Posted on 04/21/2003 1:33:09 AM PDT by kattracks
The Pope sent a coded rebuke to Washington yesterday when he urged Iraqis to take charge of rebuilding their country while working closely with the international community.In the Vatican's diplomatic lexicon, the phrase "international community" normally refers to the UN. Before the conflict started, Pope John Paul II vigorously opposed the US-led assault and advocated resolution of the crisis in the UN general assembly.
"With the support of the international community," the 82-year-old pontiff declared in his 25th Easter message, "may the Iraqi people become the protagonists of their collective rebuilding of their country." The speech appeared aimed at putting pressure on Washington and London to involve the UN more closely in political reconstruction in Iraq and to speed up the handover to civilian rule.
In the months before the fighting, the Pope conducted a series of high-profile diplomatic initiatives, sending envoys to George Bush and Saddam Hussein and holding talks with Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, and with Tony Blair.
More recently, the Vatican has offered to help coordinate humanitarian aid through its embassy and dioceses.
Easter Sunday sermons from other Christian leaders also examined the war in Iraq, with the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, calling on the international community to join forces to build the country's civil and democratic society.
He said: "Quite frankly, despite all the promises ... how things currently are in Kabul and Afghanistan post-war does not bode well as to how things might be in Baghdad and Iraq."
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said in his homily that the desire to cling on to comfortable ways of thinking had characterised the moral debate over the conflict in Iraq.
The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, urged the faithful to pray for all victims of the conflict.
established by Jesus Christ (your Lord and Savior and mine) upon Simon bar Jonah
Jesus did not build His church upon Peter, but upon the confession that Peter confessed.
, you, as a non-Catholic are indulging the propensity to "instruct" Catholics because????????????
Because someone has got to counter your heretical false teachings.
Also, you know better than Jesus Christ because????????????
Nice try. You are the ones who think you know better than Jesus Christ.
that they must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood to see heaven
A passage which has nothing at all to do with the Lord's Supper. Why is it that the doctrine of trans-subtantiation didn't come around until hundreds of years later? Didn't the apostles know any better? Hmm?? /sarcasm
We can go around like this forever if you like. The Bible, not the pope, not your priest, not the "traditions of the fathers", is always right.
But what still bothers me is the innocents ALREADY hurt and/or killed in ANY potential war seem to never be factored in when any religious leader issues opinions and edicts. For example . . . Let's say Despot X has already killed 500,000 of his own citizens. Then someone predicts another 100,000 MIGHT be killed if a country goes to war to replace Despot X. Religious leaders would moan about the 100,000 where, if history is any indication, Despot X would kill those 100,000 anyway if he's not taken out.
Help me understand this.
The pope has not issued any statements, to the best of my knowledge, approving the Iraq war as a Just War because, as I previously posted, Canon Law leaves that matter to the secular leaders of nations considering war (in this case, George W. Bush) who are responsible only to God as to the question of Just War.
I am not privy to the specifics of the discussions between the Vatican envoy and the Bush administration, are you? President Bush sent the respected Catholic lay theologian Michael Novak to the Vatican as well probably (but what do I know?) to explain the administration's thinking.
It is reasonable that such discussions occur, initiated by either side. At the Yalta Conference late in WW II, FDR confided in Stalin that the sell-out of Poland and Eastern European Catholic nations must not only be kept quiet until 1945 to get FDR past the 1944 election with Polish-American support intact but also to postpone antagonism of Pope Pius XII. Stalin, in reply, famously and impertinently asked: "How many divisions has the pope?" The answer was delivered by this very pope (John Paul II) in his support of the Polish Labor Union: Solidarnoscz, its leader Lech Walesa and you can resolve any doubts by asking the aging Polish ex-dictator Wojchiec Jaruzelski or Mikhail Gorbachev (who tried to have JP II assassinated in 1982) whether they were and are impressed with the Vatican answer to Stalin's question.
JP II has forgotten more about foreign policy and its effective use than his critics have ever known and he still knows more than they. If you imagine that he supports the shenannigans of Sodamn Insane, you imagine wrong. His Church has had an impressive bunch of enemies over near;y two millenia but has buried all who have died its enemies and all governments and empires (now dead) who have done so as well.
