Nagasaki Bell Project

On August 9, 1945 the largest Catholic Cathedral in East Asia was destroyed by the Fat Man atomic bomb. The original church had two bell towers. The bell from the right tower was recovered from the ruins and reinstalled in the new church that was built after the war, but for eighty years the left tower remained empty. The St. Kateri Institute was honored to be part of a project to make and give to the Nagasaki Catholics a new bell for the left tower.

We worked with a foundry in St. Louis to cast the new bell. Weighing approximately 750 pounds, the bell closely matches the original aside from the image of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, which replaced the previous bell’s image of Saint Martin of Tours. As the first Native American Saint, St. Kateri faced persecution from her own people similar to the persecution of Japanese Catholics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

We are extremely grateful to the more than six hundred donors who contributed to this effort. With their help, we raised $125,000 to accomplish the project. This total included the cost of making, transporting, and installing the new bell. After the installation ceremony on July 17th, the bell rang out for the first time from the left tower of the Urakami Cathedral at 11:02 a.m. on August 9th, 2025, exactly eighty years after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Hear the Bell Ring

Hear the bell ring in this coverage of the project by the Diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts. The bell can be heard five minutes and twenty-three seconds into the video.

Hear the Bell Ring