lauralot89:Our Lady of NagasakiOn August 9, 1945, the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Urakami was
lauralot89:Our Lady of NagasakiOn August 9, 1945, the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Urakami was obliterated by nuclear bomb Fat Man, killing all the parishioners inside. The cathedral had been the largest Christian structure in the Asia-Pacific Region prior to its destruction.Amid the ruins of the church, the head from a previously two meter tall statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was uncovered. The statue was scorched, with blank sockets where its eyes had melted. Our Lady of Nagasaki, as the head came to be known, remains on display as a testament to the horrors of nuclear weapons and the resilience of faith and mankind.Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan said this of Our Lady of Nagasaki: “And it is this head that is haunting: she is scarred, singed badly, and her crystal eyes were melted by the hellish blast. So, all that remains are two empty, blackened sockets. I’ve knelt before many images of the Mother of Jesus before: our Mother of Perpetual Help, the Pieta, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, just to name a few. But I’ve never experienced the dread and revulsion I did when the archbishop showed us the head of Our Lady of Nagasaki. She absorbs our sorrows, our worries, our sickness, our fears, like any good mother would. She brings them — and us — to the only one who can do anything about them: Jesus. At Nagasaki, she absorbed the radiation, incinerating heat, the suffering of her children.”In 2010, at the United Nations review conference for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Archbishops of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were in attendance, saying, “We as the bishops of the Catholic Church of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the only country to have suffered nuclear attacks, demand that the president of the United States, the Japanese government and the leaders of other countries make utmost efforts to abolish nuclear weapons.” The archbishops brought Our Lady of Nagasaki with them to the conference.Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, who was in utero on the day of the bombing, surviving due to his mother’s distance from the blast radius, also said, “How sad and foolish it is to abuse the progress that humanity has made in the fields of science and technology in order to destroy lives as massively and swiftly as possible.” -- source link