After a gunman shot former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe during a campaign rally on Friday in western Japan, Archbishop Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo said, “violence kills democracy.”

Abe was campaigning for local candidates in Nara when a person shot him in the back from close range with what news reports have described as a homemade gun. He was airlifted to a hospital but officials said he was not breathing and his heart had stopped.

Police arrested the suspected gunman at the scene.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Abe was in “grave condition” and he hoped Abe would survive. Kishida and his Cabinet ministers hastily returned to Tokyo from campaign events around the country after the shooting, which he called “dastardly and barbaric.”

“I’m praying for former Prime Minister Abe’s survival from the bottom of my heart,” Kishida told reporters at his office.

Abe is the longest serving prime minister in Japan’s history, having been in office twice, first from 2006-2007 and then from 2012-2020. A member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, he was controversial for his views on re-militarizing Japan and his revisionist views on Japan’s actions during World War II.

Kikuchi told Crux he was “deeply saddened and shocked to hear the news of attack on the former prime minister of Japan, Mr. Shinzo Abe and I earnestly pray that he would survive.”

The archbishop also deplored the fact that political violence might be happening in Japan.

“After more than 70 years since the present constitution was promulgated in 1947 with strong desire to establish peace, principle of democracy based on freedom of speech and vote supposed be the core value of this society,” he said.

“There are differences of opinion existing in the society over all kinds of issues and political antagonism among politicians made them to fight each other. However this fight has been done by debate and not by violence,” Kikuchi continued.

“Violence kills democracy. Violence kills freedom. Violence kills justice. The differences of political opinion have to be solved through dialogue and voting in freedom. No one has right to use violence to silence opposition. Only dialogue provides real solution to realize the justice and peace,” he told Crux.

Opposition leaders in Japan condemned the attack as a challenge to Japan’s democracy and prayed for Abe’s recovery.

When he resigned as prime minister, Abe said he had a recurrence of the ulcerative colitis he’d had since he was a teenager.

He told reporters at the time that it was “gut wrenching” to leave many of his goals unfinished. He spoke of his failure to resolve the issue of Japanese abducted years ago by North Korea, a territorial dispute with Russia and a revision of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution.

This article incorporated material from the Associated Press.