When Catholics Become a Peace Church

The Vatican also spoke out against war in Iraq. Archbishop Renato Raffaele Martino, a former U.N. envoy and current prefect of the Council for Justice and Peace, told reporters that war against Iraq was a preventive war and constituted a "war of aggression", and thus did not constitute a just war. The foreign minister, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, said that such a war of aggression is a crime against peace.

On September 13, 2002, US Catholic bishopshad signed a letter to President Bush stating that any "preemptive, unilateral use of military force to overthrow the government of Iraq" could not be justified at the time. They came to this position by evaluating whether an attack against Iraq would satisfy the criteria for a just war as defined by Catholic theology.

On 15 February 2003, a month before the invasion, there were worldwide protests against the Iraq War, including a rally of three million people in Rome, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever anti-war rally. According to the French academic Dominique Reynie, between 3 January and 12 April 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.

Americans, and of course American Catholics, were largely unaware of the depth and importance of the opposition of Church leaders everywhere to an attack on Iraq, since for the most part the mainstream American media did not carry these stories. In the same way, many Americans were unaware that Pope John Paul II had spoken out against the first Gulf War at least 56 times. Media in the United States, controlled by corporate, government biased owners, omitted this from news commentaries on these wars.

We go to war ...

The invasion was preceded by an air strike on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad on 19 March 2003. The following day, coalition forces launched an incursion into Basra Province from their massing point close to the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.

While the Special Forces launched an amphibious assault from the Persian Gulf to secure Basra and the surrounding petroleum fields, the main invasion army moved into southern Iraq, occupying the region and engaging in the Battle of Nasiriyah on 23 March. Massive air strikes across the country and against Iraqi command and control threw the defending army into chaos and prevented an effective resistance. On 26 March, the 173rd Airborne Brigade was airdropped near the northern city of Kirkuk, where they joined forces with Kurdish rebels and fought several actions against the Iraqi army to secure the northern part of the country.

As the Bombs fell, " American Opposition became Silent"

"Son of man, Can these Bones Come to Life ?" Ezekiel 37:1-14

But, what if"

Following the solitary example of Bishop John Michael Botean, who had, on March 7^th, just twelve days before the Iraq invasion, issued a Pastoral Letter to his U.S. diocese morally denouncing the War on Iraq as gravely evil,"

". Bishop Wilton Gregory, President of the USCCB, decides to call an emergency meeting of the entire American Catholic Hierarchy.

He had been powerfully moved by the strong words of Bishop Botean's Pastoral Letter :

"When a moral conflict arises between Church teaching and secular morality, when contradictory moral demands are made upon a Catholic's conscience, he or she, 'must obey God rather than man' (Acts 5:29)."

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