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The Terror
of the War — Just prior to our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 Detroit's auxiliary bishop, Tom Gumbleton, spoke at an anti-war rally across from Independence Hall. He quoted Pope John Paul II, who, on the eve of the first Gulf War, said: "Never again war. No, never again war." And, said Gumbleton, the pope gives some reasons why the just war theory and any theology that justifies violence is wrong:
Later that night the bishop cited the pope again at a Mass for Peace at St. Malachy Church. A considerable number of local Catholics and others participated in the rally and the mass, a last hurrah for peace, because a few days later, after rejecting a papal envoy's appeal, the president approved the bombing of Baghdad. While the "Roman" Catholic Church opposed the Iraq war, the "American" Catholic Church by and large did not. Too many American clerics in their crimson, purple or black robes walked along with a president-emperor, who, morally, had no robes. Michael Baxter in last February's issue of Sign of Peace, journal of Catholic Peace Fellowship, South Bend, Indiana, tells us that 40 percent of our military officers and one third of our enlisted personnel are Catholics. CPF sponsored a bus-full of peace-people, who stood outside a Washington hotel and urged the assembling American bishops to discuss and support Bishop Gumbleton's resolution opposing our going to war with Iraq, but on that occasion the bishops were the president's men, not the pope's. They failed to take a forthright stand for peace. Soon the war began opening a Pandora's box of suicide car bombings, ethnic enmity, direct and collateral damage, refugees, civilian deaths, children in pain, water-boarding, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. The pope was prophet. Sunday after Sunday during the dreary and dreadful debacle in Iraq, Church-goers have heard prayers supporting our troops, prayers of the faithful that our military be protected from physical harm—rightfully so, but why no prayer that the troops be protected from the spiritual harm of harming Iraqi civilians or prisoners? In so many of our sacred sanctuaries the flag of our nation holds an honored spot close to the sacramental presence of the non-violent Prince of Peace, who refused even to carry pocket-money depicting the emperor of Rome. Symbols sing—all the more discordantly when they are off-key so we should pay our flag its due respect but in its proper place—on flag-poles. The Levin Report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on torture memos fully exposes the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration's moral corruption in beginning the process for water-boarding and other torture methods even before 9/11. [One prisoner was water-boarded 183 times in one month.] Rather than keeping us safe from further terrorist attacks as the neo-cons claim, they were really planning to get confessions, forced and even false, connecting Al Queda with Saddam Hussein in order to fabricate some grounds for their contemplated war on Iraq. Then, after 9/11, the alleged reason for torture was shifted to that of providing information that would keep our country safe. Since when does the end justify torture as means? Pope John XXIII wrote in 1963 in Pacem in Terris: "In our atomic era it is irrational any longer to think of war as an apt means to vindicate violated rights." "War no more," said Pope John Paul II, and on Peace Day 1980 he said: "Violence is a lie. Do not support violence." Significant segments of our American Catholic community failed, as the popes did not fail, to foresee and predict the terrible terror of a modern war. Why were so many prelates and people wrong in going along? What is your answer? Kindly tell me, or if I am wrong, tell me—gently. Frank McGinty
[and friends] |