From Forums of the Virgin Mary [translation]:
[Note: opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Spirit Daily]
A black episode in history that had Catholics at the center:
Behind what happens on earth, a supernatural world is acting that we do not see with our senses, but we can appreciate on a spiritual level.
There are good and bad forces acting, but they do not have the last word, because the free will of men will be the one that tips the balance.
In the end, men are the ones who decide which forces to support.
And the case of the atomic bombs on Japan in World War II shows how the evil one not only encouraged Japan to receive the bombs at the end of the war, but also that they affected Catholics more than others.
Here we will talk about how the evil one encouraged the use of atomic explosions on Japan even though the war was almost over, how he operated so that one of those bombs fell on the Catholic center of Japan, and how God was present leaving us his message to the future.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later, is, together with the Nazi Concentration Camps, one of the saddest episodes in our recent history.
Probably around two hundred thousand people died in the attacks and from radiation poisoning, the vast majority civilians.
And the small Japanese Catholic community was the one that suffered the most from this tragedy, although there were also remarkable graces that show us that God is present in the hardest moments.
This is clearly a demon operation.
The Manhattan project was responsible for carrying out the construction of the first atomic bombs during World War II, in the early 1940s, under the mandate of President Roosevelt.
Scientists Oppenheimer and Fermi would be two of the leading figures in the project, but Einstein also participated in a stage of public relations with the political power.
With these bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic age of the 20th century was inaugurated.
But these bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by top US military officials like MacArthur. [scroll for more]
And Eisenhower would say that “Japan was already defeated and… dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
However, the evil one operated on the politicians and President Truman assumed the responsibilities; let us remember that Truman was a Freemason, Grand Master of the Missouri Lodge.
And given the magnitude of what was seen after the atomic blasts, it is understandable that the US authorities censored the reports of the shattered cities and did not allow the films and photographs to reach the public, as happened instead with the concentration camps. .
Because if not, Americans and the rest of the world might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes from concentration camps.
And it is because of this management that the vast majority supported Truman, believing that the bombs were necessary to end the war and save thousands of American lives.
However, there were voices that were immediately raised criticizing what happened.
For example, when Truman received an honorary degree from Oxford University in June 1956, the Catholic philosopher Gertrude Anscombe protested that Truman was a war criminal.
Felix Morley, an academic, Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the founders of the Human Events institution, called on his countrymen to atone for what had been done and proposed that groups of Americans be sent to Hiroshima, as the Germans were sent to witness what had been done in the Nazi camps.
And the Pauline priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World, called the atomic bombings “the most powerful blow ever struck against Christian civilization and the moral law.”
However, God writes straight on crooked lines and the horror of what happened is what has led the whole world to take atomic weapons with great respect and responsibility, because nobody wants to go through that again.
And there is a strange political and supernatural relationship between the explosion of those atomic bombs and the Catholics and the Catholic Church.
The official version is that a top-secret typewritten document ordered the United States to “place its first special bomb” on “Hiroshima, Kokura, and Niigata on the priority list.”
And with a ballpoint pen, someone inserted “and Nagasaki” after “Niigata” with an arrow, and you never knew who it was.
Finally, bad weather made Nagasaki the city that received the second bomb.
Nagasaki had about 240 thousand inhabitants.
And an alleged miscalculation meant that the bomb did not fall in the center of the city but in the Catholic area of the city, immediately liquidating some 75,000 people, and a similar number in the following days due to radiation.
The explosion made an almost direct hit on the largest cathedral in Asia, which was in that district of Urakami, north of the commercial center of the city.
It decimated 70% of the Catholic community, many of them descendants of “hidden Christians,” the Kakure Kirishitans, who had hidden their faith in the wake of Shinto and Buddhist persecution in the past.
Nagasaki had been an important center of Catholicism in Japan in the 16th century, promoted by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries.
Ties between Nagasaki and the Catholic Church date back to when a lord donated land to Jesuit missionaries from Portugal in 1580.
The new religion spread so fast that it was outlawed as a threat to local rulers.
And from 1597 until almost the end of the 1800s, dozens of Japanese Catholics were martyred, which drove them underground, surviving without priests for 300 years.
In 1865, Father Petitjean discovers this clandestine Church, which was made known to him after he assured that he was celibate, that he was devoted to the Virgin Mary, and that he obeyed the Pope of Rome.
The choice of Nagasaki as the repository of the nuclear explosion has always caused suspicion.
The Vatican never publicly discussed the bias behind America’s willingness to stab Japan’s Catholic heartland on August 9, 1945.
But privately, archivists and experts in Rome recall the intense diplomatic row between Washington and Rome over Japan, which marred their relations during the war.
Three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pius XII had established diplomatic ties with Tokyo, and the United States reacted with much displeasure.
To which the Vatican replied that diplomatic relations do not mean approving all the actions of a foreign interlocutor.
But behind the scenes it is known that the Church saw no choice but to establish diplomatic relations with Tokyo, because the empire was putting many Catholics under its control and the Vatican had to protect the spiritual interests of some 20 million Catholics in the territory occupied by the Japanese.
And when Urakami Cathedral suffered a direct nuclear hit and Japan’s largest Catholic community was wiped out, the Vatican unofficially saw it as an American response.
But in the face of so much pain, in Hiroshima as in Nagasaki, the Hand of God was seen.
In Nagasaki, the Franciscan convent that Saint Maximilian Kolbe had established in the 1930s was unscathed due to the special protection of the Virgin Mary.
The brothers prayed the Rosary there every day and were not affected by the bomb.
And the best known was the preservation of the house where eight Jesuit priests lived in Hiroshima, which is considered one of the great miracles of the Holy Rosary.
Half a million people were wiped out in the surrounding area.
However, the church and the eight Jesuit priests stationed there survived, despite living less than a kilometer from the epicenter of the attack.
They did not sustain any injuries.
They all lived the rest of their lives without experiencing radiation sickness, despite being exposed to high levels of radioactivity.
Neither did any suffer hearing loss from the blast or any other visible long-term effects or illnesses.
Father Schiffer, the leader of the group, attributed it to his devotion to the Blessed Virgin and his daily Rosary of Fatima.
He thought that he received a shield of protection from the Blessed Virgin, who protected him from all radiation and ill effects. “In that house, we recited the Holy Rosary together every day and we believe that we survived because we lived the message of Fatima,” he said.
In both cases, in the Nagasaki convent founded by Maximilian Kolbe and in the house of the 8 Jesuits who remained unharmed in Hiroshima, the message is the protection of the Rosary and the Blessed Virgin.
This does not mean that the rest of the Catholics who died did not pray the rosary or were not Marian, and that is why they died.
Rather, it means that God allows disasters to pass for the purpose of purifying the world, in this case so that men would have respect for the atomic bomb seeing its consequences.
And for catechetical purposes, to show the protection of the Rosary and the Virgin Mary.
And in the case of the victims, we must all remember that God is more concerned with our eternal life than with our life on earth, which is one of learning and lasts only a breath.
Well, up to here what we wanted to talk about behind the scenes is that Catholics have been the most harmed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the message that there is in it.
And I would like to ask you if you think that the choice of Nagasaki as a war objective was the hand of the evil one or was it simply a consequence?
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