Nagasaki, Mon Amour

FrontPageMag.com ^ | August 8, 2001 | Lowell Ponte

[Siobhan]

ping

[Siobhan]

ping

[Pyro7480]

I remember reading this article when it first came out. Thanks for reposting it.

[Siobhan]

A very moving 1st hand account: Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Nagasaki.

[Siobhan]

Head of Madonna
from Urakami Cathedral
that survived the Nagasaki atomic bomb.

photo by Mr. Y. Sata

[redgolum]

They took Kyoto off the list because one of the men in command had spent time there, and decided to bomb Nagasaki instead.

Of course, there were a number of those in the administartion who really didn't like Christians in general. The real reason for the targeting will probably never be known.

[Siobhan]

As one writer about the Cathedral put it, through this atom bomb blast the Truman Administration was “ironically killing more Christians than had ever been killed in Japan during centuries of persecution.”

[eastsider]

Our Lady of Akita

[bornacatholic]

most moral people answer Yes, we should have dropped the bomb....

* The mass murder of scores of innocent civilians was moral?

What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage...~Marcus Tullius Cicero

[Siobhan]

Secretary of War Henry Stemson, a Skull and Bones man, took Kyoto off the list because of "its religious significance." Stemson then added the most Christian and most Catholic city in Japan to the list -- Nagasaki.

[Siobhan]

I should have typed "Stimson" not Stemson.

[redgolum]

Secretary of War Henry Stimson

Yep, that is him. Him and his wife spent some time in Kyoto, and fell in love with the shrines there. That is why it got put on the no bomb or nuke list.

Didn't know he was S&B, but that doesn't surprise me.

[Maeve]

I was telling the boys about when we made our pilgrimage to the sorrowful site. I still remember the few great burned statues that survived from the Cathedral.

I don't think the average American will ever let it sink in that the government dropped the atomic bomb on the two most Christian cities in Japan.

Our Lady of Akita, pray for us.

[Maeve]

He is also listed as a Mason, but that is not as easy to prove for Stimson as it is for Truman.

[Siobhan]

They have the sacred surviving statues gathered together now with part of a surviving corner of the old cathedral, but I am not certain at the moment about the Burned Head of the Madonna. I fairly think it is in the rebuilt Cathedral for veneration as a miraculous surviving image of our dear Mother. But you may already now all about this, dearest.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Formally condemned by the Catholic Church, Gaudium et Spes,(Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) Para 80:

"With these truths in mind, this most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent popes, and issues the following declaration:

"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation."

The Council condemned city = target bombing in the same terms that it condemned abortion and infanticide, and for the same reason: because they are the direct, deliberate destruction of innocent human life, and thus are an abomination in the eyes of God.

[Siobhan]

Exactly. Thank you, Mrs. Don-o, for posting the exact portion of the Conciliar document.

[Frank Sheed]

http://www.freemasonrywatch.org/politics_masonry.html

President Harry Truman, a Past Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri, was quoted as saying: "Although I hold the highest civil honor in the world, I have always regarded my rank and title as a Past Grand Master of Masons as the greatest honor that has ever come to me."

Following President Truman's death in 1972, the Scottish Rite Grand Commander hailed the Missouri-born Chief Executive as "a devoted son" of the Fraternity, and "the first President of the United Statss to have been coroneted an Inspector General Honorary of the Thirty-third Degree (1945)."

Masons serving in Cabinet posts under President Roosevelt were Henry Morganthau, Secretary of the Treasury; Homer Cummings and Robert H. Jackson (later a Supreme Court Justice), Attorneys- General; Daniel Roper and Jesse Jones, Secretaries of Commerce; George Dern, Secretary of War; and Claude Swanson and Frank Knox, Secretaries of Navy.

Among Masons in President Truman's Cabinet were James F. Byrnes and George C. Marshall, Secretaries of State; Tom Clark, Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice); Fred Vinson, Secretary of Treasury (and later Chief Justice); Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense; Clinton Anderson, Secretary of Agriculture; and Henry Wallace, Secrtary of Commerce. Mr. Wallace also served as Vice President during Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term.

During World War II, under both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George C. Marshall; the Commander of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest King; and the Chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, General Henry H. Arnold-were all members of the Masonic Fraternity.

[charliemarlow]

The only thing that rivals the annual debate about the dropping of the A-bombs is the hot debate in Japan about whether or not they should have attacked Pearl Harbor.
Not.