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CV NEWS FEED // An Italian Catholic priest on mission in Hiroshima, Japan, recently praised the decision to give the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped in 1945.
AsiaNews reported that Fr. Alberto Berra, a missionary for the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, said the award “is not a recognition of the past, but a choice that looks at today’s international situation.”
“Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the hibakusha [the survivors] is an appeal to the world that is talking again about the use of these terrible devices,” he added.
According to AsiaNews, Fr. Berra has been on mission in Japan since 1990, working in Hiroshima for years. Through the testimonies of the hibakusha, Fr. Berra has seen the effects of the atomic bombs on the city even years after the bombings.
“In the hibakusha’s stories there is all the horror of war and its consequences,” he told AsiaNews. “Of course, all wars leave death and destruction in their wake. But never before had it happened in such a heartbreaking form and with consequences on the body that last over time, for some even today, after almost eighty years.”
The hibakusha who received the Nobel Peace Prize belong to an organization called the Nihon Hidankyo association, which uses the survivors’ own experience with atomic bombs to call for an abolition of nuclear weapons. AsiaNews reported that only about 107,000 survivors of the two bombings are still living, prompting members to plead for the abolition “while we are still alive.”
Fr. Berra told AsiaNews that the association takes their mission seriously, as a “task that they continue to feel very much.”
“A few months ago, for example, one of them, well in his eighties, started studying English to be able to speak to a greater number of people passing through Hiroshima,” he said. “It is truly a mission to the whole of humanity.”
Fr. Berra pointed out that the Nobel prize echoes a sentiment shared by Pope Francis in Hiroshima in 2019, when he called the use and possession of atomic weapons immoral. Fr. Berra also highlighted an initiative spearheaded by dioceses in Japan and the U.S. that calls for a world “without nuclear weapons.”
“This is a way to accept Francis’s triple invitation,” he said, “to remember the victims of almost 80 years ago, to walk together towards a world without nuclear weapons, and to protect the generations of tomorrow.”
