After the
persecution of Christians in Japan ended in 1873, Japanese Catholics purchased land in the
Urakami Valley district of Nagasaki, where
fumi-e interrogations had taken place. On that land, the
Urakami Cathedral was built; construction was completed in 1895, and it was consecrated in 1925. Three years later, a wooden altarpiece depicting Mary was constructed, inspired by a painting by the Spanish artist
Bartolomé Murillo. The statue was constructed in Italy. On August 9, 1945, three days after the city of
Hiroshima had been obliterated by an atomic bomb, an American
B-29 bomber dropped the
plutonium-powered "
Fat Man" bomb on Nagasaki, destroying the Urakami cathedral. Later, the Trappist monk Kaemon Noguchi entered the ruins of the chapel to pray, and found the remains of the statue of Mary, burned and damaged. It had missing eyes and a crack across its face. Noguchi took the statue with him to his monastery in Hokkaido. In 1975, he returned it when he learned that the church was looking for relics that survived the bombing. The statue was held in the
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum until 2005, when it was moved back to the Urakami Cathedral, which had been rebuilt. In 2005,
Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, visited the statue in Japan, and said that seeing it "strengthened [his] determination to see the end of all nuclear weapons". In 2010, Archbishop
Joseph Mitsuaki Takami brought the statue with him to the
United Nations headquarters in New York City, where he pleaded for the global elimination of nuclear weapons. ==See also==