Wolfgang Kilian, Augsburg (1581-1663). The Martyrs of Nagasaki (1597). Engraving. 1628. MDZ: Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum, Digitale Bibliothek. Wolfgang Kilian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%A4rtyrer_von_Nagasaki_1628.jpg.
Tom Faletti
August 28, 2025
While I was doing some research for a post about peacemaking and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, I learned that the Christian community in Nagasaki has a long and remarkable history.
Nagasaki’s early Christian history
In Nagasaki, the history of Christianity goes back almost 500 years, to the arrival of Portuguese sailors in 1543.
Nagasaki was built to serve as a port for Portuguese ships, under the supervision of Jesuit missionaries and with the support of the local Japanese lord. It became a center for Christian activity in Japan.
When the power structure of Japan turned against the presence of Christians there, the government forbade the preaching of Christianity.
Nagasaki was seen as a center of the Catholic faith. In the late 16th century, 20 Japanese Christians and 6 foreign priests were arrested, imprisoned, forced to walk through the snow to Nagasaki, and crucified (hung on crosses with chains and ropes) as a warning to the large Christian community in Nagasaki. (Today, people can visit a Twenty-Six Martyrs Monument and Museum in Nagasaki.)
Christianity was driven underground in a campaign of persecution and suppression that lasted for more than 200 years. Amazingly, Christians survived in secret for generations, until a series of government reforms in the 1850s allowed them to practice their faith in public again.
When the Christians emerged, they got to work. By 1864, they had built the Oura Church, which served as their first cathedral. In 1895 they built Urakami Cathedral.
Nagasaki Christians arise from the ashes of atomic ruin
When the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the Oura Church survived the blast. It still stands today.
Urakami Cathedral was not so fortunate. It was 500 meters from the spot where the atomic bomb detonated. The blast damaged it so severely that it could not be restored. It was replaced with an entirely new building in 1959. (Remains of the original Urakami Cathedral are on display in Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.)
The bell that had hung in the right tower of the cathedral was found in the rubble and saved, but the bell that had been in the left tower was totally destroyed.
More than half of the Catholics in the Urakami district of Nagasaki – approximately 8,500 of the cathedral’s 12,000 parishioners – were killed.
The Christian community in Nagasaki did not allow the attack to disperse them. They remained a community, just as they had remained a community underground during the years of repression.
They built a new cathedral in 1959. The surviving bell was re-installed in the right tower of the new structure, but the left tower was left without a bell.
When Professor James L. Nolan, Jr., of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was researching the Nagasaki bomb attack in the spring of 2023, the Catholics of Urakami Cathedral were there to talk with him.
One of the cathedral parishioners suggested to Nolan that perhaps American Catholics could provide a new bell for the left tower of the cathedral. Nolan was intrigued by the idea and went into action. He led a successful campaign that designed, casted, transported, and installed a new bell, which filled the empty spot in the left tower.
On August 9, 2025 at 11:02 AM, the exact moment that the atomic bomb detonated 80 years earlier, the new bell rang out from the left tower of Urakami Cathedral. For more on the Nagasaki Bell Project, see Sound a Bell, Take a Step, Be a Peacemaker.
Nolan saw the story of the new Nagasaki bell as part of the longer history of the Christian Church in Nagasaki: a history of people enduring suffering, staying true to their faith, and now welcoming a gesture of peace from the nation that had attacked them.
Nolan said that the ringing of that bell was “a calling to mind of the years of faithful suffering and the martyrdom of the many Catholics who stayed true to the faith, and a calling to mind (of) their example.”
Nagasaki Christians are an example to us
Would we be so faithful and persistent, through hundreds of years of persecution and suppression, and then to bring our parish back to life after an atomic attack killed two-thirds of the people in our parish?
God is always with us. The question is, do we stay with him?
Copyright © 2025, Tom Faletti (Faith Explored, www.faithexplored.com). This material may be reproduced in whole or in part without alteration, for nonprofit use, provided such reproductions are not sold and include this copyright notice or a similar acknowledgement that includes a reference to Faith Explored and www.faithexplored.com. See www.faithexplored.com for more materials like this.