Statue of Mary that survived Nagasaki nuclear blast to visit US for first time (Catholic Caucus)

While another in a series of important events aimed at making the world safer from nuclear weapons occurs this week with the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, plans are under way to bring a statue of Mary that survived the 1945 nuclear blast in Nagasaki, Japan, to the United States for first time.

Actually, only the head of Mary will be displayed at a May 2 Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, reported Ecumenical News International. It’s the only part of the wooden statue that survived the powerful explosion.

The Mass will mark the opening of a four-week U.N. conference on nuclear nonproliferation.

The statue once stood in Nagasaki’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception -– Urakami in Japanese. The cathedral was leveled by the blast, which claimed an estimated 74,000 lives.

The Mass will be one of several activities in which Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki will participate beginning April 30, ENI reported.

Although born in March of 1946, the archbishop is considered a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing because his mother was pregnant with him when the blast occurred Aug. 9, 1945.

The archbishop reportedly also is expected to meet with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon or his deputy to deliver the February statement directly.

Here's about the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing:

The cities were chosen because they had been relatively untouched during the war. The Target Committee wanted the first bomb to be "sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released."
...
Unlike many other bombing raids, the goal for this raid had not been a military installation but rather an entire city.

In Dresden, from a British site:

My father was one of the "anonymous RAF meteorological officers (who) finally sealed Dresden's fate".
...
Normally, crews were given a strategic aiming point - anything from a major factory in the middle of nowhere to a small but significant railway junction within a built-up area. The smaller the aiming point and the heavier the concentration of housing around it, the greater would be the civilian casualties - but given that the strike was at a strategic aiming point those casualties could be justified.
Only at the Dresden briefing, my father told me, were the crews given no strategic aiming point. They were simply told that anywhere within the built-up area of the city would serve.
He felt that Dresden and its civilian population had been the prime target of the raid and that its destruction and their deaths served no strategic purpose, even in the widest terms; that this was a significant departure from accepting civilian deaths as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of the bomber war; and that he had been complicit in what was, at best, a very dubious operation.
Bombing of Dresden

The people who introduced the notion of targetign entire cities were Charles Portal of the British Air Staff and Air Marshall Arthur Harris. Others, from Churchill down went along with some reluctance (see the entire page cited above).

The justifications, such as those we've seen here, come from the eye-for-an-eye moral philosophy, incompatible with Christianity.

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