He was assigned to the 509th Composite Group, the unit which was responsible for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
(1883–1957) and Katarina (Zolek, 1874–1940) Zabelka, were Moravian Catholics who immigrated to the United States before the First World War, from Austria-Hungary where his father had served in the army.
Zabelka was raised on a sixty-acre farm and attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse in St. John's, Michigan.
Upon graduation from grammar school, he entered the Sacred Heart Minor Seminary of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit.
He served first as a chaplain at Wright Field, a United States Army Air Corps airfield in Riverside, Ohio.
His requests for combat chaplaincy service resulted in his being assigned to the 309th General Hospital Unit on Tinian Island in the Marianas in August 1945.
During this time he joined the Michigan National Guard and was assigned as Catholic Chaplain to the 125th Infantry Regiment.
He fought successfully to keep the church and parochial school open for black children, despite major objections from a variety of sources and an ongoing struggle over finances.
[1] The goal of the project was to train young black people for employment and to offer them counseling and other social services, including sometimes food if there was a need.
During these years he also founded “Focus on Progress", a program to help students who were having academic difficulties in school to upgrade their learning skills.
Writing about Bishop Frank Murphy, the sole initiator of the document that became The Challenge of Peace, and what influenced him to make this proposal to the U.S. Bishops, Castelli says, "But the major influence on Murphy may have been Father George Zabelka, a Catholic priest, who as an Air Force chaplain had blessed the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as he had previously blessed the men who were inflicting massive bombing damage on the civilians of Tokyo.
Murphy quoted from an interview with Zabelka in the evangelical Christian magazine, SOJOURNERS” (August, 1980), ”Fr.
As a tribute to Zabelka's courage in admitting that he had made a grave moral mistake by his silence during the atomic bombings, Australian folk singer, Peter Kearney wrote and recorded a ballad titled, “My Name is George Zabelka” heard by tens of millions across the world, although it was never played on the secular or religious radio stations and networks in the United States.
[3][4] In 1988, a full-length documentary telling the story of Zabelka's life and conversion was released in Great Britain.
[1] Also as a consequence of that article, Zabelka and a Jesuit priest, Jack Morris, planned, organized, and participated in the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage.
It began in 1983, when walkers left the nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington, and it ended on Christmas Eve in 1984 in Bethlehem.
In his homily, Bishop Povish commented: “In our priestly gatherings, when we would concelebrate Mass together, at the prayers of petition Fr.
As he requested, Zabelka's body is buried in the veterans’ section, Wing Victory II, at Crestwood Memorial Cemetery in Grand Blanc, Michigan.