Your turn! To respond, that is!
You forget that there was no other significant testimony to the truth about Jesus Christ.
The only direct quote you have provided is a series of three words: "immoral, illegal, unjust" not in the context of their sentence much less of their paragraph, much less of their document. Mr. Sammon is a respectable journalist. One would have hoped for a fuller context. If you were familar with Vaticanspeak and its careful couching of language as to any secular controversy, you would expect more too.
BTW, as it happens, thee and me are probably on the same wavelength on the war. I thought it should have been launched long ago and that Sodamn Insane should have been erased twelve years ago.
Personally, I don't particularly care what the pope says about something (the justice of this war) which is concededly, according to Canon Law, not in his jurisdiction but rather, as must be, the sole decision of the secular leaders who consider war, based on the superior set of facts in the hands of those leaders. There is also a praiseworthy policy of clergy keeping out of direct involvement in politics (exemplified by this pope ordering Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan to leave the Congress of the United States and even Drinan complied).
The Catholic Church is not just any religion, however. In the US, it is equal before the law. That does not change its overall status.
If you don't want to be called anti-Catholic, don't BE anti-Catholic.
The paragraph about the Vatican "opposing" the 1991 war does not seem consistent when using the exuse of UN non-approval as an excuse agsinst the current war. The UN approved the last one. One of the great things about this 2003 war is that the UN did NOT approve of it and thereby harmed the UN itself, along with the French quislings, the German quislings, and their Belgian poodle. I certainly agree with you that I do not see how anyone can see the UN as a moral or morality-based institution. I think it should never have come into existence and it should be abolished ASAP, along with the EEC, the Euro, any and all NATO Treaty obligations to the quislings who opposed this very worthwhile and necessary war. Since the building in New York is outside American sovereignty because of some ditzy decision made shortly after WW II when the Rockefellers donated the land, I would take the buuilding and land as conquest.
If you think Catholics are anti-war, check out the statistics for Catholics as a percentage of the US population 28% and Catholics as participants in the US military in this war or the respective statistics for any war since WW I. So don't diss our religion and our pope as though somehow you were talking doctrine. We, Catholics, are not alone in fighting these wars, nor are non-Catholics and we certainly have done our share.
Kumbaya Catholics aren't very Catholic. That is an insult hurled at liberal Catholics usually by actual Catholics. Pacifism is no part of legitimate Catholicism and, if JP II is such a pacifist why was he active in the Resistance in WW II before entering studies for the priesthood after his girlfriend was summarily shot by the Gestapo while walking home one night?
As to your second posted article, pay strict attention to the last paragraphs in which Tony Blair states that the pope and he are on the same page. That does not sound like papal pacifism, now does it?
Your third to last paragraph is magnificently right in two respects: that any deprivation of the Iraqi people was courtesy of the Sodamn Insane palace-building and personal pocket-lining policy and had nothing to do with sanctions; and that the United States must always make its own decisions as to whether to go to war unencumbered by the opinions of the likes of Cameroon, Lorna Doone, Brigadoon, Syria, Inner Slobbovia, Outer Slobbovia, the Palestinian Homocide Bombing support club, Angola (with a hammer and sickle on its flag), the Russians (who provided Sodamn Insane recently with a list of 50 assassins available for duty in the West), Libya, Iran, the Germans (until they are governed by Christian Democrats and Christian Social Unionists rather than the Socialists and the actually Red Greens.
I have no intention of intimidating you or anyone else, just of calling you to account on the truth and if that feels like intimidation, so be it.
I believe he is in support, although he qualifies himself with care --
I don't particularly care whether you think I was attacking your church and Pope or not. I cited facts, I gave them to you, and if folks like Bill Sammon takes them out of context then there's nothing us readers can do. Hell, we don't have his notes or copies of his audio tapes.
It appears your definition of "anti-Catholic" is anyone who disagrees with you. I don't know enough about the Catholic Church to be anti- or pro- Catholic. I simply stated facts -- facts you took umbrage with so, in your world, I must be anti-Catholic. But I'll say again ANYONE -- whether it be a religious leader or a President or a street sweeper -- who says our war in Iraq was "immoral, illegal, or unjust" isn't looking at the facts.
