On August 9th, 1945, two-thirds of Japan's Catholics were annihilated. Nagasaki's historic importance as the center of Japanese Christianity and openness to the West, one would think, would have spared it from being targeted by a Western Christian nation.

Leaving aside the question of the unquestionable immorality of targeting a civilian center of population with a weapon of mass destruction, surely the leadership of an even nominally Christian and Western country would have realized that a city with Nagasaki's legacy would have served as a bridge for future trade and cultural ties, and thus would have protected it from destruction at all costs.

This was not the case.  

On that day that will live in infamy, at 11:02 AM, history's second atomic war crime slaughtered more Japanese Christians than had been martyred in four centuries of brutal persecution. Fat Man exploded over St. Mary's (Urakami) Cathedral, the largest church at the time in the Far East, where the faithful were gathered to pray. In that House of God, and in the surrounding neighborhoods, extended families of Kakure Kirishitan, hidden Christians, who had kept the Faith in secret for generations over the centuries, were obliterated from the earth forever, their seed wiped out in an instant.  

Even if the destruction of Hiroshima had been understandable – and it never will be; even without the peace overtures of the previous months, the deliberate targeting of civilians is never justifiable under Christian just war principles – the destruction of Nagasaki was unfathomable. Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and stalwart of the Old Right, labeled the bombings of these two cities "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law."  

Japs & A-rabs, Not Fellow Christians