At 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki, Japan and left a burning hellscape in the city, killing more than 70,000 people. Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Nagasaki, known as Urakami Cathedral after the district of the city where it was located, lay in ruins.
Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945, ending the deadliest war in human history that had an estimated worldwide death toll of more than 60 million people.
Later one of the bells from Urakami Cathedral’s two bell towers was found intact in the rubble of the cathedral, and since it was rebuilt in 1959, that bell has rung out from its bell tower, while the cathedral’s adjacent bell tower lacked a bell.
On Aug. 9, 2025, people gathered outside the cathedral, and others assembled inside for a Mass, and at 11:02 a.m. that day – the 80th anniversary of the exact moment when the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki – two bells in its adjacent towers rang out together for the first time in 80 years, tolling for peace. Alongside the original bell was a new bell, a gift of faith and solidarity from Catholics in the United States.
“I enjoyed witnessing the evident joy it brought to the people of Nagasaki. Many people communicated their deep gratitude for the gift of the bell,” said James Nolan, who led the Nagasaki Bell Project.
Nolan, the Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was inspired to undertake the project while visiting Nagasaki 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 left tower of the Urakami Cathedral, 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.
More than 640 people contributed to the Nagasaki Bell Project, raising $125,000 to cover the cost of the bell and its transportation and installation.
In an email interview, Nolan noted that the new bronze bell, which weighs about 750 pounds, has the same size, shape and basic design of the original bell. The bell was cast in the Netherlands, and a St. Louis foundry, the McShane Bell Company, managed the project. Since the bell is a gift from Americans, the new bell was named the St. Kateri Bell of Hope, and includes an image of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks” who is the first indigenous saint of North America.
At a blessing ceremony for the new bell for Urakami Cathedral on July 17, Nagasaki Archbishop Peter Michiaki Nakamura expressed gratitude to Professor Nolan and to U.S. Catholics for the gift of the bell. He noted that 100 years earlier in 1925, the two original bells had been installed in the first Urakami Cathedral.
Reflecting on the role of church bells, Archbishop Nakamura said, “Bells have provided a rhythm for the lives of God’s people. First, they announce the time of morning, noon and evening. They signal the gathering of the faithful in prayer. Bells are rung to joyfully bless marriages and to send the departed off to heaven.”
Nagasaki’s archbishop added that, “The bells remind us that the Lord is with us at all times and wishes us happiness.”
The new bell, he said, has “a special meaning. It is a sign of forgiveness and reconciliation for the tragedy of inhumanity caused by the tragic killing of war and nuclear weapons 80 years ago, a sign of remembrance for the victims of the atomic bombings and war, and a sign of hope that we can return to our true humanity… and walk together toward world peace in the future.”
Concluding his remarks, Archbishop Nakamura said, “Let us hope that our voices and our footsteps will echo for the sake of hope, happiness and peace.”
The original Urakami Cathedral that was destroyed by the atomic bombing had been completed in 1914 and was reportedly the largest Christian church in the Asian-Pacific region.
That cathedral had been built brick-by-brick by Catholics there and was a monument of faith to a Christian community that had endured centuries of persecution in Nagasaki, a city where saints were martyred and generations of “hidden Christians” kept the faith and passed it on, even when Catholicism was outlawed and priests were forbidden to serve there.
In 1597, 26 Japanese Christians were arrested and forced to march barefoot for 30 days to Nagasaki, where they were hung on crosses and martyred on the Nishizaka Hill overlooking the city. Those Christians included St. Paul Miki, who along with those other 25 martyrs of Japan was canonized in 1862.
When Catholic missionaries returned to Japan in the 1860s, they found that thousands of “hidden Christians” in Nagasaki had secretly preserved the faith for generations.
But between 1869 and 1873, more than 3,600 Christian villagers in Nagasaki were exiled by ruling authorities, and 650 of them died in exile during that persecution. After the exiled Christians returned to Nagasaki, the faithful there began building the Urakami Cathedral in 1895 after the ban on Christianity was lifted. Fifty years later, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 killed about 8,500 of the cathedral’s 12,000 parishioners.
At the blessing ceremony for the St. Kateri Bell of Hope in Nagasaki on July 17, Professor Nolan noted that the new bell included words inscribed in Latin that had been on the bell destroyed in the atomic bombing:
“I sing to God with a constant ringing in the place where so many Japanese martyrs with honor have worshipped and have, by their example, called their brothers and sisters and their descendants to the fellowship of the true faith and of heaven.”
Pointing out that more than 600 Catholics across the United States had made donations to the Nagasaki Bell Project, Nolan said, “Many of them knew very little of the suffering that occurred on the ground in this place. When they did learn of it, compassion and respect have often characterized their responses. In comments to me and in notes accompanying their donations, American Catholics have expressed sorrow, regret, sadness and a wish for forgiveness and reconciliation. And they have also communicated respect, admiration, appreciation, and a sense of having been deeply inspired by the courage, fortitude, joy, and perseverance of the Nagasaki faithful.”
He noted that U.S. Catholics had expressed hope that “the ringing of these bells continue to remind the people of Nagasaki of our sorrow for what their people have endured and reassure them of ours and God’s love for them.”
Concluding his remarks at the blessing ceremony, Nolan expressed thanks “for the great honor it has been to be a part of restoring this bell to you, to your community, and to your beautiful cathedral.”
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, and was among of 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 Professor Nolan to write his upcoming book on the history of Catholics in Nagasaki.
A key figure in Nagasaki’s Catholic history was Dr. Takashi Nagai, a physician and radiologist who after suffering from a serious head injury in the aftermath of the atomic bombing, 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.
Dr. Nagai encouraged fellow Catholics to dig in the cathedral’s ruins for the bells that had called them to prayer from its two bell towers. While one bell had been found damaged and unusable, the volunteers unearthed the 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.
In his book “The Bells of Nagasaki,” Dr. Nagai 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.”
In the last chapter of that book, he 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.”
Dr. Nagai became a world famous advocate for peace and forgiveness after the war before dying of leukemia six years later. He and his wife are now being considered for sainthood.
Now the two bells – the original bell and the new bell given by U.S. Catholics – ring together in the adjacent towers of Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki.
On the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing there, U.S. Catholics on a Pilgrimage of Peace including Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy and three other archbishops along with students and leaders from Catholic universities in the United States joined Japanese Catholics for a Memorial Mass at Urakami Cathedral. Catholics from two nations that had been at war eight decades earlier prayed for the victims of the atomic bombing and for an end to nuclear weapons in the world, on a day when the two bells tolled together for peace.
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