“We need to work together to foster awareness that if one member of our family suffers, we all suffer,” Pope Francis said.

“The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possession of atomic weapons is immoral,” he said. “We will be judged on this.”

This is Francis’ second visit to Japan. He came here in October 1987 to visit Jesuit missionaries as provincial. 

The pope reminded priests, religious and seminarians that the fervor of evangelization “is nurtured by a double encounter: with the face of the Lord and with the faces of our brothers and sisters.”

To be “a missionary disciple is not a mercenary of the faith,” Pope Francis told the Catholics of Thailand, but rather “a humble mendicant” who longs to bring missing family members to the Sunday table.t

Pope Francis spent his first full day in Thailand meeting with the country’s prime minister and supreme patriarch of Buddhists.