Iraq war for Catholics and Protestants is sinful.
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Saddam Hussein, but I believe that conflicts can be resolved without war and violence, and certainly without the killing fellow humans.)
News reports indicate that Uday and Qusay and two others, one a boy of fourteen, were killed from massive firepower launched by the US military forces on them in a raid lasting six hours.
Why the US military had to kill them when they could have taken them alive, for example, by smoking them out. That, it would appear to me, is a sin from the part of Catholics who participated in the raid, if any; for they had been told by their Pope from before the attack on Iraq by the U.S. that the war on Iraq is not justified.
I am a postgraduate Catholic, and for me the Pope now is an indifferent character. But as one who was taught from childhood about the Catholic faith and had lived loyally the Catholic faith – until I gradually and practically now fully come to consider and to conduct myself as a postgraduate Catholic –- I can tell you all here that membership in the Catholic Church carries with it the very solemnly sacrosanct duty to obey the Pope in morals and in dogmas.
Since the Pope did speak out against the war of the U.S. against Iraq, declaring it unjustified, Catholics who support and even join in the active prosecution of the war, and still continue in the occupation of Iraq, the conclusion seems inexorable, they are committing the sin of directly disobeying the Pope and that by participating in the U.S. war against Iraq.
Protestants would now also seem to be committing the sin of participating in an unjust war, if they now continue to support and to take part in the war; since more and more each day the reasons for the war are proving to be conspicuously false, without basis. But until these untruths have been more and more proven and exposed and publicized to be untruths, Protestants could have just obeyed the dictate of Bush on the need and justification of attacking Iraq, and occupying the country and subjugating the Iraqi people. Or they could have earlier employed their private judgment to assure their private conscience. But not now.
With Catholics, private judgment is not an option in any way when the Pope speaks out to declare an action immoral, in the present concern, that the war on Iraq is not justified.
Bush and his colleagues, all of them who consider themselves and profess themselves to be Christians, now that they are shown to have been wrong or mistaken in the reasons they had convinced themselves on, they are in all logic now also in a sinful state, for continuing to pursue the war on Iraq by maintaining an occupation force over the land and its people.
So, let’s hear from you guys here. (He he he. But I am serious here.)
Susma Rio Sep