About Those Annual Aug. 6th Hiroshima Posts, by Peter Wolfgang 

By Peter Wolfgang, Catholic Culture, Aug 08, 2025

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own.  See full bio.

August 6th was National Lecture Your Fellow Catholics on Facebook Day. If your newsfeed looks anything like mine, you’re thinking to yourself, “Isn’t every day?” But I mean something specific. August 6th was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Every year, without fail, my newsfeed on Aug. 6th is gummed up with Facebook friends reminding their fellow Catholics that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was immoral. The justifications for it smack of consequentialism, proportionalism, etc. Errors that are condemned as such in Catholic moral theology.

I have no disagreement whatsoever with these many—so many—posts in my feed. Dropping the big one on Japan was indeed immoral. You can never deliberately target noncombatants, no matter how many or how few. And in the case of World War II, the ledger fell very much on the side of the many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most obvious examples. …

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