Ridding the world of nuclear weapons is an urgent moral issue, said three U.S. archbishops participating in a Pilgrimage of Peace to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, that coincided with the 80th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of those cities.
“We must assume the cause of global nuclear disarmament with the urgency that befits the seriousness of this cause and the dangerous threat that looms over all of humanity… Eighty years of nuclear terror is far too long. It is way past time to get rid of nuclear weapons,” said Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico during a symposium on nuclear weapons issues and world peace hosted by the Nagasaki Interreligious Fellowship for Peace on Aug. 7, 2025.
Also speaking at that symposium were Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy and Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, who participated in the pilgrimage along Seattle Archbishop Paul D. Etienne and with leaders and students from U.S. Catholic universities.
The pilgrimage included Masses, dialogues and other events with Japanese participants including Hiroshima Bishop Alexis Mitsuru Shirahama and Nagasaki Archbishop Peter Michiaki Nakamura. The Partnership for a World without Nuclear Weapons, a collaboration of the dioceses of Sante Fe, Seattle, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, coordinated the pilgrimage.
Archbishop Wester said faith communities should build such partnerships that work on nuclear disarmament.
“I believe that people of faith should begin to take a stronger and more active stance for universal and verifiable nuclear disarmament. We should appeal to a higher morality in order to eliminate this scourge of humanity,” he said.
For Archbishop Wester, the issue is close to home. Located within his archdiocese is the Los Alamos Laboratory, and he noted that the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe is located less than 200 yards from the secret gateway to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where the nuclear weapons used against Japan were developed.
An estimated 140,000 people died after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and an estimated 74,000 people died after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later.
“I believe that it is impossible to live out the Gospel today and at the same time remain complacent about humankind’s possession of nuclear weapons,” Archbishop Wester said, adding that those who live in New Mexico, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, “have a special role to play in sustaining a dynamic conversation that will hopefully lead to eventual nuclear disarmament.”
Pointing out how Pope Francis during a 2019 visit to Hiroshima said “the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral,” Archbishop Wester emphasized that, “The Catholic Church should take up nuclear disarmament as a critical pro-life issue. To me, that is common sense, when one nuclear weapon can kill millions and inflict incalculable suffering upon the survivors.”
Nuclear weapons, he said, pose an “existential threat that could end civilization overnight.”
“The possession of nuclear weapons by anyone is a threat to everyone. The only way to permanently eliminate this immoral threat is to permanently eliminate nuclear weapons,” Archbishop Wester said.
The New Mexico archbishop warned that countries with nuclear weapons, instead of working toward disarmament, are engaged in massive modernization programs and stockpiling those weapons.
“The threats are arguably even more risky today given multiple nuclear actors, new cyber threats, new hypersonic weapons and the advent of artificial intelligence,” he said.
Criticizing the concept of nuclear deterrence, Archbishop Wester said that rationale “has always been used to justify our nuclear weapons stockpile.”
Praising the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons initiated by the United Nations in 2017, the archbishop said that treaty is an effort toward building “a future world free of nuclear weapons,” and “true peace, not as the nuclear weapons powers would have it through collective terror, but through a peace built upon the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.”
All three U.S. archbishops participating in that symposium expressed gratitude to the Hibakusha, the atomic bombing survivors in Japan, for being living witnesses to the horrors of nuclear weapons.
In his remarks, Cardinal Cupich also criticized the policy of nuclear deterrence.
“The use of threats, which is the essence of the strategy of nuclear deterrence, can never bring about the peaceful coexistence between nations that an ethic inspired by solidarity, authentic development, and human rights can produce,” he said. “Nations, such as my own country of the United States, have sought to find security through nuclear stockpiles. What that has led us to is the uneasy reality of armed standoffs between nations, which we have mistaken for genuine peace.”
Chicago’s archbishop added that, “Genuine peace is more than a fearful truce. The human race must commit itself to the end of the nuclear arms race, for it is a race which none can truly win, but countless millions can truly lose.”
