Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Message of Fatima

By Roberto de Mattei   |   25 June 2025

Eighty years ago, World War II ended. After the surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, the United States was still at war with Japan. On the morning of 6 August 1945, at 8:15, the American air force released an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on 9 August, another bomb exploded on Nagasaki. The two cities were reduced to piles of rubble. The total number of victims was estimated at around 200,000, almost exclusively civilians. Emperor Hirohito, on 14 August, accepted the unconditional surrender of Japan.

The political and military authorities of the United States claimed that this massacre had served to shorten the conflict, saving the lives of a great number of American and Japanese soldiers who would have died if the military operations had been prolonged. Yet it would have been enough to detonate the bomb exclusively on a military target, to demonstrate the power of the bomb in a spectacular way without massacring so many innocents. The Hague Convention of 1907 on the laws and customs of war, in force at the time, stated in Article 25, “The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.” But these rules had already been violated by the belligerents on both sides, making many actions of the Second World War immoral.

The atomic bomb was, and remains, the most devastating device that the human mind can conceive.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear warheads were 15 and 20 kilotons respectively. Those of today (American, Russian and Chinese) are 5 to 10 times stronger, if they are used as tactical weapons, whilst strategic bombs can be tens or hundreds of times more powerful.

Yet according to Catholic doctrine, however terrible, the nuclear bomb is less serious than a single grave sin. The reason, as Saint Thomas Aquinas explains, is that “mortal sin is an immense evil, according to its species; it surpasses all bodily harm, even the corruption of the entire material universe” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 73, a. 8, ad 3). Physical evil may even play a role in divine Providence and serve a greater good, but a single mortal sin is worse than all the physical evils of the universe put together, because it is a direct and voluntary offence against God, causing the eternal loss of the soul, and the good of the soul is infinitely superior to that of the body (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 26, a. 3).

In Hiroshima, as in Nagasaki, a few episodes nonetheless occurred that remind us how God’s love is stronger than death and can protect us from all evil.

In Hiroshima in 1945, there was a small community of German Jesuit fathers, who lived in the parish house of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, only eight blocks from the epicentre of the nuclear blast.

One of these Jesuits, Father Hubert Schiffer (1915–1982), recounts that Mass had just been celebrated and they had gone to breakfast when the bomb fell: 

“Suddenly, a terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me, whirled me ‘round and ‘round like a leaf in a gust of autumn wind.”

For a whole day, the four Jesuits were enveloped in an inferno of fire, smoke and toxic clouds, but none of them was contaminated by the radiation, and their parish remained standing, while all the other houses around were destroyed and no one survived. When the religious were rescued, the doctors noted with amazement that their bodies seemed immune to radiation and any other harmful effects of the explosion. Father Schiffer lived another 37 years in good health, and attended the Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia in 1976. At that time all the members of the Hiroshima community were still alive. From the day the bombs fell, the surviving Jesuits were examined more than 200 times by scientists, without any conclusion being reached, except that their survival of the explosion was an event inexplicable for human science.

The Jesuits attributed their deliverance to Our Lady of Fatima, whom they venerated by reciting the Rosary every day. “As missionaries,” Fr Schiffer attested, “we wanted to live the message of Our Lady of Fatima in our country, and so we prayed the Rosary every day,”

A similar miracle also occurred in Nagasaki. In this city, there was the Franciscan convent Mugenzai no Sono — “Garden of the Immaculata” — founded by St Maximilian Kolbe. With the explosion of the atomic bomb this convent also remained unharmed, as happened in Hiroshima with the Jesuit house. The Franciscans of Nagasaki venerated the Immaculata and spread the message of Fatima. Father Kolbe, the apostle of the Immaculata, had died on 14 August 1941 in Auschwitz.

These episodes confirm a great truth: we must not be afraid of the nuclear bomb, but of the moral disorder that afflicts humanity. Sin is the only reason for the physical evils that inundate us, because, as Saint Paul says, it is through sin that suffering and death entered the world (Rom 5:12). But prayer conquers evil, and at Fatima Our Lady taught that the weapon par excellence of the Christian combatant is the Holy Rosary. In an interview on 26 December 1957 with Father Agostino Fuentes, Sister Lucia, one of the visionaries of Fatima, said:

“The punishment from Heaven is imminent. … God has decided to give the world the last two remedies against evil, which are the Rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There will be no others … There is no problem, however difficult, of a material or especially spiritual nature, in the private life of each of us or in the life of peoples and nations, that cannot be resolved by the prayer of the Holy Rosary”.

It is true, therefore, that the prayer of the Rosary is more powerful than the atomic bomb.