Witness from Nagasaki: Dr. Takashi Paul Nagai

It was within the Providence of God that it was only three days ago that I learned about a remarkable Japanese Catholic Convert, Dr. Takashi (Paul) Nagai, for the first time.

Dr. Nagai was present in his hometown of  Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, when an atomic bomb dropped by an American bomber plane destroyed the most Catholic city in the pagan country of Japan just three days after the first atomic weapon delivered in warfare had been dropped on another city with a large Catholic population, Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Here is a brief background report about Dr. Nagai that serves as an introduction to the remarkable meditation he gave at the Requiem Mass in the ruins of Saint Mary’s Cathedral on November 23, 1945, for the Catholic victims of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki:

Dr. Takashi Nagai’s work to help survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bombing and to console his devastated Japanese Catholic community is an unusual example of life-giving love and faith amid desolation and death, various speakers said at the New York Encounter on Sunday.

“There was nothing, nothing anymore around him. He had completely lost everything,” Gabriele di Comite, president of the Rome-based Friends of Takahashi and Midori Nagai Association, said in a presentation at the New York Encounter. “He was living in a city which was completely destroyed. He had nothing anymore, he didn't have a house anymore, and he was not able to leave his bed.”

Nagai, a medical doctor who had converted from atheism to Catholicism, lost his wife Midori in the atomic blast from the Americans’ Aug. 9, 1945, attack on Nagasaki. The bomb fell on the heavily Catholic Urakami area, killing thousands of the city’s Catholics and tens of thousands of other Japanese civilians.

Nagai labored to take care of survivors and to make sense of the destruction. Years later, he would become bedridden from a cancer that had developed in early 1945, months before the bombing. Despite his sufferings, he continued to live a life of joy, humility, and faith. 

“As soon as I wake up, the first thought that occurs to me every morning is that I'm happy,” he said in his writings. “Beating within my chest is a child’s heart. The life of a new day awaits me.”

Nagai chose to make the sacrifice “to let go (of) everything that dies and give his life only to what never dies,” di Comite commented.

The doctor’s work as a writer helped tell the stories of survivors and sought to put the bombing in a spiritual context. His books and other writings became best sellers, and he dedicated the funds to reconstruction efforts. Nagai’s most famous work, “The Bells of Nagasaki,” was made into a film in 1951.

He died on May 1, 1951, admired by the people of Nagasaki and by many leading personalities around the world as “the saint of Urakami.”

“It’s really the power of one heart that converts, and shows the beauty of faith: how faith is able to restore hope and life in the worst possible condition that you could imagine,” di Comite said. “That is calling us together today.”

“The transformation, the conversion of heart of one person, has been able to change an entire city,” he continued. “The strength that changes the world, in all the struggles that we are facing, is the power of faith, the conversion of our hearts in faith.”

The presentation about Nagai took place on the final day of the New York Encounter, a three-day cultural event that includes panel discussion, art exhibits, and musical and poetic performances. The event originated with members of the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation but it is not an official project of the movement.

Also speaking was Dominic Higgins, director of the 2016 movie “All That Remains,” a biographical drama about the Japanese doctor. In Nagai’s life, Higgins said, he found “incredible stories to tell.”

“Takashi spent his final years living in a small hole in the middle of the atomic wasteland, writing a great number of books and essays, much of it centered on the atomic bombing,” he said.

“Here was a scientist who had converted to Christianity, not despite being a scientist, but because he was a scientist,” Higgins said. “Today, Dr. Nagai is best remembered as an atomic bomb and peace activist whose writing helps a nation that has been completely devastated by war.”

Higgins spent some five years making “All That Remains.” In the process, he interviewed survivors of the Nagasaki bombing and learned more about the Japanese Christianity which “radically transformed Takashi’s life.” The movie director also reflected on the life of Nagai’s wife Naguri, a teacher and community leader whose family had roots in the “hidden Christians” who kept their faith despite the suppression of Christianity for centuries.

Professor Chad Diehl, a historian at the University of Virginia, said he learned about Nagai while visiting the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki, which had an exhibit dedicated to the Catholic community and Nagai.

“I was fascinated by the fact that Nagasaki was home to the largest community of Catholics in Japan,” Diehl said. “I was confused by the realization that a mostly Christian nation, the United States had dropped a bomb on that community. And I was compelled to learn more about them, and especially about their parishioner leader, Nagai Takashi. 

