Threat of
War
Mission to White House sends message to Islam
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
Though Pope John Paul II’s last-ditch appeal to President
George Bush to avoid war in Iraq packs undeniable drama, there’s a sense
in which Cardinal Pio Laghi’s mission has precious little to do with
changing minds in the White House.
The 80-year-old former papal ambassador to the United States is
also speaking, indirectly but unmistakably, to Cairo and Tehran, Khartoum and
Peshawar, and Jakarta and Abuja. Laghi’s very presence in Washington
speaks a message to the Islamic street: This is not our war.
Making that point is seen by Vatican diplomats as especially
urgent in light of fears over the fate of Christian minorities in Islamic
nations. In several such places, Christians are facing increasing strain.
In the eastern islands of Indonesia, for example, white-uniformed
militiamen of Laskar Jihad are forcibly converting Christians to Islam. This
campaign has cost the lives of 5,000 to 6,000 people. In Bangladesh, small
radical groups supporting Osama bin Laden have bombed or burned down churches.
In Sudan, some estimate that as many as 2 million people, chiefly
Christians, have been killed in a civil war fought by the radical Islamic
regime in the North of the country against the non-Arab population in the
South.
Since the first intifada in the 1980s, there has been a steady
exodus of Arab Christians out of the Middle East, fleeing conflict, economic
collapse and a rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. Today more Christians
born in Jerusalem live in Sydney, Australia, than in Jerusalem. More Christians
from Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, reside in Belize in Central America than are
left in Beit Jala.
In Iraq, some 200,000 Christians have left since the first Gulf
War. At the start of 1991, the Catholic population of Baghdad was more than
500,000. Today, Catholics number about 175,000.
“It’s like a biblical exodus,” one Vatican official
said in mid-February.
This is the context in which last week the Vatican ended almost a
month of speculation by formally asking the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See to
arrange a meeting between Laghi and Bush. Rome had been filled with speculation
about such a mission, especially after John Paul II dispatched French Cardinal
Roger Etchegaray to Saddam Hussein in mid-February.
Vatican officials, speaking to NCR on background, said that
debate within the Secretariat of State over whether or not to send Laghi, a
personal friend of the Bush family, boiled down to two positions. Those opposed
argued that doing so would feed American arrogance by bolstering the idea that
war is Bush’s decision to make. This camp preferred to treat the United
Nations as the proper interlocutor.
(Ironically, American diplomats had quietly discouraged the pope
from sending an emissary to the White House on similar grounds, saying that the
dispute is not between Hussein and Bush, but between Hussein and the United
Nations. Thus the Americans and the more anti-American wing in the Vatican
found themselves on the same page).
The majority view within the Vatican, however, was that a direct
personal appeal to Bush was worth the risk, and not because they believe it is
likely to change the president’s mind. Privately, senior Vatican officials
have told reporters that while they may hope for a miracle, realistically they
regard war as a foregone conclusion.
The Vatican’s aim, therefore, is less to change the U.S.
position than to shape public opinion in the Islamic world.
“I see the visit as significant in shaping the understanding
of well-informed Muslims and policymakers and of confirming the perception of
many that it’s not an issue of Christianity versus Islam,” said
Jesuit Fr. Tom Michel, one of the Catholic church’s leading experts on
Islam and a former Vatican official.
“At the popular level, many Muslims will probably continue to
see an eventual war as a Christian attack on Islam and Islamic peoples,”
Michel said.
Fear of a potential eruption in Christian/Islamic relations was at
the heart of a Feb. 23-24 meeting of a joint committee between the Vatican and
Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar institute, widely considered the Vatican of
the Islamic world. The Vatican was represented by Archbishop Michael
Fitzgerald, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
“War is a proof that humanity has failed,” its
concluding statement read. “It brings about enormous loss of human life,
great damage to the basic structures of human livelihood and the environment,
displacement of large populations, and further political instability.
“In the present circumstances there is the added factor of
increased tension between Muslims and Christians on account of the mistaken
identification of some Western powers with Christianity, and of Iraq with
Islam.”
The statement suggested the Vatican’s full-court diplomatic
press, which has included recent papal tête-à-têtes with
Germany’s Joschka Fischer, Iraq’s Tariq Aziz, England’s Tony
Blair, Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar and Mohammad Reza Khatami of the Iranian
parliament, has borne some fruit in shaping Islamic opinion.
“The Muslim members of the committee welcomed the clear
policy and strenuous efforts of His Holiness Pope John Paul II in favor of
peace,” it said.
In the Arab world, the most sizeable Christian community is in
Egypt, which has 10 million to 12 million Copts. About 1.5 million Christians
reside in Lebanon, with the largest group being the Maronites, an Eastern
church that has always been loyal to Rome. There are perhaps 1 million
Christians in Iraq, with large concentrations in the Kurdish zone. There are
some 1.2 million Christians in Syria, including Aramaics, Armenians, Melkites
and Orthodox. There are small but significant Christian communities in Iran,
Jordan, Israel; Turkey and Algeria also have small Christian communities.
The Vatican has long insisted that these communities have a
“special mission” to keep the faith alive in the land of
Christianity’s birth.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 14,
2003
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