Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 2, 2023 / 13:30 pm
The chairman of the U.S. bishops’ peace committee this week urged Catholics to pray fervently for progress in nuclear arms control, warning of the thousands of nuclear weapons in the world today and the “horrors” that would result from a nuclear exchange.
Rockford Bishop David J. Malloy, who serves as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, issued the statement ahead of the 78th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those attacks brought about an end to World War II at the cost of upwards of 200,000 Japanese civilian lives; they remain to date the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
Malloy in his statement said that, in the decades since those bombings, “the development of nuclear weapons and threat of nuclear war has continued while arms control architecture is dissolving.”