Remembering the Transfiguration & slaughter....

August 6th and 9th mark 80 years since  

• "the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those two blasts and their atomic afterglow over 200,000 Japanese died. The devastation in both cases was overwhelming.... Japan unconditionally surrendered within a week.... These bombing raids were part of a strategy of demoralization in which military facilities and armament production were not the main targets. By deliberately attacking civilian populations the Allies hoped to teach their enemies a lesson and bring them to their knees....these Allied actions constituted murder on a vast scale, running to hundreds of thousands of lives" (Public Discourse, 8/3/2010)

As I noted in a book review, there was a Jesuit who was among the all too few American Catholics who objected:

I deeply appreciate Russel Shaw's recognition of the oft forgot moral theologian John C. Ford, S.J., who made magnificent contributions to the defense of the innocent in warfare and who played a MAJOR benind-the-scenes role in the preparation of Humanae Vitae (Amazon customer review, 10/11/2014)

In his own review of the same book, Mark Shea heavily quoted the author:

One of the few Catholics who protested was the leading American moral theologian of the day, John C. Ford, S.J. Father Ford is remembered now as a leader of the minority on the papal birth control commission who supported the Church’s constant teaching on contraception before Pope Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae vitae” of 1968. But that was to come later. In 1944, in the journal “Theological Studies”, Ford published a 49-page article arguing against the killing of the innocent by the obliteration bombing of cities that was then being carried out by the American and British air forces. A year later, in his “Notes on Moral Theology” in the same journal, after having acknowledged the atrocities committed by the Soviets, the Nazis, and the Japanese, he nevertheless spoke of “the greatest and most extensive single atrocity of all this period, our atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.

The words were widely noted in theological circles, but they didn’t reach me or most other American Catholics at the time. Even now, it appears they haven’t reached many. (quoted by Mark Shea, 12/29/2014)