The Inconsistent Statement of Archbishop Martino by Gary Morella @ War in Iraq @ TraditionInAction.org

War against Terrorism

Excerpts from the article

The Inconsistent Statement
of Archbishop Martino

Gary Morella

Archbishop Renato Martino
Our Sunday Visitor, January 5, 2003

Archbishop Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told a Vatican Radio audience that a war against Iraq would be "a crime against peace that would cry out for God's vengeance" (CWNews.com, March 17, 2003).

Is Archbishop Martino's avenging God going to act against those who are following God's law by obedience to just authority in defending themselves against terrorists sponsoring states who have weapons of mass destruction, and have been proven to have the ruthless mentality to use them indiscriminately? Just what Catechism is Martino reading anyway?

The Vatican is losing all credibility via shrill voices like Martino and Pio Laghi who tell sovereign states that they have to ask permission from a morally bankrupt United Nations, an organization that blatantly promotes the "culture-of-death" through its many organs primarily via international meetings that advocate hedonism, promoting vice as virtue, to defend themselves. More to the point, nowhere is it traditional Catholic teaching that such an approval must be sought in order for a sovereign country to defend itself when viciously attacked.

What's the Vatican's priority these days, the natural when it should be the supernatural? What's worse, natural or supernatural death? It's getting harder to figure out the answer looking at some of the latest press releases from Rome.

The Vatican is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from pacifists who tell us that terrorists and their sponsoring states are bad, while concurrently saying that despite that fact, we can do nothing when their evil machinations threaten our very existence as a people, regardless of how far it goes with its sole purpose of coercing the world by force to worship the religion of Islam. That's the historical bottom line that the peaceniks ignore, a line that is directly analogous to any oppressive regime such as the Nazis under Hitler or the Communists under Stalin.

If we are to believe the pacifists' radical reading of Sacred Scripture then if someone breaks into our homes, threatens our families with torture and death, we can do nothing because God does not allow it, which flies in the face of reason.

And the God Who gave us Faith also gave us reason. God being Omniscient, All-Good, and Perfect Truth cannot contradict Himself. Moreover, it has never been the teaching of the Church in any form that one cannot serve honorably in the military, the latest charge of the pacifists. Jesus said "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." Jesus did not say, "Render nothing to Caesar." The Church, in accord with Scripture, makes us cognizant of our requirement to obey lawful authority in accord with just laws, in particular when the security of the state is threatened.

But beyond this, the Fifth Commandment, first and foremost, applies to those who have an arrogant disregard of the rights of others to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness leading ultimately to supernatural happiness. We are charged with acting responsibly pertaining to these rights, as rights without duty are no rights at all. How, for example, can we rightfully lament the deaths of innocents due to wars while allowing the killing of innocents in the womb? I wonder how many of the peace zealots are pro-life? Or is their idea of peace the aforementioned promotion of hedonism at all costs, the UN variety, to include their immortal souls? Some peace that is! And please remember that this is the same UN that the Vatican spokesmen would have us somehow believe has the moral authority to preach to the world about what it can or cannot do.

Specifically, in this instance, I am referring to those [terrorist] individuals who live to kill for whatever warped reasons justified in the name of religion. See militant Islam that is doing nothing more than following the true teachings of their prophet, as opposed to a [liberal] revisionist interpretation of what he said. To listen to the pacifists' skewed reasoning, their selective interpretation of Scripture to suit an untenable position, no matter how you cut it, that same Commandment applies only to those, who out of a need for self defense, i.e., self preservation, have no recourse but to take the lives of those [terrorists] who would take theirs. Where in Sacred Scripture is there such a twisted presentation of that Commandment? ….

What does the Church say about the extremes of Pacifism and [terrorist] Realism? The Just War is the teaching of the Catholic Church, not the aforementioned extremes.

Posted on April 22, 2003

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