Pedro Arrupe At Hiroshima: Faith That Does Justice

Pedro Arrupe had been a doctor once, or close enough to one, three years of medical study in Madrid before the Society of Jesus asked something else of him.

And he had given it up the way he had given up everything else that wasn't this: the collar, the vows, the long obedient road that eventually put him here, in a wooden novitiate on a hill outside Hiroshima, responsible for 35 young men who had never seen a war up close.

It was the morning of August 6th, 1945, and he was shaving.

He would tell this part of the story many times over the decades that followed, in Rome, in retreat houses, to novices half his age who could not imagine him as anything but the old man he'd become.

The light through the window, the white flash that had no sound yet, the way he'd thrown himself down without deciding to, the way the glass had come in afterwards, cutting one of the scholastic bad enough that Arrupe's half-remembered anatomy lessons became, in the space of an hour, the most useful thing he had ever learned.

The novitiate was four kilometers from the center of the city, far enough that the buildings held, close enough that everything after was his to carry.

He did not go into the city that first day to look.

He went because there was no one else who could set a wound, and because 35 young Jesuits looked to him, in the absence of any better idea, as the closest thing to authority that ruined morning had left standing.

He turned the novitiate into a hospital before he had decided to.

There were no bandages, no equipment.

There were no sheets.

There was no morphine.

So there was whatever could be found.

There were no doctors coming from the city, because the city no longer was the kind of city that doctors came from.

What he saw on the roads into Hiroshima in the days after, he rarely described in detail, even to those who asked directly.

He would only say that medicine, as he had studied it, had no shape, a place where the hurt ended and the person began again.

This did not.

He treated burns that had no clean boundary between injury and person, on patients who sometimes did not live long enough for the treatment to matter, and he did it anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing, and he had spent his whole life being formed by people who did not consider that an option at all.

Later, when he tried to explain what those weeks had done to him, he didn't reach first for horror.

He reached for something stranger, a kind of clarity.

He said in one of the few interviews where he let himself speak plainly about it, that he had never in his life felt closer to what his vocation actually was for than in those days, when there was no liturgy left to perform.

No doctrine to explain.

Only burned people who needed someone to stay.

Three days later, further south, something similar and different happened to a city he did not see burn.

Nagasaki had a cathedral, Urakami, in the north of the city, and it held one of the oldest and largest Catholic communities in Japan.