Diehl realized Nagai played a crucial role in the restoration of Nagasaki. He drew on years of study of Nagai and Japan for his 2018 Cornell University Press book “Resurrecting Nagasaki.”

During the presentation, Diehl displayed an early 1946 photo of Nagasaki taken by the U.S. Marines. According to Diehl, the Urakami district was called “the valley of death” because of the destruction. There were “rotting corpses still underneath the rubble” and “persistent radiation which made even the American marines fall ill with radiation poisoning.”

Nagai’s book “Leaving these Children Behind” recounted some of this devastation.

The doctor sought to understand such a horrific event. Three years after the bombing, he said the event made him “able to taste true happiness.”

“Death that will come to me soon is also the greatest gift of love that I confront I who am God's and who increases in his infinite love,” he wrote.

Diehl initially believed that he was incorrectly reading Nagai, and asked himself, “how could a person who had endured so much trauma and suffering interpret the bombing in such a light?”

Many Catholic survivors felt that God had forsaken them or that the bombing was divine punishment. Some non-Catholics in other parts of the city felt the Catholics were punished because they were not Shinto believers.

Takashi, however, developed an argument that the bombing was not punishment but a manifestation of God’s love. He had lost his wife and, in Diehl’s words, “needed to find meaning in her death and in the suffering of the survivors who lived with immeasurable trauma.”

During a Nov. 23, 1945 mass funeral service in the ruins of Nagasaki’s cathedral, Nagai shared this view of the bombing “to help make sense of the trauma and begin community and individual recovery.” 

The doctor depicted the bombing as the last act of war and claimed that fighting did not take place after it. For Nagai, this meant that there is a deep connection between the destruction of Urakami and the end of the war.

Diehl summarized: “In other words, the Church of Urakami was placed on the altar of sacrifice as atonement for the sin of humankind, which was the world war. It was chosen as a pure lamb, slaughtered and burned.” This framed the destruction as “a providential tragedy.” 

The bereaved took his message to heart, and some thought God had brought Nagai to them. In Diehl’s view, he became the most influential single contributor to the reconstruction of Nagasaki. First, he was a parish leader bringing spiritual recovery to Catholics. Later, bedridden by his cancer, he took up work as a writer that contributed to another form of rebuilding: nine of his own books, two edited volumes written by bombing survivors, and two translations of Western books.

Diehl said he is not Catholic or religious, and he has taken a critical approach to Nagai. Sometimes his readers have worried his treatment of Nagai has been “hagiographic.”

“For Nagai, the most important mission that he undertook at the time, I think, was keeping faith alive at all costs, because he understood and truly believed in the role that faith could play in bringing the city back from the brink of oblivion,” the professor said.

“Studying Takashi Nagai introduced me to the power of faith, and especially to how faith can illuminate the path to recovery, even out of the darkness of the so-called valley of death,” said Diehl. 

He closed with a recitation of a poem by Nagai: “Peace, oh peace, the bell of peace is tolling. We must keep this peace forever.” (Takashi Nagai, Catholic doctor and Nagasaki atomic bombing survivor, continues to inspire at New York Encounter. I will not “shoot the messenger,” that is a conciliar “lay movement,” Communion and Liberation that I discussed in Francis, The Talking Apostate on March 14, 2013. The information about Dr. Nagai is invaluable.)

Readers may be wondering why I am presenting this information about Dr. (Takashi) Paul Nagai.

Well, as I explained in Trust in Christ the King, part four, Dr. Nagai’s reflection at the Requiem Mass on November 23, 1945, should provide a bit of perspective for those who are in a near-state of hysteria over the farce that will have in its “in person voting” phase on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, but which will continue possible up to and even after January 20, 2025, if former President Donald John Trump wins a clear victory as the forces of the Deep State, Big Media, Big Tech, the Soros-allied “community organizers,” and perhaps even elements of the United States military itself will do everything imaginable to keep the forty-fifth president from becoming the forty-seventh president.

As I have, evidently to little avail, tried to put the current events in a supernatural perspective, I think that it is good to consider Dr. Takashi (Paul) Nagai’s November 23, 1945, reflection, after which I will make a few observations. Dr. Nagai’s profound meditation was found in a 2012 review of his Bells of Nagasaki:

August 9, 2012 marks the sixty-seventh anniversary of our dropping the atomic bomb which destroyed Nagasaki, Japan.

