March 29, 2003 John Paul spoke before a group of bishops from Indonesia in Rome for their ad limina visit. He said: “I wish to assure you of my deep concern for the beloved Indonesian people at this moment of heightened tension in the entire world community. War must never be allowed to divide world religions. I encourage you to take this unsettling moment as an occasion to work together, as brothers committed to peace, with your own people, with those of other religious beliefs and with all men and women of good will in order to ensure understanding, cooperation and solidarity. Let us not permit a human tragedy also to become a religious catastrophe."
March 30, 2003 The Pope delivered his regular Sunday Angelus address. He said: “Today, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the Gospel reminds us that God ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life’ (Jn 3:16). We hear this comforting proclamation at a time when painful armed confrontation threatens the hope of humanity for a better future. Jesus affirmed ‘God so loved the world.’ So then, the Father’s love reaches every human being who lives in the world. How can one not see the obligation that springs from such an initiative of God? Conscious of such great love, the human being can only open himself to an attitude of fraternal welcome towards his fellow human beings."
April 2, 2003 John Paul II spoke at his regular Wednesday General Audience, meditating on the theme of how to make sense of God’s failure to prevent evil. He said: “The divine silence is often a cause of perplexity to the just, and even scandalous, as Job’s long lamentation attests (cf. Jb 3:1–26). However, it is not a silence that suggests absence, as if history had been left in the hands of the perverse, or the Lord were indifferent and impassive. In fact, that silence gives vent to a reaction similar to a woman in labor who gasps and pants and screams with pain. It is the divine judgement on evil, presented with images of aridity, destruction, desert, which has a living and fruitful result as its goal. In fact, the Lord brings forth a new world, an age of freedom and salvation. The eyes of the blind will be opened so that they may enjoy the brilliant light. The path will be leveled and hope will blossom, making it possible to continue to trust in God and in his future of peace and happiness. Every day the believer must be able to discern the signs of divine action even when they are hidden by the apparently monotonous, aimless flow of time. . . . Discovering this divine presence, with the eyes of faith, in space and time but also within ourselves, is a source of hope and confidence, even when our hearts are agitated and shaken ‘as the trees of the forest shake before the wind’ (Is 7:2)." As is customary, the Pope was greeted by a number of people and groups at the end of the audience, among them some Italian students preparing for careers in the hotel business. They brought the Pope a huge cake, which he received with a smile. It was decorated in the rainbow colors of the peace flag, with a large dove made of white glaze in the middle.
April 4, 2003 Two weeks into the war, the National Catholic Reporter carried a story reporting that the feared anti-Christian backlash in the Muslim world had not materialized. The newspaper contacted Christian and Muslim leaders in places where relations between the two faiths were strained: Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, Palestine, as well as Iraq. Based on reporting from March 29 to April 2, there had not been a single case recorded of harassment or violence against Christians related to the war. In fact, sources in several traditional hotspots said Christian/Muslim relations were better than ever. All sources concurred that a principal factor had been the strong antiwar line of John Paul II, which had received extensive coverage in the Arab press and praise from Islamic leaders.
April 6, 2003 The Pope delivered his Sunday Angelus address. He said: “My thoughts go in particular to Iraq and to all those involved in the war that is being waged there. I am thinking in a special way of the defenseless civilian population in various cities which is subjected to a harsh trial. Please God that this conflict ends soon in order to make way for a new era of forgiveness, love and peace."
April 9, 2003 John Paul spoke at his regular Wednesday General Audience. He linked the war in Iraq to other conflicts in Africa. He said: “While fighting with destruction and death continues in Baghdad and other urban centers in Iraq, equally disturbing news is arriving from the African continent. In the past few days we have received information about massacres and summary executions. The scene of these crimes was the tortured Great Lakes region and, especially, an area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As I raise to God a fervent prayer for the repose of the victims’ souls, I address a heartfelt appeal to political leaders and to all people of good will to do their utmost to put an end to the violence and abuses, setting aside selfish personal and group interests, with the effective collaboration of the international community."
U.S. undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, was in Rome for meetings with Vatican officials. Bolton met separately with Stafford, Ruini, and Tauran. Each meeting lasted for approximately one hour. Bolton then held a press conference before an invited group of Italian and American journalists at the U.S. embassy to the Holy See. Bolton was asked if he had detected any softening in the Vatican’s position on the war, given that the Holy See had been a leading center of opposition. Bolton replied that he rejected that characterization of the Vatican’s position. The Holy See expressed concerns, he said, but they recognized that it is up to the civil authority to make the decision. Vatican officials respect, Bolton said, the sense of conscience with which President Bush made this decision.
