Sorry, guys, but your opinions are counter to what the Church teaches. It is no more permissable to intentionally target civilian populations with nuclear weapons than it is to use human embryos as research material to develop a cure for cancer.
Pope Paul VI called the bombings a “butchery of untold magnitude”. Pope John Paul II called it “a self destruction of mankind” and included Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Auschwitz as places of pilgrimage.
The Catechism states:
I know it’s tough to take. I had always supported the bombings (I come from a military family) and excused them as well (using the same rationalizations you’ve mentioned above), but when I became a Catholic, I had to start re-evaluating my positions on certain things that didn’t wash with what the Church taught, even if it seemed counterintuitive or wrong to me.
Basically it comes down to: either we can trust in the Church’s judgment, or we can join the cafeteria.
Sorry if this is getting OT, but the principle of double effect and the idea of using evil means to achieve a good end are the *same *points of contention in both ESCR and the use of WMDs. I’ll bow out at this point so as not to derail this any further.
With all due respect you take the past Pope out of context. All wars are destructive and Evil is what the discussion was being raised. At times wars need to be fought and one must take up the sword. As far as Japan was concerned it was at the point of being unable to distinguish between civilian and military. It is never ok to deliberately kill innocents but I would like to hear the Pope say that the towns surrouding the death camps in Germany were innocent civilians as the daily aroma of burning flesh filled the morning air night after night of firing up the ovens.
Japanese military and civilians in the tens of thousands when areas and towns were defeated the U.S. by convenrtional methods retained their honor and committed hari kari
Kamakaze hey were like the today’s version of suicide bombers. The Japanese had strict codes of honour. They would rather die than surrender or be taken hostage. So, in the war of the Pacific, the Japanese thought a very effective way of winning would be using kamikaze pilots. They would fly their planes, full of explosives, into American planes, killing as many people as they could. This was an extremely effective, if not completely barbaric, stragedy
In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and headed north by northwest toward Japan. The bomber’s primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 soldiers.
At 11:00 a.m., August 6 (Washington D.C. time), radio stations began playing a prepared statement from President Truman (right) informing the American public that the United States had dropped an entirely new type of bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima – an “atomic bomb.” Truman warned that if Japan still refused to surrender unconditionally, as demanded by the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, the United States would attack additional targets with equally devastating results. Two days later, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, ending American hopes that the war would end before Russian entry into the Pacific theater. By August 9th, American aircraft were showering leaflets all over Japan informing its people that “We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate. We have just begun to to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.” Meanwhile, Tibbets’s bomber group was simply waiting for the weather to clear in order to drop its next bomb, the plutonium weapon nicknamed “Fat Man” (right) that was destined for the city of Nagasaki.
one must define civilians as if woman and children take up the sword aganist their enemy then they cease to be civilians
Unfortunately the atomic bomb saved millions of lives.
