Japan: Catholics call on Pope to issue statement against nuclear weapons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Mount Fuji

Source: Asia News/Vatican Media/ICN

Japanese Catholics have called on Pope Francis to issue a statement against nuclear weapons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki during his apostolic visit next November. Pope announced plans to visit Japan last Wednesday on his flight to Panama World Youth Day. St John Paul II became the first pope to visit the country in 1981. During that visit, St John Paul II went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also celebrated Mass in a baseball stadium in Tokyo before 35,000 people.

Pope Francis is expected to pray in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the victims of the 1945 nuclear attacks.

Keiko Ichikawa, 77, one of Japan's 450,000 Catholics said: "I believe he will sympathise with the movement to abolish nuclear weapons and hope the Pope's visit will be an opportunity to encourage the movement."

Pope Francis has repeatedly expressed his desire to visit Japan. In his youth, he wanted to work in the country as a missionary, but a lung operation forced him to give it up. According to local media, the pontiff is also considering a visit to Fukushima, the region hit by a tsunami in March 2011 triggered by an earthquake. About 18,000 people died in that disaster. The waves caused by the earthquake also swept over the Fukushima nuclear power plant, causing the meltdown of its reactors in what remains the most serious nuclear accident in the world after Chernobyl.

"We suffered a great deal in Fukushima," said Sr Yuko Honma, 82-year-old nun, "I hope he will have a chance to visit there too."

Pope Francis has spoken out on a number of occasions against nuclear weapons and raised concerns about nuclear power.

"Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence," he said in November 2017 in an address to the International Symposium entitled 'Prospects for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons and for Integral Disarmament.'

On a flight back from Bangladesh in December 2017 the Pope said his position was open to debate, but "I'm convinced that we are at the limit of licitly having and using nuclear weapons." The world's nuclear arsenals, he said, "are so sophisticated that you risk the destruction of humanity or a great part of humanity."

Even nuclear power plants raise questions, the Pope said, because it seems that preventing accidents and cleaning up after them is almost impossible.

In his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis recognised the "tremendous power" nuclear energy has gifted to humanity, but also spoke against its dangers to the environment and the risk of being used improperly. He said a global consensus to focus on clean and renewable energy is essential for sustaining the earth.

"Such a consensus could lead, for example, to planning a sustainable and diversified agriculture, developing renewable and less polluting forms of energy," Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si.