The Bells of Nagasaki was written by a physician who was a survivor of that explosion. Takashi Nagai was a professor of Radiology at the University of Nagasaki, and was approximately seven hundred yards from the epicenter of the blast. Despite his own injuries, he and other staff at the University began to help the wounded. His account of the struggle to care for the wounded after the explosion is sobering. He tells of going into a storeroom to gather emergency supplies, but instead found nothing but destruction:

"Was it not for today that we assembled all this material? Was it not for today that we practiced with those stretchers and gave all those lectures on relief work? And now we were confronted with total failure....It was really primitive medicine that we were now reduced to. Our knowledge, our love, our hands - we had only these with which to save the people."

And that is what they did. The doctors, nurses, technicians, and medical students did what they could with what they had. Dr. Nagai had to stop working because he had been bleeding from a laceration on the side of his face. It was not until he passed out that his colleagues realized the seriousness of his injuries.

Nagai's wife, Midori, died in the explosion. When he recovered her body, her Rosary was still in her right hand. This woman and her family had a tremendous influence on Dr. Nagai's conversion to the Catholic Faith. Her family had been members of the Kakure Kirishitan, or 'Hidden Christians' who continued to follow the Catholic Faith after it was suppressed in the 1600's.

I have written before about the nuns of Compiegne praying and offering themselves up as a holocaust to end the Reign of Terror in France. It appears as if the Catholic community of Nagasaki had been offering themselves as a sacrifice as well during World War II. It makes sense that Nagasaki would have a kind of martyrs' vocation, as it was the site where St. Paul Miki and companions were crucified on a hill overlooking the city.

When he was baptized, Takashi Nagai took the Christian name 'Paul' in honor of St. Paul Miki. He meditated on the significance of men and women lifting their prayers up to God - offering themselves as a holocaust to the war - when he gave this speech at the funeral for the 8,000 Catholics who died in the bombing of Nagasaki:

Is there not a profound relationship between the destruction of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Nagasaki, the only holy place in all Japan—was it not chosen as a victim, a pure lamb, to be slaughtered and burned on the altar of sacrifice to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War?

The human family has inherited the sin of Adam who ate the fruit of the forbidden tree; we have inherited the sin of Cain who killed his younger brother; we have forgotten that we are children of God; we have believed in idols; we have disobeyed the law of love. Joyfully we have hated one another; joyfully we have killed one another. And now at last we have brought this great and evil war to an end. But in order to restore peace to the world it was not sufficient to repent. We had to obtain God’s pardon through the offering of a great sacrifice.

Before this moment there were many opportunities to end the war. Not a few cities were totally destroyed. But these were not suitable sacrifices; nor did God accept them. Only when Nagasaki was destroyed did God accept the sacrifice. Hearing the cry of the human family, He inspired the emperor to issue the sacred decree by which the war was brought to an end.

Our church of Nagasaki kept the faith during four hundred years of persecution when religion was proscribed and the blood of martyrs flowed freely. During the war this same church never ceased to pray day and night for a lasting peace. Was it not, then, the one unblemished lamb that had to be offered on the altar of God? Thanks to the sacrifice of this lamb many millions who would otherwise have fallen victim to the ravages of war have been saved.

How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace! In the very depth of our grief we reverently saw here something beautiful, something pure, something sublime. Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life. All without exception were good people whom we deeply mourn.

How happy are those people who left this world without knowing the defeat of their country! How happy are the pure lambs who rest in the bosom of God! Compared with them how miserable is the fate of us who have survived! Japan is conquered. Urakami is totally destroyed. A waste of ash and rubble lies before our eyes. We have no houses, no food, no clothes. Our fields are devastated. Only a remnant has survived. In the midst of the ruins we stand in groups of two or three looking blankly at the sky.

Why did we not die with them on that day, at that time, in this house of God? Why must we alone continue this miserable existence?

It is because we are sinners. Ah! Now indeed we are forced to see the enormity of our sins! It is because I have not made expiation for my sins that I am left behind. Those are left who were so deeply rooted in sin that they were not worthy to be offered to God.

We Japanese, a vanquished people, must now walk along a path that is full of pain and suffering. The reparations imposed by the Potsdam Declaration are a heavy burden. But this painful path along which we walk carrying our burden, is it not also the path of hope, which gives to us sinners an opportunity to expiate our sins?

“Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted.” We must walk this way of expiation faithfully and sincerely. And as we walk in hunger and thirst, ridiculed, penalized, scourged, pouring with sweat and covered with blood, let us remember how Jesus Christ carried His cross to the hill of Calvary. He will give us courage.

“The Lord has given: the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

Let us give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice. Let us give thanks that through this sacrifice peace was given to the world and freedom of religion to Japan.

