wfn.org | Vatican Radio warns U.S. attack on Iraq would create worse crisis

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Note #7372 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

08-August-2002
02287

Vatican Radio warns U.S. attack on Iraq would create worse crisis

by Peggy Polk
Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY - An authoritative Vatican official has warned the Bush administration that a U.S. attack on Iraq would only create new and worse crises.
    	
"Today, an attack on Iraq seems to have priority in the American agenda of the fight against terrorism," the Rev. Pasquale Borgomeo, director general of Vatican Radio said in a commentary broadcast Aug. 6.
    	
"Experience should have taught something about falling back on certain wars, including those won, that were undertaken to resolve one crisis and destined to create others more serious," Borgomeo said.
    	
The Jesuit-run Vatican Radio, founded more than 70 years ago, broadcasts throughout the world in 37 languages. It carries news, public affairs and music in addition to papal Masses and other major church events.
    	
Borgomeo's view on a possible U.S. attack on Iraq is believed to reflect that of the Vatican Secretariat of State, which acts for the pope in the area of foreign policy.
    	
His statement coincided with the publication in London of a peace petition drafted by the international Roman Catholic peace movement Pax Christi and signed by nearly 3,000 people, including Archbishop of Canterbury-designate Rowan Williams, other Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops, theologians and academics.
    	
The petition, which was given to the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, denounced reported plans for a joint Anglo-American attack on Iraq as "immoral and illegal."

Borgomeo said that in planning an attack on Iraq, President Bush is once again giving priority to military action and considering "the geopolitical effects of such actions as annoying objections of weak and know-it-all allies."

At the same time, Borgomeo urged the European Union to take more decisive steps to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he called "a bottomless well of moral abasement."

"The Palestinian terrorism is not only sowing death and terror but is insensibly carrying Israel to its own terrain where it no longer has anything to lose," he said. "But Israel ... has to defend values whose loss is much more serious than the economic difficulty in which it finds itself."

Meanwhile, he said, the United States, involved in its struggle against terrorism, faces the Middle East conflict as if it had nothing to do with the hate that the Arab and Muslim people show against the United States.

"In the struggle against terrorism, which seems to be a priority today for the survival of humanity, that deep and unsuppressible aspiration of the people for peace must not be forgotten," Borgomeo said.
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