On a beautiful winter’s day, the community of Sydney met to visit father Paul Glynn. Fr Paul, who is now over 90, is a Marist missionary father who spent 25 years in Japan and wrote six books, the most famous being “A song for Nagasaki”, the story of Dr. Takashi Nagai. We came in contact with Fr Paul thanks to a request from Italy for one of us to do an interview with him for the 2019 Rimini Meeting held last August.

After showing us around a part of the beautiful Marist centre at Hunter Hill, which was originally a sanatorium in the late 1800s, we celebrated mass together with Father Glynn and enjoyed lunch at a local pub. Father Paul had, as a special mission in his life, the reconciliation of Australians with the Japanese in the wake of the Second World War. I can still recall as a young boy in the 1960’s seeing and hearing the anger of war veterans whenever the Japanese were mentioned. Prisoners of war under the Japanese were considered as traitors to their country and treated very cruelly.



The book “A Song for Nagasaki” tells the story of Takashi Nagai, a Japanese doctor who was the Dean of Radiology at the Nagasaki University Medical Dept. Nagai lost his wife when the atomic bomb was dropped, but despite this tragedy and all the suffering he saw and felt in his life, Nagai never lost his Catholic faith and never stopped working and writing. He wrote 15 books, some of them with such good Christian news that they became national best sellers in gloomy post-war Japan. The Japan National Government raised him to the rare honour of a "National Living Treasure" some years before he died in 1951 of radiation disease.

Father Paul brought the story of Nagai’s life to the world because he believes, as Nagai did, that even in the darkest tragedy, God is mysteriously present. As a metaphor of the society we live in, Father Paul compares the eagle from Deuteronomy 32:11 (“like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over the young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them aloft”), to the modern-day chicken hardly able to fly, passing its life head down scratching the surface of the ground to find what it can to eat.
Father Glynn, in the seven books he has written and in his living testimony, teaches us that Destiny, no matter how harsh and cruel it can initially seem, always changes our life for our good in miraculous ways. The experience of meeting Fr Glynn really touched us all; his is a missionary life filled with joy, living and working with the Japanese.

Paul Glynn
A Song for Nagasaki
Ignatius Press, 2009