On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay dropped a uranium-235 atomic bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” over Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people immediately, and by the end of 1945, the total number of deaths from the blast, burns, and radiation sickness had risen to approximately 130,000 to 140,000. Buildings were flattened for miles in every direction. The city was devastated almost beyond recognition.
Yet in the midst of this destruction, a small community of Jesuit priests stationed at their mission house survived.
The Jesuits and Their Location
The Jesuit community was living at the rectory of the Church of Our Lady’s Assumption, located within one mile of ground zero. According to the testimony of Father Hubert Schiffer himself, published in his 1953 account The Rosary of Hiroshima, there were four Jesuit priests at the parish house that morning: Father Hugo Lassalle, Superior of the entire Jesuit mission in Japan; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge; Father Cieslik; and Father Schiffer. This number is confirmed by John Hersey’s celebrated 1946 account, Hiroshima, which places them at approximately 1,400 yards (about 1,300 meters) from the center of the blast.
It should be noted that many popular retellings of this story, circulated widely on the internet and social media, state that eight Jesuit priests (or missionaries) survived the blast at a distance of “eight blocks from ground zero.” The primary sources do not support these specific numbers. Father Schiffer’s own written account names four priests at the parish house. A 2019 investigation by the Hiroshima Peace Media Center found that as many as sixteen Jesuits experienced the bombing across various locations in the city, which may account for the larger numbers that have entered popular retellings over the decades. However, the group at the parish house, whose survival is the focus of this story, numbered four.
The Explosion
Father Schiffer was thirty years old at the time. It was a quarter past eight in the morning. The priests were in their rooms at the parish house when the bomb detonated. In his own words, published in The Rosary of Hiroshima:
“Suddenly, a terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunder stroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me, whirled me round and round like a leaf in a gust of autumn wind.”
Father John Siemes, a Jesuit who had been on the outskirts of the city and who published a detailed account in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1946, described the scene at the parish house:
“They were showered with glass splinters and fragments of wreckage. Father Schiffer was buried beneath a portion of a wall and suffered a severe head injury. The Father Superior received most of the splinters in his back and lower extremity from which he bled copiously. Everything was thrown about in the rooms themselves, but the wooden framework of the house remained intact.”
Their Survival
All four Jesuit priests survived the explosion and its aftermath. Father Schiffer sustained a severe head wound, and Father Lassalle received significant injuries from glass and debris. Their injuries, while real, were not fatal, and all four recovered. In 1950, speaking in the United States, Father Schiffer reported: “Of 14 clergy and laymen we lost only one, a Japanese.”
One important factor in their survival was the physical structure of their building. Both Hersey and Siemes noted that the Jesuit mission house had been reinforced and double-braced years earlier by a priest named Brother Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes. This structural reinforcement gave the building a greater capacity to withstand the blast than the lighter wooden constructions that surrounded it. Hersey noted in his account that “all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper.”
It is also important to note that the Jesuit priests were not the only survivors near the center of the blast. Historical records indicate that an estimated 14% of people within one kilometer of ground zero survived the initial explosion. Other survivors included ten people in a streetcar approximately 750 meters from ground zero and a woman in a bank only 260 meters from the blast.
The Question of Miracle
The survival of the priests has been widely discussed in Catholic circles and is often described as miraculous. Father Schiffer himself was careful with his language. In 1951, he told an audience at Loyola University: “I won’t call it a miracle exactly, but I think we were under the special protection of God.”
In the years that followed, the priests were examined and interviewed repeatedly by scientists and physicians who were studying the long-term effects of atomic radiation. Father Schiffer reportedly underwent more than 200 medical examinations. According to the widely circulated account of his 1976 testimony at the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, he and his companions attributed their survival to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and to their daily practice of praying the Rosary. The statement attributed to them reads:
“We believe that we survived because we were living the message of Fatima. We lived and prayed the Rosary daily in that home.”
Father Schiffer later gave numerous talks about his experience across the United States and wrote his account under the title The Rosary of Hiroshima, which is preserved in the Special Collections at Sacred Heart University.
The Nagasaki Connection
Some accounts also draw a parallel to the city of Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped three days later, on August 9, 1945. In Nagasaki, a Franciscan friary established by St. Maximilian Kolbe in the 1930s survived the blast. However, as Catholic historian Donal Anthony Foley noted in The Catholic Herald, the friary was protected by an intervening mountain that shielded it from the force of the bomb. St. Maximilian Kolbe himself was not in Japan at the time of the bombing; he had been martyred at the Auschwitz concentration camp on August 14, 1941, four years before the atomic attacks.
Father Schiffer’s Later Life
After the war, Father Schiffer traveled to the United States, where he earned a master’s degree from Fordham University in 1952 and a doctorate in 1958. He worked as an associate professor of economics at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia during the 1960s and wrote a book on the Japanese banking system. He met both the pilot, Paul Tibbets, and the co-pilot, Robert A. Lewis, of the Enola Gay in the years following the bombing, and the two former adversaries reportedly became friends.
Father Schiffer died on March 27, 1982, in Frankfurt, West Germany, thirty-seven years after the bombing that should have taken his life.
The Lesson of Hiroshima
Whatever one concludes about the precise nature of the Jesuits’ survival, whether a supernatural miracle in the strict theological sense, a providential confluence of structural engineering and divine grace, or something that transcends human categories altogether, the witness of Father Schiffer and his companions remains powerful. They lived. They prayed the Rosary. They attributed their survival to the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
For the faithful, this account is a profound reminder that the Rosary is not merely a devotional habit but a spiritual weapon of extraordinary power. Those who arm themselves with it place themselves under the mantle of Our Lady, whose intercession is never without effect.
As St. Louis de Montfort wrote: “The Rosary is a powerful weapon. Use it with confidence and you’ll be amazed at the results.”
Primary sources for this account include: Father Hubert Schiffer, S.J., The Rosary of Hiroshima (1953, Sacred Heart University Special Collections); John Hersey, Hiroshima (The New Yorker, August 31, 1946); Father John Siemes, S.J., “Hiroshima — August 6, 1945” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 15, 1946); the Wikipedia article on Hubert Schiffer, which contains extensive primary source citations; and the article “The Jesuit Priests Who Survived Hiroshima” published by the National Catholic Register on August 6, 2020.