All the Pope's Men (46 page)

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. “Among 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.

Right intention
. The ultimate end of a government in waging war must be to establish peace, rather than to use a “just war" as a pretext for its own gain.

Last resort
. A governing authority must reasonably exhaust all other diplomatic and nonmilitary options for securing peace before resorting to force.

Reasonable chance of success
. A government may not resort to war unless its prospects for success are good. In this way, lives will not be needlessly wasted in the pursuit of a hopeless cause.

Proportionality
. A government must respond to aggression with force only when the effects of its defensive actions do not exceed the damage done by the aggression itself.

For determining justice
in bello
, two values are key:

Noncombatant immunity
. An authority waging war is morally obligated to seek to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. While civilians may sometimes come in harm’s way, a government may never deliberately target them.

Proportionate means
. This criterion pertains to specific tactics of warfare and seeks to restrict unnecessary use of force. It is intended to ensure that the military means used to achieve certain goals and goods are commensurate with their value, particularly when compared to the loss of life and destruction that could also occur.

Under the pressure of world events since the first Gulf War, the Holy See has been forced to clarify how it applies these principles to a new international situation in which nonstate actors such as terrorist networks have become threats and the role of old security alliances is not clear. Four moments have been key:

In 1991, the Holy See opposed the Gulf War.

In 1999, The Holy See supported an international intervention in Kosovo to stop the violence against the civilian population in that former Yugoslav province, although it expressed reservations
in bello
, especially with respect to the NATO bombing of Serbia.

In 2001, the Vatican gave basic support to the U.S.-led strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

In 2003, the Holy See opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq with a ferocity that few issues in the recent past have aroused.

In all of this diplomatic activity, the Holy See has worked out a new understanding of when the use of force is morally legitimate. A single state, in its view, has the right to use force only in self-defense, meaning in response to a direct attack. A group of states, such as NATO or the ad-hoc coalitions cobbled together by U.S. administrations in recent conflicts, may have the right, even the duty, to engage in “humanitarian intervention" to end a crisis in which civilians are being persecuted by an unjust aggressor. In all other situations, the only legitimate use of force—such as a preventive war to disarm a potential aggressor—is that sanctioned by the international community working through the United Nations. In all cases, morally legitimate use of force is a response to violence that is already in act. The Holy See’s bottom line is that no state is ever justified in striking first.

This view is contested by the Bush administration, which argues that sometimes rogue states are determined to skirt the will of the international community on disarmament, and their stockpiles of weapons pose a threat to the security of the United States and the rest of the world. The possible links between such governments and international terrorism make that threat all the more serious. When the United States has intelligence that an attack against American interests is imminent, it reserves the right to strike first, even without the approval of the United Nations—a process whose potential political complications make it too cumbersome to be feasible in some real-life situations. It would be irresponsible of any American administration, the Bush team argues, to ignore credible information regarding possible hostile activity and thereby put American lives and interests at risk. Moreover, this is not just a matter of defending America, but the West and, for that matter, global civilization.

In many ways, this is less a dispute over principles than over prudential judgment. No one in the Holy See would deny that a man facing someone pointing a gun in his face has the right to use force to disarm him. One does not have to wait for the assailant to shoot. Nor would anyone in the Bush White House seriously argue that the United States has the right, or for that matter the desire, to invade any country whatsoever that might one day pose a threat to its security interests. The question is, where on this continuum does a particular case fit? The clash over Iraq seems to suggest that the Holy See sets the bar much higher than the White House in terms of how much evidence there must be, and how convincing that evidence must appear, before force can be considered.

International Law

As outlined in chapter 1, the Holy See has long been a supporter of the construction of a strong system of international law. Beginning with Pope John XXIII in
Pacem et Terris
, every pope of the late twentieth century has called for a strengthened United Nations with real enforcement powers to make international law stick. The argument is that the international community must be governed by the force of law, not the law of force.

In July 2002, as a concrete expression of this attitude, the Holy See gave a symbolic contribution of $3,000 to a trust fund established by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to support the new International Criminal Court. The Vatican had long been a proponent of the court. In 1998, John Paul II said that the international court “could contribute to ensure the effective protection of human rights on the worldwide scale." The Pope’s statement included a caution that the new court should be firmly based on the rule of international law. He added that, “Crimes against humanity should not be considered as the internal affair of one nation." This backing came despite the fact that conservative Catholic critics of the court complained that it is “permeated with feminist ideology" and warned that it could force through legal recognition of a “right" to abortion, or even put the Pope himself on trial.