Cardinal Cupich noted the United States and Russia, which he called the world’s “twin nuclear superpowers,” have 10,500 of the roughly 12,300 nuclear warheads on earth. Chicago’s archbishop said diplomatic engagement between those two countries “should place nuclear arms reduction at the top of the agenda.”
Opening his remarks, Cardinal McElroy said, “As we have gathered together to mark the anniversary of the terrible atrocity of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in these days, we have reflected deeply upon the unique horror of atomic and nuclear weapons, on the lives they have taken, destroyed and scarred, and upon their threat to the entire existence of humanity at this moment in human history. Truly at Los Alamos, the United States created a destroyer of worlds that haunts the very core of the human family.”
Washington’s archbishop said religious leaders, drawing upon the nature of faith, can forge “true bonds of peace in a nuclear world,” and he highlighted four foundations of interreligious dialogue and solidarity that he said could “provide for the wider societal discussion on nuclear weapons and war in general.”
The first foundation, he said, “is to speak unswervingly to the transcendent as the source for every grace and beauty that we know in our world and as the one unassailable foundation for the dignity of every human person.”
The cardinal said people of faith “witness to the conviction that nuclear weapons are evil because they contravene the most fundamental values of our sacred identities as men and women placed upon this earth to safeguard and foster one another, not to destroy them in anger and war.”
The second foundation, he said, involves communities of faith seeking to share a common bond of true and abiding friendship, which can be seen in providing aid to the suffering of the world.
“A third element of interreligious dialogue that can contribute to finding a pathway of peace in our nuclear world is courage. So many of the divisions of hatred and misunderstanding in our world thrive precisely because people are afraid to confront them and the structures of power and alliances and prejudices which lie behind them,” Cardinal McElroy said.
Reflecting on the courage needed to seek greater understanding and build new bonds, the cardinal said, “The journey of faith in forging peace for our world is one that profoundly demands courage at every moment.”
The fourth foundation for interreligious dialogue “in this perilous nuclear moment requires us to seek and exhibit a truly radical unity in faith and action,” Cardinal McElroy said. He added, “In these days of remembrance and renewal, let us take up this challenge to banish the tribalism which denies the common identity of men and women and children and families in every land.”
Washington’s archbishop said religious leaders are “acutely aware of the technological threats posed by nuclear weapons” and of the peril posed by policies of the modernization and proliferation of those weapons.
But people of faith, he said, witness to the power of hope.
“Hope is not the belief that everything comes out well. It is the conviction that in our moments of greatest need, grace will surround us and help us to get through. We must bring this same hope to the future of nuclear weapons and that of war itself,” Cardinal McElroy said, adding, “We have the tools to call our societies to look more deeply at themselves and the world they are creating for themselves and future generations.”
On the 80th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, religious communities can bring depth to the dialogue on the threat nuclear weapons pose for humanity, the cardinal said.
As he concluded his remarks at the symposium, Cardinal McElroy said, “In witnessing to transcendence, we refuse to accept the myopia that denies the sacred dignity of the human person which was not produced by man nor is validated by man. In our friendship in faith, we build up the bonds of community and refuse to accept any surface meaning of the solidarity that binds us. In courage, we speak freed from many of the strictures that bind leaders in other dimensions of civil society, and at our best constitute a truly prophetic witness to our tormented world. And in the throes of hope, we refuse to assign the nuclear peril and the future of war to a fatalistic determinism, but instead cry out: It need not be so!”
Rather than being “a sidelight to the construction of our nuclear future,” religious communities throughout the world “have a singular capacity to challenge hatred and tribalism, forge solidarity and reflect the core elements of substantive peace,” the cardinal said.
Links to texts of talks by Washington Cardinal Robert W. McElroy during the August 2025 Pilgrimage of Peace to Japan commemorating the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
https://adw.org/about-us/who-we-are/robert-cardinal-mcelroy/pilgrimage-of-peace-to-japan/
