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POETIC LICENCE: The Pope should go to Iraq as a human shield to avert war

Kaleem Omar

Leaders of US churches have been speaking openly against a war with Iraq. But a majority of Americans still favour going to war, including some clergy. No matter how local American religious leaders feel about an attack, they frequently have to preach to congregations that are split on the issue

Just about the only thing that might stop the Bush administration from going to war against Iraq is if Pope John Paul II were to declare that he was going to Baghdad to act as a “human shield” and would stay there until the United States pledged that it would not attack the country. Such a move might make even the most hawkish members of the Bush administration think twice about raining death and destruction on the defenceless Iraqi people.

As head of the Catholic Church (which has more than 1.2 billion members worldwide), the Pope commands enormous influence and moral authority. In recent months he has become increasingly involved in efforts to avert a US-led attack on Iraq. He was a strong critic of the 1991 Gulf War and has repeatedly denounced UN sanctions against Iraq in the years since.

The Pope and the Vatican are opposed to the looming new US war against Iraq and that has been increasingly clear in recent weeks. The Pope has himself been speaking on an almost daily basis, praying for peace and insisting that war is not inevitable, that war would be a defeat for humanity.

“A stream of Vatican officials have taken an increasingly strong public position that is critical of the idea of a so-called preventive war,” John Allen, the Vaitcan correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, the leading US Catholic weekly, said in an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Archbishop Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, recently denounced the idea of a preventive war as a “war of aggression” that does not come under the definition of a “just war.” Martino said the latest evidence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction presented to the UN Security Council by US Secretary of State Colin Powell (in a 76-minute salvo earlier this month) was both unconvincing and vague.

Earlier, an Italian magazine controlled by the Vatican, Civilta Cattolica, suggested the war was motivated in part by economic reasons. It also warned that war would foment terrorism and destabilise the Middle East.

Allen pointed out that the Vatican does not strictly adhere to a pacifist stance. It approved of the war in Kosovo as an attempt to protect civilian populations who were being brutalised. But, in the case of Iraq, Allen said, Vatican officials believe that alternative options to war have not yet been exhausted. “For example, they would argue: ‘Let’s give the weapons inspectors a longer time to work. We have today a new pledge from the Iraqis to cooperate with the inspections. Let’s work through the international community, let’s work through the Security Council rather than through what President Bush in the United States is calling the coalition of the willing’,” Allen said.

Another argument from the Vatican is that a US-led strike against Iraq would have disastrous consequences for the Middle East and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The Vatican also says that any war the United States conducts outside UN parameters will substantially weaken the international laws the Holy See has used as a tool for promoting religious freedom, especially in countries with Christian minorities.

Meanwhile, leaders of US churches have been speaking openly against a war with Iraq. But a majority of Americans still favour going to war, including some clergy. No matter how local American religious leaders feel about an attack, they frequently have to preach to congregations that are split on the issue. Worship services might include an entire sermon in opposition of the war, or simply offer prayers for diplomats and the military.

As the US government’s decision about an invasion draws near, though, with some reports suggesting that an attack could come as early as the first week of March, mainstream American clergy are reportedly facing increasing pressure from peers and congregants to provide more guidance — to offer a “moral framework for judging war,” as an article in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor newspaper put it.

The chorus of opposition from US churches began last autumn, when talk of war with Iraq started to increase, following President George W Bush’s September 12 address to the United Nations, in which he declared that the UN ran the risk of becoming “irrelevant” if it failed to act against Iraq to force it to get rid of its “weapons of mass destruction.”

UN inspectors have found no evidence that Iraq still possesses any such weapons. But the Bush administration has astonishingly interpreted this lack of evidence to mean that Iraq does have such weapons. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the administration’s arch hawks, has gone to the extent of saying that it is not for the weapons inspectors to prove that Iraq is guilty of the charge but for Iraq to prove that it is innocent — thus standing the time-honoured principle of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.

Among the American churches speaking out against an attack, especially a “preemptive” one, are the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Churches. Leaders of other faiths are also opposed. According to the Christian Science Monitor, even evangelical Protestant churches are divided, with some taking a stand in favour of the attack, and others expressing concern over it.

But Catholic churches in some communities are not talking about war or antiwar. “I think they are afraid to talk about it, afraid the parishioners won’t give their money in the churches if they have different opinions,” the Monitor quoted Sister Sandra Lyons, a Reading, Pennsylvania, nun as saying. She said that the clergy should at least state the Catholic Church’s criteria for when war is justified.

According to the Monitor, Pastor Carl Beavers of Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church in Jackson, Wyoming, is doing just that: He outlines the “just war” criteria and lets people in his skiing community make up their own minds. “The issue is whether innocent people are threatened. That’s the only reason to go to war,” he said.

Last month a 13-member delegation of the US National Council of Churches visited Iraq. The head of the delegation, Bob Edgar, told reporters that preemptive war is “immoral and illegal,” “theologically illegitimate” and “profoundly violates” Christian beliefs and religious principles. The delegation also pleaded for an easing of UN sanctions in force since Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, saying that the sanctions had had a devastating impact on the Iraqi people.

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