The Holy See believes in the rule of international law in part as an antidote to a unilateral world in which strong nations impose their will on the weak. An additional, more realpolitik motive for the stance is the conviction that the growth of international law, and especially the concept of universal human rights, offers the best prospect for protection of the religious freedom of Christians where they are a minority, such as India and the Islamic world. This Vatican conviction leads to resentment of the United States when it is perceived to be obstructing the construction of an international legal order. As noted above, a May 17 editorial in
Civiltà Cattolica
excoriated the United States for holding prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without guaranteeing them the procedural rights specified in the Geneva Convention or other relevant international agreements. Under the same logic, the Vatican has strongly supported recent international treaties on a host of other matters, from the Kyoto Accords on the environment to the agreement banning land mines and the UN treaty on the rights of the child.

Given the Bush administration’s well-known reluctance to subject Americans to the jurisdiction of international courts out of a fear of politicized indictments, and its generally lukewarm attitude toward the concept of a binding international legal order, this is a difference that seems destined to endure. As the United States prosecutes its war against terrorism, it is increasingly likely to adopt strategies that sometimes place it outside commonly recognized international standards in terms of how a state is supposed to conduct intelligence, treat the citizens of other nations, and so on. Since much of the terrorist threat currently preoccupying the United States emanates from the Islamic world, this may exacerbate anti-American sentiment in the Islamic street. The Holy See is deeply concerned that anti-American Islamic anger not become anti-Western and anti-Christian. It will feel increasing pressure to be critical of the United States, in order to put public distance between itself and measures deemed to violate international law. In other words, it will be increasingly difficult for the Holy See to look the other way when the United States takes action in contravention of international standards and agreements.

United Nations

While some Americans, including the key tacticians in the Bush administration, are leery of surrendering power to the United Nations, the Vatican believes strongly in a reformed UN with real decision-making authority. John Paul II, in his message for the 2003 World Day of Peace, put it this way: “Is this not the time for all to work together for a new constitutional organization of the human family, truly capable of ensuring peace and harmony between peoples, as well as their integral development?" In a statement on the role of the United Nations in July 2003, Cardinal Renato Martino expanded on this point, calling the UN the only forum “that, by its representativeness, can offer a platform of dialogue at the world level. The Holy See is convinced, and this is not something recent, that the worldwide common good must be pursued with adequate structures of universal competence," he added. Martino advocated reform in at least two areas: the first would aim to “empower the functioning of the Security Council." The second would aim to ensure that the international body could “guarantee order and security better, not only from the political and military point of view, but also in the economic and social field. For example, the new problems relating to protection of the environment and health require urgent measures that are respected by all."

This position strikes some observers as curious, since in other contexts the Holy See has been an ardent critic of the United Nations, especially on issues of the family, sexuality, and reproductive health policies. In September 2000, for example, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writing in L’Avvenire rejected UN proposals for a New World Order targeting for special criticism the UN’s goal of depopulation. Ratzinger wrote that the philosophy coming from recent UN conferences and the Millennium Summit “proposes strategies to reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness [we] have attained will not be affected." He criticized this philosophy for “not being concerned with the care of those who are no longer productive or who can no longer hope for a determined quality of life." Ratzinger argued that “at the base of this New World Order" is the ideology of “women’s empowerment," which erroneously sees “the principal obstacles to [a woman’s] fulfillment [as] the family and maternity." The cardinal advised that “at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians—and not just them but in any case they even more than others— have the duty to protest."

Pressed to explain this seeming contradiction, Vatican officials generally say that in itself the United Nations is merely a tool, and as such may be applied for ends that are either morally legitimate or morally destructive. In order to build a more just world, however, they see it as an essential tool and support augmenting its powers and responsibilities. They offer three arguments in support of this position. First, a strong United Nations would have a unique capacity to promote the common good on the global level, ensuring that global economic structures do not simply enrich elites at the expense of the rest of the world. The UN would be able to promote the “globalization of solidarity" that has been a cornerstone of the Vatican’s international vision since the collapse of the old Cold War system. Second, a reformed UN would help ensure that strong nations do not simply impose their will on the weak. Third, Vatican officials believe that a UN committed to multilateral decision-making, in which small and medium-sized states have real possibilities to shape policy, would be less open to manipulation by powerful nonstate actors such as corporations and NGOs (think Planned Parenthood, for example). The Vatican learned from the battles at the Cairo and Beijing conferences in the mid-1990s that sometimes its most serious opposition in the UN system comes not from states, but from representatives of civil society. Vatican officials argue that a UN in which states counted more and these special interests counted less would actually be more democratic and less susceptible to the imposition of values such as those described by Ratzinger above.

The Bush administration and mainstream political sentiment in the United States find it hard to reconcile with this vision of the United Nations. From the dominant American view, the United Nations is a forum for international cooperation, useful when states can agree to a common effort to address some problem, but inessential to the legitimacy of the actions any individual state might take. While the Holy See would understand the United Nations in terms of sovereignty, the United States would see it rather as a means of cooperation among individually sovereign states, each of which retains complete liberty of action. Given that the post–September 11 world situation is witnessing a highly activist and interventionist approach from the United States, this difference with the Holy See and much of the rest of the international community would appear set to become steadily more serious.