Mourning the Dead and Protecting the Living: Remarks from the August 9th Peace Vigil
Our quarterly peace vigil against nuclear weapons fell on August 9th, the 80th anniversary of the US bombing of Nagasaki. The vigil was an occasion both to mourn all those killed by the nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to call for action against the threat posed by nuclear weapons today. Below is a selection of remarks and readings from the vigil.
Marie Dennis
From remarks by Consistent Life Network endorser Marie Dennis, of the Catholic peace organization Pax Christi International:
Marie Dennis
For moral arguments to change the opinion of political decision-makers will require a sustained effort by communities of faith to develop synergy between nonviolent activism (like this [vigil]) and “insider (realpolitik) negotiations for policy change.”
Religious institutions, including the institutional Catholic Church, need to develop collaborative strategies with faith-based peace movements like Pax Christi, plowshares activists, peace fellowships, all of us—to help politicians hear and heed the demands of ordinary people for an end to the nuclear nightmare…
It is time to replace the logic of violence in which we are mired with a new logic of nonviolence, opening the space for creative, life-giving alternatives; training us for active love and healing rather than for fear and killing; providing solid ground for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Pope Francis said, “The consistent practice of nonviolence has broken barriers, bound wounds, healed nations” (letter from Pope Francis to Cardinal Blase Cupich, April 4, 2017). Nowhere is this transformation more desperately needed than in freeing the world from the terrifying threat of nuclear weapons.
Many years ago, Jesuit peacemaker Rev. Richard McSorley, SJ wrote, “The taproot of violence in our society is our intention to use nuclear weapons. Once we have agreed to that, all other evil is minor in comparison” (Rev. Richard McSorley, SJ, “It’s a Sin to Build a Nuclear Weapon,” U.S. Catholic, 1976). Consent to the presence of nuclear weapons in our world not only accepts the risk of a nuclear conflagration in the future, but also undermines the ethical foundations for the common good here and now.
Judy Coode
Judy Coode of Consistent Life Network member group Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore read from the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of Hiroshima bombing survivor Setsuko Thurlow:
Judy Coode speaking
I was just 13 years old when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air.
As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates’ faint cries: “Mother, help me. God, help me.”
Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.” As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.
Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.
Thus, with one bomb my beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents were civilians who were incinerated, vaporized, carbonized – among them, members of my own family and 351 of my schoolmates.
In the weeks, months and years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors . . .
To the officials of nuclear-armed nations – and to their accomplices under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” – I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil . . .
When I was a 13-year-old girl, trapped in the smoldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving toward the light. And I survived. Our light now is the [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons]. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it.”
Lauren Pope
Lauren Pope of member group Rehumanize International read from The Crazy Iris and Other Stories from the Atomic Aftermath, an anthology of stories remembering the bombings of Japan:
Lauren Pope
We hadn’t heard a single bomb drop, we hadn’t seen a trace of an enemy plane. The sky had been perfectly peaceful . . .
Nearly all the people had burned clothing and they walked along in files like ants.
Had they been burned by the flames from the sky? I wondered. I was convinced then that what I had seen in the moment in the factory had indeed been some kind of “fire from heaven.”
Since I knew so little about the geography of the city, I decided to walk in the direction of the green hills I could see in the distance.
The overhead wires that the trolley cars ran on were plastered all over the streets like cobwebs and people with bare feet were stepping over them. Some brown-colored animals – whether dogs or cats I couldn’t tell- lay tumbled by the road.
Everything had been burned! I thought. Everything had a brownish color. Even the asphalt on the street had turned the color of an old frying pan.
- From “Human Ashes” by Katsuzo Oda
Jack McHale
Jack McHale of Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore read this poem by the late Daniel Berrigan, SJ, a Consistent Life Network endorser:
Jack McHale
SHADOW ON THE ROCK
by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
At Hiroshima there’s a museum
and outside that museum there’s a rock,
and on that rock there’s a shadow.
That shadow is all that remains
of the human being who stood there on August 6, 1945
when the nuclear age began.
In the most real sense of the word,
that is the choice before us.
We shall either end war and the nuclear arms race now in this generation,
or we will become Shadows On the Rock.
Our thanks to all the member groups and other organizations who co-sponsored this event: the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore, American Solidarity Party of DC-Maryland, Rehumanize International, Pax Christi USA, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Little Friends for Peace, the Isaiah Project, the Assisi Community, the Norfolk Catholic Worker, and the Hampton Roads Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Nuclear war dismantles the human body like an abortion does. Except it does it to a whole lot of people at once. And like the preborn, they are innocent.
Nuclear War will abort everybody.