ROME — In an unusual effort to counter increasingly fierce criticism by the Vatican against a possible war in Iraq, the U.S. government hosted a conservative theologian here Monday who argued that a military strike against Saddam Hussein would meet the definition of a “just war” in Catholic doctrine.
“Public authorities are responsible for one supreme duty: to protect the lives and the rights of their people,” said Michael Novak, a Catholic thinker and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, speaking to an international group of journalists invited by the U.S. Embassy.
“And no president of the United States is going to put the United States at risk again, knowing full well that if there was something he could have done and didn’t do, he would be blamed for it forever,” he said.
Novak’s visit, which included meetings with Vatican officials last week, was organized at the behest of Jim Nicholson, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See and a Vietnam combat veteran who previously chaired the Republican National Committee.
Although both men took pains to say that Novak was not speaking for the U.S. government, his presence underscored the deep split between the Catholic Church and the Bush administration over military action against Iraq.
On Sunday, Pope John Paul II, who has spoken against a possible preemptive strike against Hussein’s regime, dispatched an envoy to Baghdad in a last-ditch effort to avert conflict. A Vatican spokesman said the trip was designed to “demonstrate to all the plea of the Holy Father in favor of peace and to help Iraqi authorities make a serious reflection on the duty of an effective international commitment based on justice and international rights.”
Hussein’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, is expected in Rome on Friday for a meeting with the Pope.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the pontiff made a point of saying that nations have a right to defend themselves against terrorism, and he did not criticize the subsequent war to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
But Iraq has been different. In a speech to diplomats to the Vatican last month, the Pope said, “No to war!” His top aides have criticized U.S. policy in explicit terms.
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s foreign minister, questioned why the United States would want to “irritate a billion Muslims.”
The director of Vatican Radio, the Rev. Pasquale Borgomeo, accused the U.S. of wanting to impose “the hegemony of a superpower by force and not by law.”
Official Vatican newspapers, the content of which is approved by top church officials, have gone further. One contended the United States wanted war to seize control of Iraq’s oil supplies, and another said U.S. policy lacked “intelligence.”
U.S. diplomats here have been frustrated by the tone of the comments, which they feel resembles the kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism that is common in some European intellectual circles.
However, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and most mainline Protestant denominations in the United States also have questioned the rationale for a preemptive strike on Iraq.
Into the debate waded Novak, a 1960s anti-Vietnam War activist who is now better known for his moral defense of capitalism and free trade. He argued that if Hussein does not agree to disarm, a preemptive strike against his regime fits the definition of a “just war,” a concept first spelled out 1,600 years ago by St. Augustine and now enshrined in Catholic catechism.