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 Papal Envoy Says Events Proved Vatican Right About Iraqi War |
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Story submitted by hugetim on Fri 19 Dec 2003 - 11:24 h |
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Seven months after he tried to convince President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq, Cardinal Pio Laghi, papal envoy, said events have proved the Vatican right about the consequences of war and the difficulties of consolidating peace. Cardinal Laghi recounted in detail his meeting last March with Bush and other White House officials in a talk on Oct. 4 at a conference on “God and the Meeting of Civilizations” at the monastic center of Camaldoli in central Italy.
In March, three weeks before the United States launched its offensive against Iraq, Pope John Paul II sent Cardinal Laghi, a former ambassador to the United States, to plead the case against war with Bush and his aides, but the cardinal said he did not feel his arguments were given much weight. “I had the impression they had already made their decision,” Cardinal Laghi said. Today, as U.S. and allied forces try to resolve vast problems in Iraq, “events have shown that the worries of the Holy See were well-founded,” he added.
Cardinal Laghi said that when he sat down to talk with Bush on March 5 the president began expounding the reasons for war at length, until the cardinal interrupted to say: “I did not come here only to listen, but also to ask you to listen.” Bush listened to the cardinal, but raised objections to the Vatican’s moral arguments against use of force, its rejection of “preventive war” and its warnings about the practical consequences for Iraqis and others.
When Bush said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was training members of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, Cardinal Laghi said he asked him: “Are you sure? Where is the evidence?” Cardinal Laghi also questioned the administration’s conviction that Iraq possessed and was ready to use weapons of mass destruction. But Bush had no doubt that he was right, the cardinal said. The president acted almost as if he were divinely inspired and “seemed to truly believe in a war of good against evil,” Cardinal Laghi said.
“We spoke a long time about the consequences of a war. I asked: ‘Do you realize what you’ll unleash inside Iraq by occupying it?’ The disorder, the conflicts between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds—everything that has in fact happened,” the cardinal said. Bush insisted that democracy would be the main result.
At the end of the encounter, Cardinal Laghi recounted, Bush said that although they disagreed about many points, at least they held common positions on the defense of human life and opposition to human cloning. The cardinal replied that those issues were not the purpose of his mission.
On his way out of the White House, Cardinal Laghi said his sense that Bush and his aides had already made up their minds to attack Iraq was confirmed when a Marine general came up to him, shook his hand and said: “Your Eminence, don’t worry. What we’re going to do, we will do quickly and well.” Three weeks later, air strikes and the ground campaign against Iraq began.
The cardinal said that, in the end, the pope and the church did not appear to have much influence on the decision to go to war or even in prompting a deeper reflection on the issues. But to a wider global audience, he said, the church made the point that it was committed to peace. Cardinal Laghi said that in making his case to Bush he was guided by the pope’s statements on Iraq and those of the U.S. bishops’ conference.
In a paper submitted to the conference, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh detailed the response of U.S. bishops to the terrorist attacks and to the military response that followed. Bishop Wuerl said, however, that the bishops’ moral voice had been weakened by the scandal of clerical sexual abuse in the United States and the scandal’s “spectacular” exploitation by the media.
“As a faith community the church in the United States had never experienced such a scandal or been the object of such intense media coverage and in too many instances manipulation of the story,” he said. “In spite of the scandal, the bishops have continued to speak out as a voice of moral authority. However, it is only fair to say that that moral authority has been diminished by the scandal,” he said.
-America Magazine, Signs of the Times, 10/20/03 |
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Catholic Teaching · Iraq war
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