The OFM Nagasaki Project in St. Peter's Square

On 10 June in St. Peter's Square, as part of the World Meeting on Human Fraternity, a video was projected made by the OFM Nagasaki Project, an International Franciscan Community of Peace, whose basic concept is to spread and promote lasting peace in the city of Nagasaki and around the world.

The meeting, entitled “Not Alone”, was promoted and organized by the Vatican Foundation “Fratelli tutti”, chaired by His Eminence Card. Mauro Gambetti, OFMConv, who asked the Nagasaki Project for the creation of a video to be projected during the meeting.

In the video, recorded by the Order’s Nagasaki Project International Community of Peace, in collaboration with Br John Wong, General Definitor and President of the General Commission for the Service for Dialogue, in at and around the hypocentre of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki, Japan, and edited by the Communication Office of the San Pedro Bautista Province (Philippines), we see Br Jacobo Hitoshi Kataoka, OFM, direct descendant of hidden Christians, who were persecuted for over 240 years in Nagasaki. He was 9 years old and had just finished confessing in the Urakami church when the atomic bomb exploded on August 9, 1945. In a few minutes he recounts his experience of violence and death, of nuclear weapons and hatred, but also and above all of peace, of relationship with God, of fraternity.

Watch the video: “No violence, no more violence”.

The “Nagasaki Project: International Peace Community” was born in 2010 from an idea of the then Minister General Br José Rodríguez Carballo, when he visited Nagasaki on the occasion of the meeting of the East Asian Conference, held in Japan. His short stay and experience of the place inspired him to dream of an international community of friars in Nagasaki, which would be a living testimony of peace and reconciliation.

Nagasaki was chosen for its history: everyone remembers the atomic bomb dropped in 1945, but little is said about the persecutions that Christians suffered in the previous centuries (from the 16th to the 19th century). It is no coincidence that the OFM Province is called the “Holy Martyrs of Japan”: among these 26 martyrs, killed in 1597, there was also the missionary friar San Pedro Bautista (who gave his name to the Province in the north of the Philippines).

The basic concept of the Project is to live as a contemplative fraternity on an evangelizing mission. The friars of the Nagasaki fraternity support the campaign to ban nuclear weapons, collaborate in peace activities with the JPIC Office of the East Asia Conference and with other agencies that carry out the same type of advocacy.