May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen. (As found at: The Bells of Nagasaki by Takashi Nagai.)

Takashi Paul Nagai saw the hand of God in all that had happened to his beloved Nagasaki. He was given the graces by Our Lady to view the tragedy of what to atomic bomb had wrought in his native place through the eyes of the true Faith, knowing that his own sins and those of the survivors had to be punished. In other words, Dr. Nagai, though saddened by the loss of his wife and the destruction of his city, maintained a perfect equanimity in his surrender to the will of God as he sought to explain to his fellow survivors that they must also accept all that God had permitted to be visited upon them so that they might make expiation for their own sins.

Thus, there is going to be a chastisement of epic proportions no matter what happens on November 5, 2024, and the eighty-one days between then and January 20, 2025. However, we must remain as calm as Takashi Paul Nagai by viewing whatever happens as within the Providence of God and as a chastisement for our own sins.

We must give thanks God no matter what happens in this coming election as we recognize that our sins deserve to be punished and call to mind these words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:

Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of men. For they will deliver you up in councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues. And you shall be brought before governors, and before kings for my sake, for a testimony to them and to the Gentiles: But when they shall deliver you up, take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.

The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come. The disciple is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the goodman of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household?

Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Fear not therefore: better are you than many sparrows. Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man's enemies shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it. He that receiveth you, receiveth me: and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me. (Matthew 10: 16-40.) 

The Cross is ever present in our lives. There is never any fleeing from the Cross. If we truly understand the Faith and reject all naturalistic influences, we will come to accept the fact that the Cross is waiting for us at every moment of our lives. No matter what decisions we might make as to which fork in the road to take at a given time, we can be sure of one thing: the Cross will be waiting for us all along either path. The Cross is our hope. The Cross is the means of our salvation. The Cross of the Divine Redeemer is the glory of our Catholic Faith. Catholics glory in that Cross. They do not shrink from it, and they recognize that every difficulty, every misunderstanding, every physical or emotional or spiritual pain, every humiliation, every calumny, and every rejection is meant to give us a share in the Cross of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as we give whatever merit we earn to Him through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. And we must recognize the simple truth that there is more merit for us when the crosses that we are asked to bear are hidden from public view and others make judgments about us based on a complete ignorance of those hidden crosses that are meant to be revealed only on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead.

It is certainly true that Catholics in previous times of persecution took prudent measures to protect themselves. Catholics during the episodic persecutions undertaken against them by Roman emperors and their minions between 67 A.D. and 313 A.D. (and for a while longer in some parts of the Roman Empire) assisted at Holy Mass in the catacombs. Catholics during the time of the Protestant Revolt in England in the Sixteenth Century had Holy Masses offered in their homes clandestinely. Some of those Catholics had what were known as "priest holes" in their homes, hiding places to keep their priests from the minions of King Henry VIII or his immediate successor, his son, King Edward VI, or, very notoriously, his daughter by the Jezebel known as Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, who hired the wretched Richard Topcliffe, known as the "priest-catcher," who captured and tortured numerous priests, including Blessed Robert Southwell, S.J. Among Elizabeth I's other famous Jesuit victims was, of course, Blessed Edmund Campion, S.J., who used various disguises to stave off what he knew would be his inevitable arrest and execution. And, of course, Japanese Catholics maintained the Faith for a period of two hundred fifty years in the underground with only the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Matrimony following the persecutions against them at the end of the Sixteenth Century and the beginning of the Seventeenth Century.

Although Catholics in these—and many other—periods of persecutions took prudent measures to protect themselves, they were ever willing to embrace the Cross and to accept martyrdom with joy as the means by which they could glorify the Most Blessed Trinity and to save their immortal souls as they bore witness to the one and only true Faith, Catholicism. Catholics in each of these periods of persecution knew that the civil authorities and/or enemies of the Cross of the Divine Redeemer in various false religions employed sophisticated networks of spies to try to catch them in a "forbidden" act of worship or some "forbidden" speech that sought to proselytize in behalf of the true Faith. These Catholics did not leave in fear of the spies. Neither should we.

That is, there are far, far more sophisticated and intrusive means today by which the enemies of the Faith can spy upon us. Even the very instrument on which these words are being typed, a computer, can be used against us. Although there are various "spy-busting" software programs designed to "catch" efforts to plant "bugs" in our computer that monitor our use of the internet, it is a fact of life that those intent on gaining knowledge about us and our beliefs can do so more readily than ever before.

