A Dove in Good Company--Fr. Greeley

[Maeve]

from the center of the article:

Yet I am curious that the writers think that a priest does not have the right -- and indeed the obligation -- to express a moral teaching. If a priest believes a war is immoral, he should say so. Moreover, in my criticism of the Iraq war, I have a priest of considerably more importance than I in the same camp -- and potentially much more troublesome.

The pope.

His Holiness and his colleagues in the Vatican have opposed the war since the very beginning. John L. Allen in his superb book on the Vatican -- All the Pope's Men -- devotes 65 pages to detailing, day by day, the Vatican's position on the war. Allen comments that this mobilization of the Vatican apparatus around opposition to the war is unique in modern history. The papacy does not accept the theory of unilateral preventive war. It does not agree with the Bush administration's foreign policy. It did not think that all possible grounds for a peaceful solution were exhausted before the American attack and, like most of Europe, it did not believe that there was sufficient evidence of weapons of mass destruction -- and it turns out that they and not the Bush administration were right. It urged that nothing happen until the completion of the U.N. arms inspection -- and it turns out that here again the pope was right and the president was wrong.

''War,'' the pope said on Jan. 13, 2003, ''cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring common good except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after military operations.''


http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel24.html