"Just and Urgent Cause"

Vatican favors disarming Iraq but opposes war

BY: Peggy Polk

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February 20, 2003

VATICAN CITY (RNS)--The Vatican has called disarming Iraq a "just and urgent cause" but said it must be done through the process of weapons inspection and the building of an international consensus to block a U.S. attack on Baghdad.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Holy See's new permanent observer at the United Nations, made the most detailed statement to date on the Vatican's Iraq policy in an address to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday. The Vatican Press Office issued his statement on Thursday. John Paul and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who conferred at the Vatican on Tuesday, agreed on the "essential role" of the United Nations to defuse the crisis.

"The Holy See realizes that the international community is rightly worried and is addressing a just and urgent cause: the disarmament of arsenals of mass destruction, a threat surfacing not just in a single region, but unfortunately in other parts of our world," Migliore said. But, urging the international community to "draw strength from the wealth of peaceful tools proved by the international law," he said war would not be a "just" tool to use against Iraq.

"To the grave consequences for a civilian population that has already been tested long enough are added the dark prospects of tensions and conflicts between peoples and cultures and the deprecated reintroduction of war as a way to resolve untenable situations," the prelate said.

The Vatican representative called on Security Council members to line up behind the weapons inspection process instead, presenting a united front against the U.S. push for armed intervention. He said "the vast majority of the international community" has called for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis, and "that call should not be ignored."

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