“WORKING TOGETHER FOR PEACE”
The cathedral’s chief priest, Kenichi Yamamura, said the bell’s restoration “shows the greatness of humanity”.
“It’s not about forgetting the wounds of the past but recognising them and taking action to repair and rebuild, and in doing so, working together for peace,” Yamamura told AFP.
He also sees the chimes as a message to the world, shaken by multiple conflicts and caught in a frantic new arms race.
“We should not respond to violence with violence, but rather demonstrate through our way of living, praying, how senseless it is to take another’s life,” he said.
Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year’s commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance.
MARTYRDOM, TORTURE
An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project.
During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime.
Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches.
He managed to raise US$125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell.
When it was unveiled in Nagasaki in the spring, “the reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears”, said Nolan.
Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki’s Christians, who, converted in the 16th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years.
This story was told in the novel “Silence” by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016.
He explains that American Catholics also showed “compassion and sadness” upon hearing about the perseverance of Nagasaki’s Christians after the atomic bomb, which killed 8,500 of the parish’s 12,000 faithful.
They were inspired by the “willingness to forgive and rebuild”.
