{"id":5,"date":"2008-06-09T14:20:01","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T14:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-catholic-case-for-another.html"},"modified":"2008-06-09T14:20:01","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T14:20:01","slug":"the-catholic-case-for-another","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-catholic-case-for-another.html","title":{"rendered":"The Catholic case for “another” US-led invasion…"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, not an incursion into the Middle East. Neither the Vatican, nor the Pope (current or past), nor the bishops, nor church teaching or tradition supported the American invasion of Iraq. But when President Bush, the author of that terrible tragedy, meets his new BFF, Pope Benedict XVI, in the Vatican later this week, the pope may want to bring up another idea: Invading Myanmar, aka Burma.
\nThis would not be an attempt to overthrow the oppressive regime, but rather a humanitarian intervention under the rubric of the “responsibility to protect.” (How bad is it in the wake of May’s cyclone? Check out this TNR piece<\/a> by Alvaro Vargas Llosa.) France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, raised the intervention idea last month as the toll of death and misery sparked by the terrible cyclone was transformed into a catastrophe by the intransigence of the brutal Myanmar regime, which would not open its doors to international relief. As a New York Times story <\/a>relates,<\/p>\n

In 2005, the United Nations recognized the \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d doctrine when governments could not or would not protect their citizens, even if this meant intervention that violated national sovereignty. But it has been rarely applied.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The doctrine grew out of the West’s sense of guilt from our collective inaction in the 1990s over the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and Rwanda, to take two prime examples. The French under Mitterand were a lone voice for action in Serbia and Croatia, just as they led the opposition to the 2003 Iraq misadventure. Now the Sarkozy government is proposing intervention in Myanmar. Time to give the French their due?
\nIf giving Paris props is too much to bear, then how about the pope? One of the many overlooked (because they were overly-complex) passages from Benedict’s speeches in America in April was this central appeal from his address to the United Nations<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect. This has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity. Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made. If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments. The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage…When faced with new and insistent challenges, it is a mistake to fall back on a pragmatic approach, limited to determining \u201ccommon ground\u201d, minimal in content and weak in its effect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Powerful stuff. Benedict traced the history of the principle of the “responsibility to protect” back to the first great theologian of international law, the sixteenth-century Dominican Friar Francisco de Vitoria, and he wraps it in his favored principles of human dignity and natural law. A strong editorial <\/a>from the Jesuit weekly America<\/em> also lays out the case for intervention.
\nUnfortunately, the moral standing of the United States in the wake of the Iraq debacle makes it difficult to make such an argument, and the responsibility would fall largely to the Europeans, who have been far too passive when we have been far too assertive. Moreover, if any papal-presidential conversation along these lines does take place in the Apostolic Palace, it will likely be in private, as Benedict has shown no willingness to pressure Bush, whom he apparently likes, on issues about which they disagree. That wouldn’t be sad. It’d be tragic. Let’s pray for a different outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, not an incursion into the Middle East. Neither the Vatican, nor the Pope (current or past), nor the bishops, nor church teaching or tradition supported the American invasion of Iraq. But when President Bush, the author of that terrible tragedy, meets his new BFF, Pope Benedict XVI, in the Vatican later this week, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Catholic case for "another" US-led invasion... - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/06\/the-catholic-case-for-another.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Catholic case for "another" US-led invasion... - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"No, not an incursion into the Middle East. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}