Hiroshima and the Feast of the Transfiguration

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 10, 2026

In his August 6, 2026 opinion piece in the Washington Times (“U.S. Navy Veteran Recalls the Bombing of Japan”), former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, Christopher M. Lehman, Sr., writes:

Playing the devil’s advocate, I mentioned to Mr. [Eddie] Desmond [a World War II U.S. Navy veteran numbered among those preparing for a Normandy-like invasion of Japan] that Catholic theologians and other Monday-morning quarterbacks have argued for decades that there was no question about it: Truman’s decision was immoral.

Mr. Desmond’s response was ambivalent. He acknowledged the immorality of intentionally killing civilians, but “the bottom line is that there had been ‘massive death and destruction all around,’ and the war had to end.”

Lehman did not mention that Admiral William Daniel Leahy, President Truman’s senior military adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war, and President Dwight Eisenhower were among the “other Monday-morning quarterbacks.”

In his 1950 memoirs, Leahy wrote that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Moreover, Leahy continued, “in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

President Eisenhower recalled in 1963: “I told him [Secretary of War Henry Stimson] I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Nor can Lehman attribute the objection merely to isolated “Catholic theologians.” The Second Vatican Council solemnly taught: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.” (Gaudium et Spes 80) There can be no doubt that good ends (winning the war with fewer casualties) were invoked to justify profoundly evil means: the deliberate destruction of cities together with their civilian populations. Recent geopolitical events have overcome the post-war reticence to connect Church teaching directly to those terrible bombings.

Our failure to apply enduring moral principles consistently when examining Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and the bombing of London has allowed arguments used to justify attacks on civilians to persist. Once such actions are accepted as justified, they become moral precedents that inevitably invite repetition. The late Senator Lindsey Graham, in defending Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, said in a Sky News interview [see 23-minute mark]:

”What did we do in World War II? Did we think for one minute about starving the Germans? Did we bomb every city into smithereens? …This is an absolute existential threat to the Jewish people….” Interviewer: “So we just flatten Gaza? [Graham]: Flatten it! We flattened Berlin. We flattened Tokyo. Were we wrong to drop the atomic bomb to end the Japanese reign of terror?... I think most Republicans think the way I do….

The invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a precedent for contemporary warfare illustrates the continuing consequences of how societies morally evaluate attacks on civilian populations.

Direct attacks on population centers are intrinsically evil. Good intentions or circumstances cannot mitigate the evil. The witness of Catholic martyrs like St. Thomas More, who refused to cooperate with evil at the cost of his life, reinforces orthodox Catholic moral teaching.

Catholic moral teaching also recognizes a “consequent conscience,” in which a person judges an action after it has been committed. Such reflection can lead to repentance, correction, and more precision in moral understanding. Individuals and nations can acknowledge past wrongs without denying the complexity and confusion of the circumstances in which decisions were made.

We cannot change the past. Only by judging Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and every deliberate attack on civilian populations by the same moral standard rooted in God’s law can we prevent yesterday’s atrocities from becoming tomorrow’s moral precedents. Each of us will stand before the judgment seat of God, where we will render an account not only of our deeds but also of the moral judgments by which we sought to justify them.

On December 8, 1941, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the United States declared war on Japan. August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, became, with fearful symmetry, the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Three days later, Nagasaki—the historic center of Japanese Catholicism—was destroyed by the second atomic bomb. Japan surrendered on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption.