About those annual Aug. 6th Hiroshima posts

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 08, 2025

August 6th was National Lecture Your Fellow Catholics on Facebook Day. If your newsfeed looks anything like mine, you’re thinking to yourself, “Isn’t every day?” But I mean something specific. August 6th was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Every year, without fail, my newsfeed on Aug. 6th is gummed up with Facebook friends reminding their fellow Catholics that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immoral. The justifications for it smack of consequentialism, proportionalism, etc. Errors that are condemned as such in Catholic moral theology.

I have no disagreement whatsoever with these many—so many—posts in my feed. Dropping the big one on Japan was indeed immoral. You can never deliberately target noncombatants, no matter how many or how few. And in the case of World War II, the ledger fell very much on the side of the many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most obvious examples. The carpet bombing of Dresden is another. And there are still others. The Allies rolled into the 1930s condemning the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria. But as the 1940s wore on, the good guys were doing things that were not so good. Some of the same things they had once condemned. For all the talk of Just War, that is where war always seems to end up. Given the history, it’s small wonder why the Church has leaned ever more pacifist in the modern era.

So I get all that. What I don’t get is, who exactly are the Catholics that all these posts are lecturing? I have over 3,000 friends on my Facebook. To date, there is exactly one Catholic on it who defends dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. In the circles I move in—I suspect, in the circles that most of Catholic Culture’s readers move in—defending the dropping of the bomb in World War II is just not a thing. So again, who are all these posts aimed at?

Here’s what I think. The posts are aimed at the poor schlub having a beer in an American Legion or Knights of Columbus hall somewhere right now. Our hypothetical target is a man who was formed by the ambient culture of mid 20th century America, which was Christian in a sense, but not exactly Catholic. He’s a 70-something Boomer whose father fought in World War II. Maybe he fought in Vietnam. He’s from an era when America and Catholicism seemed to go hand-in-hand and, but for a few obvious outliers like Roe v. Wade, he’s been given little reason to think otherwise.

Here’s what I’d like to say to the perpetrators of the annual August 6th Catholic Facebook beatdowns. Give that poor guy a rest. Let him drink his beer in peace. Yes, he’s wrong about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, he doesn’t have your theological sophistication. He was formed by mid or late 20th century Catholic Americana, he never heard any differently, and he doesn’t want to hear it now. He served his country, raised his family, paid his dues, and he is probably not going to be with us much longer.

Bear in mind, too, we didn’t have the Catechism of the Catholic Church until the 1990s. It was not even until 1993 that Pope St. John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, made it crystal clear that proportionalism, consequentialism, etc, were errors that had crept into Catholic moral theology in the post-Vatican II era. Our hypothetical target did not come of age in an era of Catholic moral clarity. Even those of who were fortunate enough to grow up under JPII and Ratzinger/Benedict were then plunged back into 1970s-style theological fuzziness in our middle age. At the risk of never being hired by a certain seminary in Detroit, may I just say: Hello, Footnotes 329 and 351 of Amoris Laetitia. I’m looking at you!

And that’s all I’ve got to say about it. Fortunately, our calendars don’t hit another National Lecture Your Fellow Catholics on Facebook Day for almost a year. See you on St. Maria Goretti’s Day!