What can we do?

Go into a cocoon?

No.

We must recognize that the intrusiveness that exists at this time is part of the Chastisement that is being visited upon us for our own sins—and some of us deserve a Chastisement far worse that God in His infinite and ineffable Mercy permits us to suffer!—and those of the whole world.

Our first Pope, Saint Peter, writing under the inspiration of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, has given us our marching orders about how to deal with the statist spies who have a variety of different--and mostly subtle, at least up to now--ways of applying pressure upon us to conform to the "received wisdom" of their statist paymasters:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, to refrain yourselves from carnal desires which war against the soul, Having your conversation good among the Gentiles: that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by the good works, which they shall behold in you, glorify God in the day of visitation. Be ye subject therefore to every human creature for God's sake: whether it be to the king as excelling; Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good: For so is the will of God, that by doing well you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God. Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king. Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if for conscience towards God, a man endure sorrows, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if committing sin, and being buffeted for it, you endure? But if doing well you suffer patiently; this is thankworthy before God.

For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps. Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. Who, when he was reviled, did not revile: when he suffered, he threatened not: but delivered himself to him that judged him unjustly. Who his own self bore our sins in his body upon the tree: that we, being dead to sins, should live to justice: by whose stripes you were healed. For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the shepherd and bishop of your souls. (1 Peter 2: 11-25.)

There are countless examples of saints who converted unbelievers or apostates to the Faith during the midst of persecutions. The confident bravery of Catholics who weathered torture with trust in Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother, the Acts of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and Contrition uttered by Catholics facing execution for their beliefs as they refused to pay any esteem whatsoever to the very false religions that are esteemed so readily today by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and his conciliar "bishops," the quiet acceptance of the loss of friends and even family members for the love of the true God Who has revealed Himself to us exclusively through His Catholic Church, the kind words offered to their jailers by Catholics who have been imprisoned for the Faith, the performance of the Spiritual and Corporal Works of Mercy in the midst of the most excruciating torments imaginable, yes, all of these and so many other means have been used by Catholics in the midst of being spied upon and persecuted simply because they desired to obey God rather than men and would not give up the Catholic Faith.

Holy Mother Church gives us these saints to be our intercessors, yes. She also gives them to us to be our examples as to how to accept our daily crosses, whether large or small, and to give thanks to God for each and every one of them, rejoicing that He loves us so much as to give us opportunities to manifest our love for Him as He has revealed Himself to us through His true Church as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world by giving all of our prayers and sufferings and humiliations and penitential acts that are seen and known only by Him to Him through His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

The first Successor of Saint Peter as the Bishop of Rome and the Vicar of Christ, Saint Linus, gave up his life willingly in imitation of the One Whose Vicar he was, imitating as well the martyrdom of Saint Peter himself. The Chief Shepherd of the flock of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave up his very life for the sheep for whom his Divine Master had shed every single drop of His Most Blessed Blood to redeem. We should pray to Saint Linus every day to help us to cooperate with the graces that Our Lady sends to us that have been won for us by the shedding of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, which must be our glory each day of our lives, just as Saint Paul taught us in his First Epistle to the Corinthians:

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness: But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor. 1: 23-25.)

According to Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, over eleven million Catholics gave up their lives between 67 A.D. and 313 A.D. rather than to renounce the Faith and/or to partake in false worship. Pope Saint Linus and Saint Thecla were two of these saints, each of whom should inspire us not to take lightly these words of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that were included in the quotation just above from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew:

And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10: 28.)

As we intercede with Our Lady for the Poor Souls this day, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, and every day of our lives, let us remember that the members of the Church Suffering in Purgatory, despite being reliant upon us to help them to be purified so as to rejoice as members of the Church Militant in Heaven, can intercede for us.

So, pray for the Poor Souls, but also pray to them, who are present mystically at a true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of Mass along with the members of the Church Triumphant, as they want to help us have the courage and the serene acceptance of suffering and chastisements that was possessed by Dr. Takashi Paul Nagai, who was very devoted to Our Lady and her Most Holy Rosary.

Even though he is neither a Servant of God nor a beatus, we should pray to Dr. Nagai be ever reliant upon Our Lady as he was and thus to be able to see everything that happens through the eyes of the true Faith without any kind of fear or apprehension whatsoever.

We travel by the Holy Faith, not by elections.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Our Lady of Deliverance, pray for us and for the Poor Souls.

Saint Joseph, Patron of the Dying, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us. 

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.