28th July, 2015
A delegation of church leaders from seven countries will take part in a pilgrimage in early August to two Japanese cities destroyed by atomic bombs 70 years ago.
The church leaders – who represent World Council of Churches’ member organisations in the US, Germany, South Korea, Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and Norway – will visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to commemorate the bombings which decimated the cities on 6th and 9th August, 1945.
There, they will meet with atomic bomb survivors, church members, religious leaders and government officials and will take home calls for their own governments to join a new inter-governmental nuclear pledge to establish a formal ban on nuclear weapons.
While all seven nations represented by the pilgrims have vowed to support nuclear disarmament, the organisers of the pilgrimage point out that both the US and Pakistan have their own nuclear arsenals and the remaining countries are all prepared for the US to use nuclear weapons against their enemies.
Bishop Mary-Ann Swenson, of the United Methodist Church in the US and the leader of the delegation, said she invited Christians around the world to join them in prayer as they make the pilgrimage.
“We will be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to remember the horror of the atomic bomb, and to affirm what ever-larger majorities of the United Nations General Assembly are saying today, “It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances”,” she said.
Peter Prove, director of the WCC”s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), described the 70th anniversary of the bombings as a "significant milestone".
“It is timely because most of the survivors of the 1945 attacks are now in their 80s," he said. "Their cries of “never again” must still be heard. It is urgent because the nuclear powers are all modernizing their nuclear weapons instead of abolishing them as promised. It is also hopeful because a growing international majority is forming to ban nuclear weapons, and WCC member churches are involved.”
– DAVID ADAMS
