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Pope in fresh bid to avert war
01/03/2003 16:52 - (SA)
Vatican City - Pope John Paul II will send one of the Vatican's most experienced diplomats to Washington next week in a fresh bid to avert a war in Iraq, the Holy See announced on Saturday.
Cardinal Pio Laghi will leave for Washington "in the next few days," bearing a written message from the pontiff to US President George W Bush, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said.
A veteran Vatican diplomat who has served under five popes, the 80-year-old Laghi is a former papal nuncio to the United States.
His mission follows that of another envoy, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who travelled to Baghdad to plead with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors, amid intensifying efforts by the Vatican to avoid a war.
"The cardinal, who will leave Rome in the next few days, will bear a message from His Holiness and will outline the position and the initiatives undertaken by the Holy See to contribute to disarmament and peace in the Middle East," Navarro-Valls said in a statement.
In the intense diplomatic shuttling which has marked the build-up to a conflict in Iraq, talking to the Vatican has become almost obligatory for leaders with an eye on public opinion, which in Europe is overwhelmingly opposed to war.
The pope has emerged as a leading moral voice against a military strike and world leaders have in recent weeks beaten a path to his door, including leading protagonists for and against a war.
"We must redouble our efforts. We must not resign ourselves because war is not inevitable," John Paul II said last month as he dispatched Etchegaray to Baghdad.
However, in his most recent public pronouncements, the pontiff was notably pessimistic on Friday.
"The world stands on the brink of yet another war" he wrote to the newly-installed Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, remarking that the Anglican leader was taking office "at a painful and tense moment in history."
In recent days John Paul II, for whom "all war is a defeat for mankind", has held audiences with the strongest supporters of Washington's build-up to war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Spanish counterpart Jose-Maria Aznar.
In those meetings, as in his audiences with Saddam Hussein's roving ambassador Tareq Aziz and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the pope has constantly underscored the vulnerability of Iraq's civilian population, and their suffering after years of UN embargoes.
He urged Blair, Bush's closest confederate, to make "every effort" to avoid war.
US officials have said Bush, who met the pontiff at the Vatican last May, had no plans to meet the pope soon.
Only last week, a White House spokesman said the pope's anti-war pronouncements would not influence Bush when it came to deciding on military action.
Bush "will make his decisions based on what he thinks is right to protect the American people," spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The US president and chief proponent of a war to disarm Saddam has, in light of Blair and Aznar's visits, been somewhat conspicuous by his absence from the Vatican.
The US, through its ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, has instead sought 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 the case that war on Iraq was morally defensible.
The Vatican has repeatedly said Washington's preventive war would be a "war of aggression" and therefore without moral basis.
Just last Monday, Vatican Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Tauran said: "A war of aggression would be a crime against peace." - AFP
- AFP
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