VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has agendas both pastoral and personal for his trip to Asia, where he’ll appeal for global nuclear disarmament at the sites of the atomic bomb and minister to two tiny Catholic communities that have suffered gruesome periods of persecution.
Emphasizing the dignity of life is also on Francis’ to-do list for his trip to Thailand and Japan that begins Wednesday, given the scourge of human trafficking in Thailand and Japan’s use of capital punishment and high suicide rate.
In Thailand, Francis will also be reunited with his second cousin, Sister Ana Rose Sivori, an Argentine nun who has lived in Thailand since 1966 and will serve as Francis’ official translator there.
ASIAN MARTYRS AND MISSIONARIES:
One of the highlights of the trip will be Francis’ prayer at the memorial of the 26 Nagasaki Martyrs, who were crucified in 1597 at the start of a two-century wave of anti-Christian persecution by Japanese rulers.
Francis’ own Jesuit order had introduced Christianity to Japan with the arrival of St. Francis Xavier on the archipelago in 1549. After converting more than a quarter-million Japanese, missionaries were banned at the start of the 17th century. Japanese Christians were forced to renounce their faith, suffer tortuous deaths or go underground.
Francis will greet some descendants of these Hidden Christians, whose story was recounted in the 2016 Martin Scorsese film “Silence.”
Francis will also honor Thailand’s World War II-era martyrs, who were victims of anti-Christian persecution by Thais who viewed Christianity as foreign and associated with French colonial powers. Francis will pray at the sanctuary for Thailand’s first martyred priest, Nicolas Bunkerd Kitbamrung, who was beatified in 2000.
THE POPE SAYS NO NUKES:
Francis has gone further than any other pope by saying that not only the use, but the mere possession of nuclear weapons is “to be firmly condemned.” Japanese bishops are hoping he goes even further and calls for a ban on nuclear power.
Francis will likely repeat his appeal for a total ban on the bomb when he visits Nagasaki and Hiroshima, meets with survivors of the 1945 bombings there as well as victims of the March 11, 2011, Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in northern Japan. An offshore magnitude-9 earthquake triggered a tsunami that knocked out power for the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear plant, displacing more than 100,000 people and coating the area with radioactive waste. In response, Japanese bishops in 2016 called for the abolition of nuclear power to protect “our common home.”
