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ROMA – Among the many comments from Catholic quarters that were issued after the war in Iraq, there are two opposing views that are distinguished by their authority and their combativeness. The first is an editorial that appeared in “La Civiltà Cattolica” on May 17, 2003. The second is the featured article in the May edition of the magazine “First Things,” signed by its editor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus.
The articles that appear in “La Civiltà Cattolica,” which is produced by a group of Jesuits in Rome, are by statute reviewed and approved by the Vatican secretary of state. They therefore fully reflect certain opinions at the top levels of the Church.
“First Things” is an expression of U.S. Catholics of a neoconservative bent, who are close to the Bush administration. Apart from Neuhaus, this viewpoint’s more distinguished spokesmen include George Weigel, author of the monumental authorized biography of John Paul II, which was published in many languages, entitled “Witness to Hope.”
The May 17 editorial in “La Civiltà Cattolica” is an implacable jeremiad, not only against the war in Iraq, but against the entire current state of American politics. But one fact should be emphasized: the matters under accusation are purely political, not theological; the war fought by the United States was never branded as contrary to Christian faith or morals.
The essay by Fr. Neuhaus points in the opposite direction: it analyzes the statements against the war made by the leaders of the Christian Churches, and in particular those of the Catholic Church. His analysis runs the gamut from politics to culture to theology. He comes to a very severe judgment, not of the pope, but of what was said and done by those responsible for Vatican diplomacy.
Here are the salient points of the two commentaries.
“LA CIVILTÀ CATTOLICA”
The editorial is entitled “Healing the Wounds of the war in Iraq.” This is how its summary begins:
“The war in Iraq has disturbed the world order, stripping the U.N. of authority, injuring international law, creating a divide between Europe and the United States, and encouraging the Islamic world’s designs of revenge against the invasive West.”
The disaster created by the United States – and that is how it is summed up – has no redeeming factors. If it is true that Iraq “has been liberated from the ferocious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein,” this very “liberation” (quotation marks in the original) has only brought about greater damage. Even the “somewhat positive fact that the war was concluded in less than a month” is another provocation: the defeat of the “weak” Iraqi regime “has proven that there were not sufficient reasons to bring war against Iraq, because this country posed no real threat to the United States and its allies.”
The treatment of Taliban fighters detained at Guantanamo is added to the Americans’ burden of disgrace. But the Islamic threat to the West is analyzed with perfect detachment:
“It must be noted that the war in Iraq, desired and then won by the West, which is considered by Muslims as ‘materialistic, corrupt, atheistic, and unbelieving,’ is for the whole Islamic world a wound and a humiliation that can be revenged, sooner or later, through acts of terrorism or the conquest of positions of political and economic power in western countries with the weapon of oil.”
And further on:
“What the Islamic world will have a hard time accepting is that the United States should settle into the Middle East in some stable form.... For the Islamic world, it would be a new form of colonialism, which it could not permit, because the Koran says of the faithful of Allah (s. 3:110): “You are the best nation raised from among men. You promote justice, thwart iniquity, and believe in Allah.” It is therefore not possible that westerners, who are corrupt unbelievers in their view, should subject the Muslim faithful to their evil interests. Allah does not will it, and this will must be enforced with jihad, to the point of ‘martyrdom’ for the honor of Allah and the destruction of the infidels.”
According to “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the Muslims saw the U.S.-British war as “above all, an attempt to take control of their wealth.” But this is also the opinion of the authors of the editorial, and of the Vatican authorities who approved it. In fact, they write in a passage dedicated to the future of Iraq:
“The economic, social, and administrative reconstruction of the country seem very uncertain, because the western countries that would need to carry it out seem most interested in exploiting Iraqi oil, and not very concerned with the reconstruction of the country, in part because it is expected to be very expensive.”
The theory that oil was the real cause of the war was already supported by “La Civiltà Cattolica,” in an editorial on January 18, 2003. But the conclusion of this editorial was even more broadly accusatory. The United States is the incarnation of “an imperialistic superpower exercising absolute domination”; it recognizes “the law of the jungle”; and thanks to it, “the spirit of war, of strife, and of violence seem to have gained the upper hand at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”
”FIRST THINGS”
The essay by Fr. Richard Neuhaus is entitled “The Sounds of Religion in a Time of War,” and it examines how religious leaders, both Catholic and non-Catholic, formulated their moral judgments on the war in Iraq.
Neuhaus finds the words of John Paul II unobjectionable. Not so are those pronounced by other Vatican figures. The cardinal secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, foreign minister Jean-Louis Tauran, and Renato Martino, president of the Council for Justice and Peace, receive particular attention.
Neuhaus finds their total silence on centuries of moral reflection on war “impressive”: not a single reference to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, or Francisco Suarez.
Moreover, he finds it contradictory that they should jump on the bandwagon of the United Nations, which they have chosen as the exclusive vehicle of moral authority in international affairs. He notes that in half a century only two wars were supported by the security council in advance: the Korean War in 1945 and the Gulf War in 1991; that the U.N. gave John Paul II no help whatsoever in opposing the Soviet empire; and, above all, that for years the U.N. has been the Holy See’s greatest adversary on crucial moral questions like abortion and population control.
Another weak point for the Vatican officials, according to Neuhaus, was their arguing against the war on the basis of pure fear: hundreds of thousands of civilian victims, the explosion of the Muslim world, Iraq as a new Vietnam.
Neuhaus recalls that, at the beginning of the war, the president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, Wilton Gregory, released a very balanced statement, in which the Church assured its spiritual support both to the faithful who approved the war in good conscience and to those who opposed it. But very different words were coming from the Vatican. Once the war was defined as a “crime against humanity” (as Tauran and Martino had it), the Catholic American had to choose between loyalty to his country and fidelity to the Church.
