Americans are very unaware of the ethical and moral stance of the major Christian sects against going into Iraq. The Catholic Church is very clearly against the Iraq intervention. not unlike the Anglican. We just don't hear their voice in the mainstream press.
From http://www.cjd.org/paper/jp2war.html
"The most consistent and frequent promoter of peace and human rights for the last two decades has been Pope John Paul II.
From Iraqi War I to Iraqi War II, he has echoed the voice of Paul VI, crying out before the United Nations in 1965: War No More, War Never Again!
John Paul II stated before the 2003 war that this war would be a defeat for humanity which could not be morally or legally justified.
...The official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano carried the Pope's Easter message of peace with a headline in very large letters, Pace (peace), taking up a quarter of a page. He has asked Catholics to pray and do penance and ask Christ for peace, a peace "founded on the solid pillars of love and justice, truth and freedom."
As you know, there is a just war doctrine within the Catholic church. We can argue over specifics but the church is not completely a pacifist organization. Whether the conditions are met is a political argument not a religious one.
http://www.catholic.com/library/
..._Doctrine_1.asp
The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
* the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
* all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
* there must be serious prospects of success;
* the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.
Andrew Greeley wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times:
“The papacy does not accept the theory of unilateral preventive war. It does not agree with the Bush administration's foreign policy. It did not think that all possible grounds for a peaceful solution were exhausted before the American attack and, like most of Europe, it did not believe that there was sufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction — and it turns out that they and not the Bush administration were right. It urged that nothing happen until the completion of the U.N. arms inspection — and it turns out that here again the pope was right and the president was wrong.... The teaching on the Iraq war is not “authoritative.” Yet, ought not Catholic conservatives, who virtually worship the pope, at least listen to him respectfully on this subject?”
The Catholic Church did not and does not view the intervention in Iraq as morally justified.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europ...ope/
2654109.stm
http://www.catholic.org/featured...ine.php?
ID=5230
Show me a quote from the Holy Father saying that the war in Iraq is just and moral and that he favors preemptive wars because they are especially just wars.
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