Posted on 03/03/2003 2:46:58 AM PST by HAL9000
The pope wants to go in front of UNO if its message with Bush does not stop the war
Jean Paul II will ask to address personally to the Security Council of the United Nations if its message with the American president George W Bush does not convince it to give up a war against Iraq, learned Monday the AFP from diplomatic source vaticane.L' possibility of a direct address of the pope in the United Nations was evoked during the maintenance of the pope with the secretary-general of UNO, Kofi Annan, there are two weeks in the Vatican, one added of the same source.Le cardinal Pio Laghi left Rome Monday morning for Washington carrying a message of peace as it must give to the American president. The cardinal, old apostolic nuncio (ambassador) in Washington and friend of the Bush family, hopes to be received mercredi.Une delegation of American religious leaders forwarded last week to Jean Paul II a letter wishing that the head of the catholic Church go to ONU."Il is allocated only to the pope himself to make such a decision ", commented on Sunday on a chain of television the archbishop Renato Martino, old observant of the Holy See at the United Nations and current president of the pontifical Council for justice and the peace, which had been charged to transmit to the missive.Si the pope, had tired and old of almost 82 years, had he could benefit from it to go to request in Ground Zero, affirms one diplomatic source vaticane.Ce gesture would be very appreciated by all the Americans, adds one. He had been considered last August at the time of the voyage of the pope in Canada for the world Days of Jeunesse.Dans diplomatic circles of the Holy See, one estimates that the parallel actions and concommitantes of the pope on the two protagonists of the crisis, Iraq and the United States, represent a significant chance so that a war is evité.Le Iraqi president Saddam Hussein should take account of the risk to be relatively insulated in the Arab world if he made the deaf person ear with a call to order of the Arab League, even observes one of the same source.De, underlines one, president Bush, of methodist confession, should not receive from one who asked nearly a billion and half of Christians of the whole world to fast for peace Wednesday. This fast is also preached by the World Council of Churches of Geneva where Protestant Eglises and orthodoxes.En sit reiterating Sunday its call to all the Christians, the pope confirmed his determination with all to try for the paix."Sans to go in front of the difficulties, it is necessary to look for and traverse all the possible ways to avoid the war, which always brings with it serious mournings and consequences for everyone ", he launched to the thousands of brought together pilgrims Saint-Pierre place under the eye of the cameras of télévision.Le cardinal Laghi will make any possible sound to convince president Bush that a unilateral attack except UNO against Iraq is a "crime against peace", Foreign Minister of the pope, Mgr Jean Louis Tauran.
Pope mulls appeal to avoid war
Vatican City, Mar 3 - Pope John Paul II intends to make a personal address to the United Nations Security Council if an appeal this week to US President George W. Bush fails to deter him from going to war with Iraq, a Vatican diplomatic source told AFP on Monday.
The spectre of the frail pope, left almost immobile from advanced Parkinson's disease, making a dramatic personal plea to the UN emerged as his special envoy left for Washington to try to persuade Bush to allow more time for a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi crisis.
Cardinal Pio Laghi, an 80-year-old former Vatican ambassador to the United States and a personal friend of the Bush family, left Rome for a meeting at the White House, tentatively scheduled for Wednesday.
Laghi's visit is the latest element of a diplomatic peace offensive by the head of the Roman Catholic Church, who has emerged as the leading moral voice against war with Iraq.
"I hope to establish a dialogue with President Bush. Some say the war has already begun. We don't believe that this is so," said Laghi, after a weekend in which US and British intensified strikes on Iraqi targets in moves seen as clearing the way for war.
"The position of John Paul II and the Holy See is to avoid the outbreak of war," Laghi said, before boarding a plane for Washington.
But a White House spokesman said last week that Bush was unlikely to be swayed by the Holy See. The possibility of the ailing 82-year-old pontiff flying to New York to make what would be a dramatic 11th-hour appeal to avert war was raised at a meeting two weekes ago between John Paul II and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan", the Vatican source said.
Archbishop Renato Martino, the Vatican's former permanent observer at the UN, said on Sunday: "It's up to the pope himself to make such a decision."
If the pontiff does go to New York, he is also likely to pray at Ground Zero, the Vatican source said.
A papal pilgrimage to the site of the World Trade Centre, destroyed on September 11, 2001, would be much appreciated in the United States as a gesture that the Vatican, in calling so stridently for war to be averted, also fully recognizes US citizens' pain.
The Vatican's steadfast refusal to condone military action against Iraq as a "just war" has frustrated the White House, despite attempts by its ambassador to the Holy See, Jim Nicholson, to get the Vatican on its side in the moral debate.
Nicholson arranged a visit to the Vatican and a speech to diplomats and clergy in Rome by Michael Novak, a conservative US theologian who argued that war on Iraq was morally defensible.
The Vatican has repeatedly said Washington's "preventive war" would in reality be a "war of aggression" and therefore without moral basis.
Just one week ago, Vatican Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Tauran said: "A war of aggression would be a crime against peace."
See post #100....
The attitude on this forum is one of sullen submission to the inevitability of American hubris, blindness and nemesis.
The silence around here on one of the most important--and, in my opinion, most chilling--foreign policy statements yet made by the President is deafening. But terribly, terribly enlightening....
By the way, I clearly mis-spoke there. This forum is suffused with--one might even say dominated by--New Leftism.
"Spiritus Gladius."
Yes, and you're a great case in point.
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