and
denied it—For our sakes
who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract
their bitter pilgrimage,
make heavy their
steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with
the blood of their wounded feet!
"We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him
Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and
friend of all that are
sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause.) ‘Ye have prayed it; if
ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.’
"It was believed afterward that the man was a
lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”
See, “White
Light, Black Rain” The documentary tells the stories of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
from the perspective of the “hibakusha”, the radiation-poisoned
survivors of the two nuclear bombs, who have been commonly ostracized
from society. The showing is sponsored by the Community of the Third
Way (the local affiliate of the national organization, Every
Church A Peace Church) and the Just Peace Committee of Peace
Church, UCC of Duluth.