Saddam killed more Iraqis than we ever could. Saddam punished the Iraqi people more than we ever would. Saddam is/was the most EVIL despot the world has known since Hitler -- and some would rightfully argue that's still up for debate. The U.S. and our coalition partners are the only MORAL countries in the world who had the courage to take him out.
I didn't say Catholics were anti-war so don't even shadow me with that accusation. And lastly, you're certainly not an authority on "the truth" so don't try to impress anyone with your comments of "calling you to account on the truth" when all you did was call two FReepers liars and anti-Catholics because we don't blindly drink at the same religious trough you do. If someone like Bill Sammon says the Pope said the war was "immoral, illegal, or unjust," then you're barking at the wrong dog when you growl at me. I don't have a pro-Pope or anti-Pope agenda . . . I do have a pro-USA and pro-facts agenda however and all those who are moaning "woe is me" about the innocents who were affected by the war have conveniently and erroneously forgotten about those hundreds of thousands of innocents who are buried in unmarked graves all over the Iraqi countryside.
In closing, we could've had an interesting debate and I suspect we both could've learned something. But when someone unfairly calls me names in the first sentence of their post that tends to take the debating option off the table. You're right . . . we agree on more things than we disagree on and I suggest this. Read our original posts again WITHOUT YOUR PREJUDICED GLASSES and see if you still think we're both liars and anti-Catholics. I suspect you read them with pre-conceived notions. You might not like what I wrote and you might want to "nit-pick" with the facts I used but there are no falsehoods or anti-Catholic comments in my original post.
God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. He lived his life on earth. He entered into three years or so of public ministry. He was betrayed by Judas, arrested, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was scourged, crowned with thorns, made to carry His cross most of the way to Calvary, fell several times along the way, was stripped of His robe, nailed to the cross, suffered thereon for several hours until He died but, on the third day, he rose again from the dead, and thereafter, after an interlude of some weeks, ascended into heaven.
I am betting we agree so far.
He did all this so that mankind could live in the darkness for nearly fifteen hundred more years (and whatever it may seem like I am going to be a lot more polite here than usual) all so that a renegade Augustinian monk with a yen to marry a nun against both of their vows of obedience as well as celibacy, could found His Church and break the news that the book alone or grace alone or faith alone or all three alone or any one of them three times or whatever could get them to heaven.
I will refrain from any speculation as to which of the thousands of resulting sects might be right compared to the other designed faiths, but you get the picture as to how hard it would be for someone with a near two thousand year unbroken link to Jesus Christ would find the reformation theory a tad unpersuasive.
You can too find my Church in the Bible IF you are looking for it. It is right there in the Peter passage in Matthew. BTW: No man has revealed this to you (Simon bar Jonah) but only My Father in Heaven.
I see your countering and redouble.
As to the Holy Eucharist, a Christian loses a LOT of credibility disagreeing with the words of Jesus Christ as you do. The earliest pages of Mass rubrics date to the time of Ignatius of Antioch who succeeded Peter at Antioch and was likely baptized by Peter. The apostles knew what Jesus Christ knew. Our bishops and our Mass are descended from them.
I am also betting that you are not personally fluent in Aramaic, Hebrew or Greek and are therefore, as most of us are, a devotee of the traditions of translators (many of them whose identities are unknown to us along with their skill, accuracy and morality) if not the "traditions of the fathers"
If you deny that then render for us in the Biblical Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
That true Church: Infant baptism or adult baptism? Divorce is OK? Divorce is not OK? Divorce CAN be OK? Abortion is OK. Abortion is not OK. Abortion CAN be OK? Birth control?
There is a concept, possibly developed by Polycarp right here on Free Republic that I commend to you: YOPIOS [{Your Own Personal Interpretation of Scripture) and (given the thousands of reformed denominations) what else can it be?] is no substitute for the Church established by Jesus Christ Himself for your guidance. We draft no one. Walk away from the Holy Eucharist if YOPIOS insists, but stop kidding yourself as to Truth and history.
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