Archbishop Farrell in Nagasaki, Japan, ‘the human heart must be open to peace’
Archbishop Farrell delivered the following homily during Mass yesterday in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Nagasaki, Japan.
“War and violence never truly solve disputes. They are born of hatred and, while violence born of hatred may gain the upper hand, it never brings the healing and unity we call peace” – Archbishop Farrell
Homily
Readings: Rom 12:5-16; Ps 130; Luke 14:15-24
One cannot come to this place, this Cathedral, and the church of which it is the centre, without thinking of the horrific suffering that was inflicted on the people of this city when the atomic bomb was dropped here, on 9 August 1945. The events here, and in Hiroshima a few days before, were a tragedy that belie description, a horror that must never be repeated.
But to come to this place, and to this country, is also to come to a place that is utterly different: it is to come to a culture that looks at the world in different optic. Our sisters and brothers in Japan put life together in another way. And yet, as Saint Paul says to the Romans in today’s First Reading: “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” As the Second Vatican Council taught exactly 60 years ago: One is the community of all peoples, one our origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth (§1).
These are the words of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, a document that might well be described as a declaration of hope. In the wake of the horrors of two world wars, and a mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the Council Fathers could declare:
In our time, when day by day humankind is being drawn closer together, and the ties between different peoples are becoming stronger, the Church examines more closely her relationship to non-Christian religions. In her task of promoting unity and love among people, indeed among nations, the Church … reflects on what people have in common and what draws us into fellowship.
In the polarised age in which we live, it is certainly more difficult to have the same quiet confidence in “the ties between different peoples becoming stronger,” but we might do well to take seriously that in this declaration our Church speaks with its true voice, and to hear in its values and sentiments the voice of Christ, “who is our peace, the one who has broken down the wall of hostility between us” (see Eph 2:14).
On our journey to Japan we have come to appreciate many things. At a very material level, I have been quite taken by the levels of precision and planning evident in the cities of this land. On a human level, the importance of relationship with others and being in harmony with creation. On the level of the faith, the respect for Christian values, and the importance of baptism as a vocational choice in the life of the faithful, have given me cause for reflection. Let me explain.
The Catholic mission experience in Asia, and particularly in Japan, has been notably different to our mission experience in other parts of the world. While there existed a very venerable Christian community founded by the Jesuit missionaries of the mid to late 16th century, there has been a keeping of respectful distance from the faith and praxis that Christian missionaries have proposed. It has brought many of those in mission over the last century – some of them from our own shores – to consider afresh both the character of their mission and witness. Many have asked whether someone who is fully committed to Christ – ‘God with us’ the full and authentic revelation of God – has something to discover in dialogue with those who have a praxis of seeking God who is ineffable and other, and who, in the words of Nostra Aetate, ‘realises the radical insufficiency of this changeable world’ (see §2, referring to “Buddhism in its various forms”).
I have been very struck by the importance of baptism in the life of the faithful here in Japan. In Ireland, our faith imagination sees baptism as something one has done: “I was baptised.” “Was she baptised?” we ask. In Japan, people are more likely to say, “I am baptised.” Baptised and being sent, they know who they are. It is another way of perceiving who we are, and how we are, in relationship to Christ. We might also do well to reflect on what we might learn from Christian mission here, not just in terms of missio ad extra, but equally in terms of how all who minister in the Church – both lay and ordained – might be nourished and sustained in a society and culture where we have little influence, less power, and no control. The Church in Ireland is rapidly being thrust into a radically new situation where the pastoral reflexes and strategies of former generations are proving grossly inadequate, and will bear little, if any, enduring fruit.
However, we cannot turn to the altar of this cathedral, to, in the words of today’s Gospel, ‘eat bread in the Kingdom of God, without returning to the horror that was visited upon this city in 1945. Since the bombing of Hiroshima and here, nuclear arms have thankfully not been used in warfare. But now, in recent days, after the détente of the 1980s and ‘90s, we see the threat of nuclear warfare being made anew.
Both experience and history teach us that war and violence never truly solve disputes. They are born of hatred and, while violence born of hatred may gain the upper hand, it never brings the healing and unity we call peace. In the horror and injustice that were visited upon this place and its people, and that are still being visited in devastating ways, this very day, on the people of Gaza, Ukraine, South Sudan, and countless other places, there is a cry for justice and healing.
Our Lord teaches us that the way to justice and healing is not the way violence and settling of scores. No! The way to true justice and lasting healing is the long, hard road of forgiveness, lived out in the love of those who are our enemies (see Matt 5:38–48). In the words of Pope Leo XIV on this day last week ‘peace is a constant journey of reconciliation. … The human heart must be open to peace.’ (Address at the Meeting for Prayer for Peace at the Colosseum on 28 October 2025 – below).
And while each of us must work in peace and for peace with all our might, we need also to recognise our ‘radical insufficiency’ (cf Nostra Aetate §2) to do this on our own. True reconciliation demands that we go beyond ourselves, and journey with the other. All authentic religion recognises the necessity of prayer in that journey: “the human heart must be open to peace,” continued Pope Leo last Tuesday: ‘It is through meditation that we open our hearts, and in prayer that we go beyond ourselves. We recollect ourselves in order to go beyond ourselves.’
That prayer – coming from the depths of our hearts, in the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm, has endless forms: be it in the words of Wilfred Owen, words born from the awful trenches of the First World War:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
(from “Strange Meeting”)
Or, in the prayer of Saint John Paul II in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations back in 1979:
May there be peace in justice and in love.
May the praying voice of all those who believe in God – Christians and non-Christians alike – bring it about that the moral resources present in the hearts of men and women of good will be united for the common good,
and call down from heaven that peace which human efforts alone cannot effect.
(2 October 1979)
Or, in the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm:
Out of the depths we cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear our voice!
With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption,
His people indeed he will redeem, from all our iniquity.
(see Psalm 130: 1–2a, 7b–8)
May the Holy Spirit come upon us (see Luke 1:35), and open our hearts, to each other, and to God’s undying word of hope planted deep in every human heart.
May the Holy Spirit come upon us! May the word take flesh in our lives! (cf. John 1:14)
Immaculate Conception, Queen of Peace, pray for us.
Saint Paul Miki and companions, pray for us
Saints of Nagasaki – known and unknown, pray for us.