But the biggest problem came in attributing even to the pope judgments against the war (immoral, contrary to the doctrine of the Church, a crime against humanity...) which in reality he had never expressed. Neuhaus writes:
“There are times when Catholics, and all Christians, must choose between complicity in great injustice and fidelity to moral truth. That choice has over the centuries produced martyrs beyond numbering. For a curial official even to imply that coalition soldiers and others are facing such a choice is a reckless abuse of ecclesiastical office. Unless, of course, he really thinks that his view of the war is binding upon consciences. Were that the position of the Church, one would expect the Pope to say so, and the Pope has not said anything even remotely like that. It is to be feared that some churchmen are more enamored of being players in world politics than devoted to being shepherds of souls.”
He concludes: “As people have tried to make their decision over the past weeks and months, the sounds of religion in the public square have, with few exceptions, not been helpful. More often than not, religious leaders have sown confusion.”
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The website of
> “La Civiltà Cattolica”
And the complete text of his editorial on May 17, 2003, reproduced here by kind permission:
> Risanare le ferite della guerra irachena
The article by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in the May 2003 edition of “First Things”:
> The Sounds of Religion in a Time of War
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Do the two opposing articles from “La Civiltà Cattolica” and “First Things,” then, confirm that a “clash of cultures” is taking place between the Vatican and the United States?
This interpretation was proposed by John L. Allen, Jr., the Vatican correspondent for the newsweekly “National Catholic Reporter,” in his weekly online newsletter, “The Word from Rome,” May 23, 2003.
On one side, there is the sentiment of “I don’t understand the Vatican position” expressed by Condoleezza Rice and other Washington leaders. On the other, there is an analogous and long-running incomprehension of the American positions at the Holy See.
Allen cites the condemnation of “Americanism” pronounced by Pope Leo XIII in 1899. But even today, important Vatican leaders, especially the European ones, remain tenaciously hostile to what they consider the American spirit: unbridled individualism, consumerism, the Calvinist ethic, the search for earthly success as the confirmation of the blessing of God, the feeling of being the chosen champions of good against the reign of evil. The war in Iraq is taken as having reinforced this hostility to the American spirit in the Roman curia. And the editorials in “La Civiltà Cattolica” are the sign.
But Allen notes another matter, which closely concerns “First Things.” The catholic intellectuals who write for this magazine, Neuhaus, Weigel and Michael Novak being foremost among them, imagined during the last years of the Cold War a providential and lasting alliance between the Catholic Church and America, based on shared values like the defense of life and the family and on common geopolitical aims such as human rights, economic liberty, and democracy.
The foundation of this alliance was laid during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But then the eight years of Bill Clinton broke it off. With the presidency of George W. Bush, the alliance should have been reestablished, and in effect it was so at the beginning. And it will be so again, in the hopes of these intellectuals, once the war in Iraq is put to rest.
But what if the incomprehension unleashed during the war in Iraq were the real constant element in the relations between the Vatican and America, irrepressibly returning to view?
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A link to the newsletter by John L. Allen, Jr., May 23, 2003:
> U.S. vs. Vatican: a Clash of Cultures
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On this website, on Iraq:
> Poland’s Catholics Depart for Iraq. With the United States and the Pope (12.5.2003)
> Secularism and Fundamentalism in Iraqi Islam. The Double Misinterpretation (30.4.2003)
> “War Diary, January-April, 2003.” Author: Pietro De Marco (18.4.2003)
> Bush & God: A Puzzle for the Church in Europe (8.4.2003)
> War Report. The Paper Dragons of the Pacifist Theologians (31.3.2003)
> The Postwar Era According to Camillo Cardinal Ruini (25.3.2003)
> War in the Gulf. What the Pope Really Said (20.3.2003)
> Is Europe a Province of Islam? The Danger is Called Dhimmitude (17.3.2003)
> The Interventionist Church. Archbishop Migliore’s Peace Offensive (6.3.2003)
> A Test of Catholic Geopolitics: How to Read the World After September 11 (3.3.2003)
> “L'Osservatore Romano” and “Avvenire”: The Two Discordant Voices of the Church of Rome (26.2.2003)
> After – and Beyond – the Tide of Pacifism. An Essay by Pietro De Marco (24.2.2003)
> From Assisi to Baghdad. If This is the Way to Make Peace (17.2.2003)
> The Theory and Practice of Just War. Nine Documents to Understand It Better (12.2.2003)
> It’s Islam Against the United States – but the Shiite Muslims Are an Exception (5.2.2003)
> Iraq: The Purely Political Reasons for the Church's "No" to War (30.1.2003)
> Exclusive Interview with Ambassador Nicholson: "The Points of Disagreement between Bush and the Pope" (27.1.2003)
> The Three Mysteries of John Paul II, Solved by His Cardinal Vicar (23.1.2003)
> The Pope's Jesuit Allies Duel with Bush's Strategists over Preventive War (21.1.2003)
> Iraq, Europe, and Russia: John Paul II's Three Active Fronts (13.1.2003)
> The Church and Iraq. How to Get Rid of Saddam Hussein without Making War on Him (7.1.2003)
> Saddam Hussein massacres Shiite Muslims, and the Vatican looks away (27.11.2002)
> Iraq. Anche il papa dà l’ultimatum a Saddam (18.9.2002)
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Go to the home page of > www.chiesa.espressonline.it/english/, to access the latest 30 articles and links to other resources.
Sandro Magister’s e-mail address is s.magister@espressoedit.it
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