From Fr. John Dear:
This week, as we remember the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago, the Doomsday Clock of “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” stands at 100 seconds to midnight—the closest it’s ever been to nuclear war since August 6th, 1945. We are closer to nuclear war right now than we have ever been. Some 14,000 nuclear weapons stand ready to go. Weapons have proliferated, many nations, possibly other terrorist groups, have them, and conflicts around the planet, particularly between India and Pakistan, hold us teetering on the brink of another Hiroshima holocaust.
For forty years, I’ve been speaking out and protesting nuclear weapons. For nearly twenty years now, my friends and I have a led an annual Hiroshima day vigil outside the Los Alamos, New Mexico Nuclear Weapons Labs, birthplace of the bomb. And yet, the Biden Administration has carried on the legacy of the Trump Administration by pouring billions of dollars down the drain of the nuclear industry hellhole, and this sinful waste of money has been met, in this time of divisive alienation, with widespread silence and complicity.
Yes, there are signs of hope—such as the great global organizing of the Nobel Peace Prize winning group, “The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons” (www.icanw.org), the Plowshares disarmament movement, and Pope Francis’ extraordinary recent statements condemning every aspect of the development and maintenance of these weapons of mass destruction.
But I wonder why, in the face of our global crises—from environmental destruction, and catastrophic climate change, to the COVID pandemic, to extreme poverty and deepening racism—why so few seem to speak out against this unspeakable, existential threat which we continue to inflict upon ourselves and the whole planet.
Lately, I’ve been thinking back to my friends and teachers, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the legendary peace activists, and founders of the Plowshares disarmament movement. As I kid, I regularly attended their weekend retreats, and witnessed them open their Bibles and read from the Hebrew scriptures about idolatry. I rarely understood what they were talking about. They would talk for hours about the consequences of our idolatry through our quiet support of nuclear weapons and ever-worsening loss of our humanity. As I get older and our predicament worsens, alas, it all makes sense.
I well remember, for instance, spending a quiet afternoon thirty-five years ago listening to Daniel Berrigan read Psalm 115. I expected sweet reflections on the spiritual life of peace. Instead, I heard sharp denunciations and condemnations of the idols of war. To this day, I’ve never heard anybody else say such things.
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see.
They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell.
They have hands but do not feel, feet but do not walk,
and no sound rises from their throats.
Their makers shall be like them, and all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:4-8)
The idols of this world are dead, the psalmist wrote long ago, as are those who worship them. That means, Dan explained, you can’t live in peace and the fullness of life if you spend your years quietly supporting the culture’s idols of death. You must take a stand, speak out and resist.
What is the antidote to idolatry? The Berrigans testified to their faith in the living God of peace, but they insisted that such faith can only grow within the boundaries of nonviolence. Belief in the God of peace, in a culture as sick as ours requires publicly renouncing belief in the culture’s false gods of war and all other instruments of death, according to Psalm 115.
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Other louie postings on Nagasaki & Hiroshima are here:
Flash of Light, Wall of Fire (2020)
Nagasaki (2018)
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