The common American interest with the Vatican now, Bolton said, is to look to the future. Concretely, that means installing a government that respects the will of the Iraqi people, making sure that a humanitarian disaster is avoided in Iraq, eliminating weapons of mass destruction, and moving forward toward a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. On the humanitarian front, Bolton said the Vatican had offered some concrete suggestions as to how aid might be delivered. This was a pressing problem, since the destruction of the Ba’ath Party meant the destruction of the only instrument Iraq had for getting supplies from the Food-for-Oil program to its people. Churches and mosques in Iraq, Bolton said, may have a role to play in creating a substitute delivery system. He vowed to relay the suggestions to Washington, so that people on the ground could make the decision.
April 10, 2003 Fighting appeared to end in Iraq. Sodano issued the following statement: “The Secretariat of State, having been informed of the latest developments in Baghdad, which mark an important turning point in the Iraqi conflict and a significant opportunity for the future of the people, hopes that the military operations underway in the rest of the country will soon end, with the aim of sparing further victims, civilian or military, and further suffering for those populations. Given that the material, political and social reconstruction of the country are on the horizon, the Catholic Church is ready, through her social and charitable institutions, to lend the necessary assistance. The dioceses of Iraq are likewise available to offer their structures to contribute to an equitable distribution of humanitarian aid. The Secretariat of State hopes once again that, with the silencing of weapons, the Iraqis and the international community will know how to meet the compelling present challenge which is to definitively bring an era of peace to the Middle East."
John Paul spoke before an assembly of young people from Rome on the occasion of World Youth Day, giving special emphasis to Mary and the rosary. He said: “Responding to this invitation and taking Mary into your home will also mean working for peace. Mary, Regina Pacis (Queen of Peace), is indeed a Mother, and like every mother all she wants for her children is to see them living peacefully and in agreement with one another. In this tormented time in history, while terrorism and wars are threatening peace between men and women and religions, I would like to entrust you to Mary so that you may become champions of the culture of peace, today more necessary than ever."
April 13, 2003 The Pope
delivered his Palm Sunday homily in Rome. Speaking to the youth present, he said: “And how could we fail to express our fraternal solidarity to your peers who are so sorely tried by war and violence in Iraq, in the Holy Land and in various other regions of the world?"
April 16, 2003 The Pope spoke on the occasion of the Easter Triduum, the final three days of Holy Week. He said: “Commemorating this central mystery of the faith also involves the commitment to put it into practice in the concrete reality of our lives. It means recognizing that Christ’s passion is continued in the dramatic events which, unfortunately, still in our time afflict so many men and women in every part of the earth. The mystery of the Cross and of the Resurrection, however, assures us that hatred, violence, blood and death do not have the last word in human lives. The definitive victory is Christ’s, and we must set out anew with him if we want to build a future of authentic peace, justice and solidarity for everyone."
April 17, 2003 The Pope celebrated the Holy Thursday liturgy. In his homily, he said: “I would like the collection taken during this Celebration to go to alleviate the urgent needs of all those in Iraq who are suffering the consequences of the war. A heart that has known the love of the Lord opens spontaneously to charity for his brethren."
April 18, 2003 The Pope celebrated the traditional Good Friday Way of the Cross liturgy at the Colosseum. Since he no longer was physically capable of carrying the cross for the fourteen stations, John Paul had adopted the custom of asking individuals to carry it for one or two stations to symbolize particular concerns. This year, the cross was borne for the twelfth and thirteenth stations by an Iraqi family. John Paul said: “Mystery of the faith! Man could not imagine this mystery, this reality. God alone could reveal it. Man does not have the possibility of giving life after death. The death of death. In the human order, death is the last word. The subsequent word, the word of the Resurrection, is a word that comes only from God, and this is why we celebrate this ‘Sacred Triduum’ with such profound feeling."
During a Rome press conference with three Catholic news outlets, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of Health and Human Services under President George Bush and himself a Catholic, discussed the standoff between Rome and Washington over the Iraq war. “If I had my druthers, I would rather have had the Pope on my side," Thompson said. “But we have much better information than the Pope about what’s going on inside Iraq and what would happen in the rest of the Middle East. . . . The Pope is concerned about innocent children and citizens, and so are we," Thompson said. “We can show with empirical evidence and data that we have saved men, women and children from torture, from rapes and murders, in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.
In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, renowned Italian editorialist Ernesto Gallia della Loggia criticized the Vatican’s handling of the Iraq crisis. He said he was surprised not by the Holy See’s position on the war, but by the tone of its opposition, and especially by what he saw as its uncritical commentary about Iraq. Galli della Loggia noted that in John Paul’s United Nations speeches on peace, the Pope had always placed his message in the context of human rights, yet the Pope did not use human rights language much during the Iraq crisis. Galli della Loggia suggested this may be because references to human rights would have invited awkward questions about the brutal character of the Saddam Hussein government. Galli della Loggia also speculated that the Holy See had gambled that it could afford to antagonize the Americans more than Islamic nations. “They probably think that no matter what the Pope says, American Catholics will be okay and the American administration will still see the Vatican as a great global institution. In that sense, there’s nothing to lose by coming out against the Americans, and everything to gain by siding with Islam," he said.
