A lost cross returns to Nagasaki as a sign of peace in a nuclear age

The cross from the rubble of Urakami Cathedral returned to Nagasaki this week (Photograph: Randy Sarvis / Wilmington College)

Patrick Comerford

Nagasaki is often forgotten in the days immediately after we commemorate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

But today [9 August] marks the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the second use of nuclear weapons in modern warfare.

The Japanese city of Kokura was the initial target for the crew members of the B-29 bomber Bockscar. But low visibility that day forced them to abandon their mission. They were flying low, scanning for an opening in the clouds, when they found a clear patch of sky unexpectedly.

Below them lay the city of Nagasaki and the massive Mitsubishi arms factory. They decided they had found the target for the world’s most powerful weapon, a 4.5-ton plutonium bomb nick-named ‘Fat Man’ – the Hiroshima bomb was known as ‘Little Boy.’

The bomb that day killed tens of thousands of people and wiped out the city in an instant. Just 500 metres from ground zero was Urakami Cathedral, or the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

This cathedral had been at the heart of a vibrant Catholic community that dates back to Nagasaki’s early days as a trading port and the arrival of Saint Francis Xavier and other Christian missionaries in the 16th century. For centuries, generations of Christians in Nagasaki had suffered persecution and adversity. They had been tortured, banished, and executed and forced to practice their faith in secrecy until the ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873.

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was built between 1895 and 1925. The bomb on 9 August 1945 fell on Nagasaki just 20 years after Urakami Cathedral had been completed. The priest and several parishioners who were inside at the time were destroyed along with much of the church’s memories and history.

The cathedral has since been rebuilt and now, 74 years later, a small piece of that history has been returned to the cathedral: a cross, mostly forgotten, had been taken from the rubble and Walter Hooke, a former US Marine.

Hooke gave the cross to Wilmington College, a Quaker-run liberal arts college in rural south-west Ohio, where the Peace Resource Centre houses reference materials related to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The centre was set up in 1975 by the late Barbara Reynolds, an American Quaker and anti-nuclear activist who died in 1990.

How did Hooke come across the cross? He had been stationed in Nagasaki after the bombing. Hooke was a devout Catholic and arrived in Nagasaki in October 1945. He developed a friendship with Aijiro Yamaguchi, then the Bishop of Nagasaki. Hooke’s son told the Asahi Shimbun, a leading Japanese newspaper, that the Bishop gave Hooke the cross, perhaps in the hope that it might change Americans’ perceptions of the bomb.

‘One of the things that always really bothered my father was that a Christian country bombed a cathedral that was a centre of Christianity in Asia,’ Christopher Hooke, now 69, said at his home in Yonkers, New York. ‘There was absolutely no strategic value in the bombing of Nagasaki. I think that was the point.’

Hooke died in 2010 at the age of 97, and the cross remained in Wilmington for decades. But earlier this week, on Tuesday [6 August], the anniversary of the Hiroshima, bombing, Tanya Maus, director of the Peace Resource Centre at Wilmington College, gave the cross to the Archbishop of Nagasaki.

Archbishop Mitsuaki Takami was exposed to radiation in the womb while his mother was pregnant in Nagasaki.

Dr Maus decided to return the cross after she read a report in the Asahi Shimbun that the Nagasaki Peace Association had been trying to locate the cross for 30 years.

Dr Maus contacted Church officials in Nagasaki in April. ‘I started to think about the idea of ‘should it really be here?’ Maybe it needs to be in Nagasaki, where people can sort of explore that history more and the meaning of the cross more.’

‘For me the cross represents human depravity. The utter stripping away of values, in this case Christian values, but it could be any values, that keep human beings from killing each other and destroying each other,’ she was quoted as saying in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. ‘Part of giving it back was letting go of that and making it accessible to people who want to find their own meaning in it.’

‘Atomic bomb victims will die, but the cross will remain as a living witness to what happened in Nagasaki,’ Archbishop Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki said when he received from the cross from Dr Maus on Wednesday.

‘The cross is an embodiment of the brutality of war,’ Dr Maus said. ‘The cross is a cry to the US government and governments of other countries that possess nuclear weapons to stop the use of nuclear weapons,’ she said after handing over the cross to Archbishop Takami in Urakami Cathedral.

Dr Maus said the cross will be displayed alongside the head of a wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary known as the ‘Bombed Mary,’ whose glass eyes were melted by the atomic bomb. According to the Japan Times, the cross will be on display in time for a Mass in the cathedral today marking the 74th anniversary of the bombing.

Pope Francis is expected to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Archbishop Takami hopes he will visit the cathedral and see the cross for himself.

Archbishop Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki (centre) receives the cross that survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from Tanya Maus (right) of Wilmington College in Ohio, at Urakami Cathedral on Wednesday, with Chitose Fujita, a member of the cathedral congregation (Photograph: Masaru Komiyaji / Asahi Shimbun, 2019)

Emo Church links a village in Co Laois with a Russian Tsar

Saint Paul’s Church, Emo, Co Laois (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

After visiting Emo Court, the splendid neo-classical country house in Co Laois designed by James Gandon for the Earls of Portarlington, I visited Saint Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, the parish church built in Emo village on a site donated by the Earls of Portarlington.

