On August 6, 1945, Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe was serving as master of novices at the Jesuit novitiate outside Hiroshima. At 8:15 a.m., his life changed in an instant.
“I was in my room with another priest at 8:15 when suddenly we saw a blinding light,” he later wrote. “As I opened the door which faced the city, we heard a formidable explosion.”
The Jesuit house was badly shaken, but it remained standing. Hiroshima, of course, did not.
When Fr. Arrupe and the other Jesuits stepped outside, the scale of the catastrophe became clear. He never forgot the first victims he saw: “a group of young women, 18 or 20 years old, clinging to one another as they dragged themselves along the road.” Burned, bleeding, and barely able to walk, they were the beginning of what he described as a “steady procession.”
Fr. Arrupe had studied medicine before entering the Society of Jesus, and that training became suddenly urgent. With almost no supplies and no outside assistance, he and the novices converted the novitiate into an improvised hospital for the wounded pouring out of the city.
Who was Pedro Arrupe?
His account is unsparing. “To cleanse the wounds it was necessary to puncture and open the blisters,” he wrote. The injuries were so extensive that ordinary containers quickly proved useless. “At first we used nickel-plated pails, but after the third patient … we began to use kettles and basins we could find in the house.”
The scene was chaos, but Fr. Arrupe’s response was disciplined and practical. He organized the novices, treated burns and wounds, and stayed close to those who were dying. Before beginning, he remembered, “We did the only thing that could be done in the presence of such mass slaughter: We fell on our knees and prayed for guidance, as we were destitute of all human help.”
That line captures what made the moment so decisive. Fr. Arrupe answered with prayer, courage, and work.
He also understood that moment as emblematic of his priesthood, a vocation that demanded risk. As he later wrote, “a priest cannot remain outside the city just to preserve his life.” Even amid fears of lingering poison in the air, he and others went in to help the wounded and care for the dead.
Hiroshima marked Fr. Arrupe permanently. Long before he became Superior General of the Jesuits, the bombing had already shaped the man he would become. His witness still carries force because it is concrete. In one of history’s darkest moments, Pedro Arrupe did not turn away. He prayed, he served, and he remained with the victims.
Pope Francis
Some 12,000 miles away, an 8-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio was affected by the news of the bomb so much that he would remember it his whole life. "I remember the tear-filled yes of my mother and my father when the news reached them. They wept," he wrote in his autobiography.
Jorge Mario was a young Jesuit novice when Fr. Arrupe was superior general. The young religious wrote the priest asking permission to be sent to work in the Japanese missions as he had. But Fr. Arrupe denied the permission because Jorge's lungs were too weak.
Decades later, the Pope would look back on the priest as an "iconic figure for the Jesuits." He quoted his once-superior: "only by being a man-or-woman-for-others does one become fully human." And the Pope remembered that Fr. Arrupe was "a man of prayer. ... I remember that he prayed sitting on the ground, as the Japanese do."