Galli della Loggia observed that it was the most Catholic countries of Europe—Spain, Italy, and Poland—whose governments backed the United States on the war, while it was France and Germany, the birth-places of Revolution and Reformation respectively, that sided with the Pope. Galli della Loggia said this is a sign of the political weakness of the Catholic Church in Europe. It does not have the throw-weight to determine policy, even in nations where ostensibly friendly governments are in power.
Galli della Loggia said that the Iraq crisis exposed a fundamental weakness in Vatican foreign policy—hesitation to confront corrupt regimes in the developing world. “The Vatican wants to be a global voice of conscience, supporting developing nations," Galli della Loggia said. “Often they express this support by spouting the same economic formula they always recycle, blaming rich nations for poverty. . . . But the principal obstacle to social and economic development is not the West, but dictatorial and corrupt regimes that strangle their own people. Catholic missionaries and even the Vatican polemicize against the West, hiding local responsibility. They’re afraid of being tossed into the ‘Western’ mix if they make problems for these governments. Ironically, the only governments the Church criticizes are in the West, where it knows it won’t have to pay any price because those governments respect human rights," Galli della Loggia said.
April 20, 2003 In remarks on Easter Day, the Pope seemed to support calls for the Americans to turn over responsibility for postwar Iraq as quickly as possible to the United Nations and to the Iraqis themselves. He said: “Peace in Iraq! With the support of the international community, may the Iraqi people become the protagonists of the collective rebuilding of their country. . . . Let there be an end to the chain of hatred and terrorism, which threatens the orderly development of the human family. May God grant that we be free from the peril of a tragic clash between cultures and religions. May faith and love of God make the followers of every religion courageous builders of understanding and forgiveness, patient weavers of a fruitful interreligious dialogue, capable of inaugurating a new era of justice and peace." The address was delivered live to fifty-three countries. The crowd in St. Peter’s Square spontaneously burst into applause. From that point forward, every reference to peace brought cheers. In the end the Pope was interrupted by applause a campaign-style fifteen times.
April 22, 2003 Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who served as the Vatican’s foreign minister for ten years under John Paul II, gave an interview to La Repubblica in which he reflected on the Pope’s peace initiative over the past few months. “In the entire Christian world, there was a spontaneous consensus around the Pope never before seen," Silvestrini said. “I don’t recall any epoch in which the Pope had such attention from Christians of the various confessions, from patriarchs and bishops. It was as if all had said: ‘You are our spiritual guide in this reflection on peace.’ " Silvestrini said the pan-Christian support for the Pope elicited a dream. “I’m thinking about an ecumenical convocation in which the exponents of the Christian churches together with the Pope could carry out a grand reflection on the responsibility of Christians with respect to war," he said. A new ecumenical consensus in favor of peace, Silvestrini argued, could be the “good" to come from the “evil" of the Iraq conflict. “The sensation is spreading that we are arriving at a maturation in the history of humanity," Silvestrini said. “Just as at a certain point slavery was abolished, and torture and the death penalty were condemned, we are now dissolving the notion that war can ever be justified. Apart from defense against aggression, but certainly not a preventive war."
April 30, 2003 Outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See Neville Lamdan, in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, voiced concern that under the pressure of recent world events, including 9/11 and the Iraq war, the Catholic Church’s primary interreligious relationship is increasingly no longer Judaism but Islam. It is a situation, he said, that could pose dangers both for Israel and for the broader Catholic/Jewish dialogue.
June 2, 2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met John Paul II in the Vatican, followed by talks with Sodano and Tauran. U.S. officials presented the meeting as a sign that Vatican/American relations were “back on track" following the dispute over the war. “Amo
ng the themes discussed was the material and political reconstruction of Iraq," the Vatican statement afterward read, “which must be able to count on the cooperation of the international community and pay particular attention to fundamental rights, such as the right to religious liberty."
FLASHPOINTS
Despite the positive spin on the Powell visit, it is clear from this review of the Holy See’s activism on the Iraq war that fundamental differences exist between the foreign policy vision of the United States under the Bush administration and that of John Paul’s Vatican. Absent a change of philosophy on either side, it is reasonable to assume that the following four disputes will be recurrent flashpoints in the Rome/Washington relationship.
Preventive War
The Roman Catholic tradition of moral reflection on the characteristics of a “just war" distinguishes between legitimacy ad bellum, meaning the reasons for waging the war, and in bello, meaning the manner in which the war is conducted.
For justice ad bellum, the tradition offers six tests:
Legitimate authority. Private individuals and groups are not permitted to take up arms against others, however justified their cause may appear. Only governments—those who have been entrusted with the public good—may wage war, and they must do it openly and legally.
Just cause. A government may wage war in self-defense, in defense of another nation, to protect innocents, or to regain something wrongfully taken. The desire for personal glory or revenge, or to impose tyrannical rule, is never an acceptable cause for waging war.
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