These comments are by Father George Zabelka, a Catholic
chaplain with the US Army air force, who was priest and pastor for the
airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
He was discharged in 1946, and during the next 20 years he realised
that what he had done and believed during the war was wrong, and that the
only way he could be a Christian was to be a pacifist. These comments are
from an interview he gave to Sojourners Magazine in 1980.
"For the first three centuries, the three centuries closest to Christ,
the Church was a pacifist church. With Constantine the Church accepted
the Pagan Roman ethic of a just war and slowly began to involve its membership
in mass slaughter, first for the state and later for the faith.
"Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, whatever other differences they
may have had on theological esoterica, all agreed that Jesus' clear and
unambiguous teaching on the rejection of violence and on love of
enemies was not to be taken seriously. And so each of the major branches
of CHristianity by different theological methods modified our Lord's teaching
in these matters unti l all three were able to do WHAT JESUS REJECTED
- that is, take an eye for an eye, slaughter, maim, torture.
"It seems a 'sign' to me that 1700 years of Christian terror and slaughter
should arrive at August 9th 1945 when Catholics dropped an A bomb on top
of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan.
"One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken
out against the atomic bombing of nuns - three orders of Catholic sisters
were destroyed in Nagasaki that day. One would have thought that I would
have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics
shouldn't bomb Catholic children . I didn't.
I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, was heir to a Christianity
that had for 1700 years engaged in murder, revenge, torture, the pursuit
of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord."
Fr George Zabelka
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