Bishop Shirahama of Hiroshima and Sant'Egidio led a 75-hour prayer relay linking Japan, Rome, and New York — closing at the exact minute the second bomb fell.
At 8 a.m. on Thursday, August 6 — the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — Bishop Alexis Mitsuru Shirahama of Hiroshima celebrated Mass at the World Peace Memorial Cathedral in the city’s Noboricho district, at the very hour the diocese gathers each year, minutes after the 1945 blast. With that Mass, a 75-hour vigil for peace began — and it was designed to end at a precise moment: 11:02 a.m. on Sunday, August 9, the exact minute the second atomic bomb struck Nagasaki.
The vigil, organized by Bishop Shirahama and the Community of Sant'Egidio in collaboration with the Focolare Movement, parishioners, and volunteers, was not confined to Japan. Three spaces were opened simultaneously for continuous prayer: the crypt of the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary in Hiroshima, the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in New York, and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome. For 75 consecutive hours, the three cities prayed in relay — east to west, across time zones, across the distance that separates a cathedral crypt from a Roman basilica — for the victims of the bombings and of all current conflicts.
The vigil ended at the same moment Pope Leo XIV was speaking from the window of the Apostolic Palace. The Pope’s Angelus address on Sunday morning reflected on the Gospel of Jesus walking on the water — Matthew 14:22-33 — and the disciples’ experience of powerlessness in the storm. In Nagasaki, Bishop Shirahama closed the vigil with a homily on the same passage. “Faced with a storm of evil so overwhelming that we want to cover our eyes,” he told the congregation at Urakami Cathedral, “we may find ourselves on the verge of despair. There is only so much we can do to build peace.” But Peter’s cry from the sinking boat — “Lord, save me!” — and Jesus’s immediate response pointed to the same truth the Pope had articulated in Rome: that faith is born precisely in the moment of helplessness, and that Christ is already there.
The vigil was explicitly connected to Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. In a joint message, Bishop Shirahama and Sant’Egidio president Marco Impagliazzo reflected on the Pope’s words about the common good, “founded on the inviolable dignity of all persons,” calling the vigil a way to receive the peace of the risen Christ — “a disarming, humble, and persevering peace,” the phrase Leo used from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica at the moment of his election in May 2025.
Leo had written to Bishop Shirahama directly for the occasion: “True peace demands the courageous laying down of weapons — especially those with the power to cause an indescribable catastrophe. Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.” “Though many years have passed, the two cities remain living reminders of the profound horrors wrought by nuclear weapons,” the Pope added. “Their streets, schools, and homes still bear scars — both visible and spiritual — from that fateful August of 1945.”
The week also saw a Pilgrimage of Peace to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by several American Catholic bishops and university delegations, who issued a joint statement with Japanese and South Korean bishops strongly condemning “all wars and conflicts, the use and possession of nuclear weapons, and the threat to use nuclear weapons.”
In his closing homily, Bishop Shirahama returned to the image of Peter being pulled from the water. “While it is important for us to take steps to draw closer to Jesus,” he said, “what is even more important is our faith in Jesus, who is always by our side, saying: ‘Take heart; it is me. Do not be afraid.’” The vigil had begun in the ruins of a city destroyed by a single weapon. It ended, 75 hours later, with a bishop standing in another such city, reading the same words the Pope had spoken that morning in Rome.
