When a pope opposes war

National Catholic Reporter, April 27, 2007

That Pope Benedict XVI is a European is hardly news. But to American Catholic neoconservative pundits, especially those once welcome in papal salons, noting the pope's geographical, political and cultural heritage is not an observation. It is an accusation.

In his Easter "urbi et orbi" address, Benedict declared, "Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees." To most American Catholics, and certainly to most Europeans, the pope's words reflect the terrible reality that is post-invasion Iraq under occupation. He simply spoke the truth.

To the neocons, Benedict's sentiments were, at best, an overstatement; at worst, the Vatican equivalent of the "cut-and-run" calumny leveled at domestic opponents of the United States' Iraqi misadventure.

The pope, imply his new critics, could learn something from the steadfastness of President Bush.

What they think, of course, is significant because they had great access to the highest levels of authority during the previous papacy and because they have had a role, disproportionate we would say, in shaping the Catholic conversation in the United States.

"It seems evident enough that Benedict has been very skeptical about the policy of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq," Fr. Richard John Neuhaus notes ever-so-diplomatically. "To judge by a few words in his extensive Easter Sunday survey of the world's many troubles, Pope Benedict is not so impressed [with the surge strategy in Iraq]."

But he should be, says Neuhaus, the editor of First Things.

Neuhaus' ideological soul mate, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, is more direct. The pope's words, writes Novak, "sounded like a standard European view of reality--at least of those Europeans who have always disagreed with the American war aims, and now that things have become difficult and costly want to stick it to the Americans."

Writes Novak, "I was disappointed in Benedict XVI for being uncritical about this." Whether Novak's "disappointment" weighs on the Holy Father is not known.

Writing in National Review Online, Novak continued: "The coalition forces cannot oblige Iraq to form a successful, patient, slowly maturing democracy. But the coalition forces are giving the people of Iraq the chance to do so--a rare and precious chance in the Arab world of the last 100 years. Maybe the vision [for Iraq] will not succeed. But do not say that the vision itself was not positive. It was, indeed, noble, and carried out with much self-sacrifice, heroism, and devotion to others. ... Do not, dear European friends, condemn nor trivialize these generous sacrifices."

Neuhaus, in defending the casus belli, makes a related case. Traditional just-war doctrine, he says, "adequately provides for the use of military force in the face of a clear and present threat of aggression. Such a use of force is more accurately described as defensive rather than preemptive, and it is worth keeping in mind that in 2003 all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war."

Let's pick some of this apart.

The U.S. invasion, says Novak, was "noble."

No, we and our European friends in the Vatican and elsewhere agree, it was not. It was, in fact, a preemptive strike against a crippled country ruled by a despot whom our president, drawing connections where none existed, would not abide in a post-Sept. 11 world. The hubristic notion that we could nurture a "slowly maturing democracy" in such a deeply divided country was (and is) pure folly.

Neuhaus' assertion that "all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war" is both elastic and incorrect. In fact, as is well-documented in such works as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, the U.S. intelligence community was deeply skeptical of Saddam's alleged capabilities. In the run-up to the war, inspectors from the United Nations found no evidence, none, that Saddam's weapons programs had survived the first Gulf War and the ensuing decade of sanctions.

And the idea that "all the countries with developed intelligence services" believed that Saddam "intended to use [weapons of mass destruction] in aggressive war" is simply incorrect. Perhaps George W. Bush and Tony Blair believed that (though we have our doubts), but the Europeans opposed the preemptive war because they didn't view the threat posed by Iraq as worthy of the cost of an invasion. The Europeans, including those in the Vatican, have been proved right.

Back to the Vatican, it seems the problem is not that the pope is European or even that he is, as one conservative blogger put it recently, receiving insufficient input. It seems more the case that the first pope elected in the 21st century has difficulty acceding to a preemptive invasion and a brutal occupation that has seen endless slaughter and the destruction of a culture and any vestige of normal life.