Thursday, February 28, 2008

Are American Catholic Servicemen In Iraq Committing Sin?

Darwin Catholic has a very good post up called Is Fighting in an "Unjust War" Evil? I think he is pretty sound there.

I have to run out of town for the evening(that means the Louisiana Catholic Blogger Update is delayed till tomorrow). However I am thinking of doing a post on what the Vatican and "Catholic" position(s) is on the Iraq Conflict later tonight.

Perhaps I should say I will be trying to make a case for what is not. Too many blogs, respected Catholic publications, and well meaning Catholics seem to be confused on the matter. I see blanket statements like the " The Vatican is Against the War" and "Catholic must oppose the War" etc etc.

It will not be a post that talks about if our initial entry was just or not. That can be argued forever.

The fact is the US Bishops have said we have moved past that question and I quite agree. People can disagree of course on what we should do as to Iraq. I have my own ideas and will present them. However we need to be clear what the the various Catholic viewpoints are and what they are not as to the current situation at least as we were hearing form Catholic authority. If we don't get this down then these soundbites are just propaganda and are perhaps even misleading.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I understand that our Church does not like war, nobody does. However, we also have a moral duty to both defend our our country and to free women and children from Sadam's torture chambers. I fear that many of our church leaders have no clue about Iraq, if they did, more Catholics would be Pro-War like me. I am pround that nevertheless, that several of my fellow Catholic countrymen are nice enough to save the women and children of Iraq and Afghanistan for that matter.

OHIO JOE

James H said...

I agree with that in part. I hope to his other post today to show what we are hearing that the Church's position is in fact not