Just so I don’t forget… as described here back in March, 2003:
President Bush, fresh from making plans for war against Iraq, met for 40 minutes Wednesday with Cardinal Pio Laghi, an emissary from the Vatican who made a last appeal for peace.
A friend of the president’s father and the Vatican’s first ambassador to Washington, Laghi brought to the White House the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church on Ash Wednesday. In Rome, meanwhile, Pope John Paul II called on the world to fast for peace.
Laghi, 80 years old and retired from the Vatican, said after his meeting with Bush that a war would be “illegal and unjust,” but stopped short of calling it immoral. In a news conference at the National Press Club, he also said the United States had an obligation to seek the blessings of the United Nations.
That’s before the invasion.
That envoy, by the way, referred to the war as “immoral”, but the Pope did not, at least as indicated by this Catholic News article. Or at least, it’s a little fuzzy what exactly the pope said:
Laghi came bearing the pope´s message: A war would be a “defeat for humanity” and would be neither morally nor legally justified.
In a letter to Bush, the pope stood by his view that a pre-emptive strike on Iraq is immoral “unless it gets backed” by the United Nations.
Note that this was not reported in much more mainstream. Media Matters quotes the Dallas Morning News as saying:
One of the strongest anti-war voices belongs to the pope. He sent an envoy to visit with Mr. Bush this month with a letter that called the war ‘immoral, illegal, unjust.’
But they don’t have a link to the story.
