WASHINGTON (OSV News) — A scholar who has written about the moral implications of atomic weapons and now is writing a book on the historic legacy of faith of Catholics of Nagasaki, Japan, is leading the Nagasaki Bell Project.
The project is an effort to encourage U.S. Catholics to support the casting of a new bell for Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral as a sign of solidarity and faith in time for the bell to ring out on Aug. 9, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on the city.
James L. Nolan Jr., the Washington Gladden 1859 professor of sociology at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., was inspired to undertake the project while visiting the city in the spring of 2023 and doing research and interviews for a book he is writing on how Catholics in Nagasaki have experienced suffering through the centuries and despite that, their faith has endured and been marked by a spirit of hope.
One of the parishioners at Urakami Cathedral suggested to him that it would be wonderful if American Catholics gave a bell for the church’s left tower to replace the bell that had been destroyed in the bombing. That man said he would like to hear the new bell ringing there in his lifetime.
Nolan said he thought that was a fantastic idea, and he has been working on that project since then.
The atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki Aug. 9, 1945, left a burning hellscape in that city, leveling buildings and killing more than 70,000 people, many instantly. Others died from the lingering effects of radiation. Three days earlier the U.S. bombed Hiroshima, Japan.
The Nagasaki bomb detonated about a third of a mile from the city’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral, known as the Urakami Cathedral after the district of the city where it was built. The structure — at that time believed to be the largest Catholic church in East Asia — lay in ruins. About 8,500 of the cathedral’s 12,000 parishioners were killed.
After the bombing, Dr. Takashi Nagai, a prominent Catholic who was a physician and radiologist, encouraged people to keep the faith. While suffering from a serious head injury in the aftermath of the bombing, he cared for survivors and witnessed the bomb’s horrific effects on the dead and on the living.
He returned home to find his house destroyed and his beloved wife, Midori Moriyama, dead. Amid her charred remains, he found a melted rosary that she prayed with.
Nagai encouraged fellow Catholics to dig in the cathedral’s ruins for a bell that had called them to prayer from one of its two bell towers. While one bell was found damaged and unusable, the volunteers unearthed a second bell and found it intact and relatively unscathed, and they rang it out on Christmas Eve in 1945, offering the city’s surviving Catholics an enduring sign of hope.
A new Urakami Cathedral was rebuilt and dedicated in 1959 on that site, with that original bell in one tower, and the other tower without a bell.
Nagai became a world famous advocate for peace and forgiveness after the war before dying of leukemia six years later.
Nagai offered an inspiring witness of faith, Nolan said. “His story is remarkable. He (Dr. Nagai) was right near the epicenter and sustained injuries. And yet despite his injuries, despite the fact that he had leukemia, and received more radiation from the bomb, he served his community. He sought to help people, and he sought to help rebuild the church (and) the community.” A sainthood cause for Nagai and his wife is underway.
As of November of this year, the Nagasaki Bell Project had raised just under $52,000 of the estimated $125,000 it will cost to cast, ship and install the large bronze bell. A foundry in St. Louis is making the new bell, which will look much like the original.
The new bell’s design will include some of the Latin that was inscribed on the original bell that Nolan said references “the years of faithful suffering and the martyrdom of the many Catholics (there) who stayed true to the faith.”
More than 400 martyrs of Japan have been recognized with beatification by the Catholic Church, and 42 have been canonized as saints.
Those beatified include 205 missionaries and hidden Christians persecuted and executed for their faith between 1598 and 1632. Pope Pius IX beatified them on May 7, 1867. Between 1603 and 1639, 188 additional priests and Catholics were persecuted and martyred. Pope Benedict XVI beatified them Nov. 24, 2008. On Feb. 5, 1597, 26 Catholics were executed by crucifixion in Nagasaki. Pope Pius IX canonized them June 8, 1862.
Nagai wrote a book about the Nagasaki bombing and its aftermath, “The Bells of Nagasaki,” which he hoped would inspire people to work for peace and oppose war. In November 1945, he was invited to speak at a requiem Mass for the victims of the atomic bomb there.
He noted the history of faith of Nagasaki’s Christians, and he contended that the deaths of so many of them in the bombing ultimately could be seen as a sacrifice to God for peace.
“Our church of Urakami kept the faith during 400 years of persecution when religion was proscribed and the blood of martyrs flowed freely,” Nagai said at the Mass. “During the war, this same church never ceased to pray day and night for a lasting peace. Was it not, then, the one unblemished lamb that had to be offered on the altar of God? Thanks to the sacrifice of this lamb, many millions who would otherwise have fallen victim to the ravages of war have been saved.”
Nolan noted that Nagai offered a Catholic perspective on suffering, emphasizing the need for forgiveness and peace and the need to rebuild, instead of responding with anger, bitterness and retribution.
“That’s how he could understand the bombing as a kind of peace offering to end the war and to bring peace to the world,” Nolan told the Catholic Standard, Washington’s archdiocesan newspaper.
In the last chapter of “The Bells of Nagasaki,” Nagai issued a heartfelt plea for peace and against nuclear war, writing, “Men and women of the world, never again plan war! With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From the atomic waste, the people of Urakami confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. The people of Urakami prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Urakami may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world.”
The way Nagai endured suffering with faith and grace offers an example to Catholics today, Nolan said.
“You look at his life. Here is a person who lost everything. He lost his wife. He lost his health. He lost his community. He lost his job. He lost many of his friends, and he lost his church. In the midst of all of that, he remained joyful, hopeful and offered a narrative of peace and forgiveness. It’s remarkable.”
Nolan’s interest in Nagasaki’s Christians was spurred by trips to that city and to Hiroshima when he was writing “Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age.”
After his father’s death, he received a box containing the personal papers of his grandfather, Dr. James F. Nolan, an OB-GYN radiologist who served as a doctor for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s top-secret World War II program to develop and deploy the first atomic bombs. Dr. Nolan was among a group of doctors, scientists and military officials who went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the month after the bombings to assess the damage.
Writing that book inspired Nolan to write a book on the history of Catholics in Nagasaki. Noting how they kept the faith during times of persecution and passed it on from generation to generation for 250 years without priests, he said, “It’s a legacy of suffering but staying faithful, and also staying hopeful.”
If the Nagasaki Bell Project is successful, Nolan hopes to be at Urakami Cathedral next August to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki by hearing the new bell ring out there. “It will be incredibly meaningful. I want to join with the parishioner who asked me and said that he wants to hear that. I do, too.”
The ringing of that new bell in the Urakami Cathedral would continue a goal of Dr. Takashi Nagai, who in “The Bells of Nagasaki” wrote about what it meant when the unearthed bell from the cathedral’s ruins rang out once again: “I pray and strive for this bell of peace to continue ringing until the last day of the world.”
More about the The Nagasaki Bell Project can be found at https://stkateriinstitute.org/nagasaki-bell-project.
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