The site of the church was a gift of Henry Dawson-Damer, 3rd Earl of Portarlington, of Emo Court. He donated the site to the parish in 1861, and the parish priest of Portarlington and Emo, Father Terence O’Connell, commissioned the Dublin-based architect John Sterling Butler (1816-1885) to design a new parish church.

The architect and civil engineer John Sterling Butler was born in Dublin and was apprenticed to his father, William Deane Butler. He was elected Dublin City Architect in 1866, and was also architect to the Mendicity Institution in Dublin (1867-1873).

However, Butler appears to have been involved in a serious misdemeanour in 1878 that caused him to absent himself and then to resign the post of city architect and to have his name removed from the list of associates of the Royal Hibernian Academy.

In his letter of resignation, Butler asked the Lord Mayor and the City Council ‘to believe that, though sinning, I have been sinned against.’ He died in Paris on 29 June 1885.

Inside Saint Paul’s Church, Emo, Co Laois … dedicated in 1866 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The foundation stone for Saint Paul’s Church was laid on 18 June 1861, and the church was dedicated on 16 September 1866.

This is a Gothic Revival church, set back from road in own grounds, has a bell tower and spire, and the tower has a pyramid-shaped roof.

The other architectural features include tooled buttresses, lancet-arch windows with limestone surrounds and mullions, a pointed-arched doorway with a timber panelled double door, stained glass windows, the marble pulpit, a first-floor gallery, a coffered ceiling, a chancel arch, clustered columns, and a marble reredos, limestone steps at the front door, a Pieta inside the main door, and a statue of Saint Paul outside this door.

The East Window above the High Altar in Saint Paul’s Church, Emo, Co Laois (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The east window above the High Altar shows Saint Paul (left) and Saint Peter (right) on either side of the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph.

The effigy of the Countess of Portarlington is the work of the sculptor Sir Joseph Boehm (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

However, the most interesting detail inside the church is the life-size Carrara marble monument to the Countess of Portarlington by the sculptor Sir Joseph Boehm. The monument was commissioned by Lord Portarlington in 1875 in memory of his wife.

Lady Alexandrina Octavia Maria Vane (1823-1874), who was born on 29 July 1823, was a daughter of Charles William Vane, Marquess of Londonderry (1778-1854).
Her father, a half-brother of Lord Castlereagh, was reputed to be one of the richest men in the United Kingdom, and she was named after her godfather, Tsar Alexander I, a grandson of Catherine the Great.

Her sister, Lady Frances Anne Vane (1822-1899), married John Winston Spencer-Churchill (1822-1883), the future Duke of Marlborough, in 1843 and was the grandmother of Sir Winston Churchill.

Lady Alexandrina, known popularly as Lady Aline, married Lord Portarlington on 2 September 1847. The couple had no children.

The Pieta inside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, Emo (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The countess became a Roman Catholic in 1867. She was 51 when she suffered a brief illness, and she died on 15 January 1874. Over 10,000 people attended her funeral when she was buried in Saint Paul’s Church.

Her husband commissioned her effigy in Saint Paul’s Church. This is a recumbent figure on a plinth, and her head rests on a pillow decorated with the coat-of-arms of the Earls of Portarlington and their motto (Vitae Via Virtus, Virtue is the way of life).

The dedication reads, ‘Aline Countess of Portarlington, born July 29th 1823, died Janry 15th 1874.’ It is signed ‘JE Boehm Fecit.’ Along the side panel is a Pauline quotation: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ (see I Corinthians 15: 55).

The effigy is the work of the Viennese-born sculptor Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834-1890), best known for his marble statue of Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle (1869), his Jubilee head of Queen Victoria on British coins (1887), and his statue of the Duke of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner (1888).

One of his best-known pupils was Queen Victoria’s sculptor daughter, Princess Louise, whose work includes a likeness of Queen Victoria on the west façade of Lichfield Cathedral.

The pulpit in Saint Paul’s Church, Emo (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

In Ireland, Boehm worked extensively at Curraghmore, Co Waterford, for the Marquess of Waterford, including the marble effigy in Clonagam Church, Portlaw, of Lord Waterford’s wife, Florence Grosvenor Rowley (1844-1895), who died in childbirth. His bust of 1890 of WEH Lecky (1838-1903) is part of the historian’s monument in the south aisle of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

Lady Aline’s widowed husband unveiled her marble effigy in Saint Paul’s Church in May 1875. A year later, her brother-in-law, the Duke of Marlborough, became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (1876-1880).

The ‘pony stables’ across the street from Saint Paul’s Church, Emo (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The ‘pony stables’ across the street from the church is an unusual building. In 1918, James Dunne of Kilbride House donated these shelters that were used by parishioners attending mass to tie up their ponies and horses. A smaller shed was used by parishioners for bicycles.

The shelters and shed were restored in 2012 by Emo Tidy Towns group with the support of Laois Tidy Towns Group with the support of Laois Partnership and Father Thomas Dooley, parish priest of Portarlington and Emo.

The statue of Saint Paul at Saint Paul’s Church, Emo, Co Laois (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)