By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On the Ides of March, seven American servicemen were killed when their helicopter crashed in western Iraq. Their names: Captain Mark K. Weber; Captain Andreas B. O’Keeffe; Captain Christopher T. Zanetis; Master Sergeant Christopher J. Raguso; Staff Sergeant Dashan J. Briggs; Master Sergeant William R. Posch; and, Staff Sergeant Carl P. Enis.
We pray for the repose of their souls. But honestly, did anyone, outside their loved ones, even know they were there?
In fact, we now learn that there are currently 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq. Why are they there? Does anybody know?
Many of us have friends who served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan. When asked to describe their mission, the most common reply is sobering: “to survive and get my men home safely.”
Pope St. John Paul II urged President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq. On March 5, 2003, Pio Cardinal Laghi conveyed to the president the Pope’s message that the war would cause “chaos” in the Middle East. “You might start, and you don’t know how to end it,” the cardinal told the media. Later reports from those attending the meeting indicated that the cardinal’s message may have received a less than dignified reception in the Oval Office, and the invasion began on March 19, 2003.
But there were problems. On March 7, 2003, Bishop John Botean, head of a small Byzantine Catholic diocese based in Ohio, had issued a pastoral letter warning those in his flock not to take part in the war, under pain of mortal sin. After a careful consideration of the Just War theory as explained in the Catholic Catechism, Bishop Botean concluded:
“With moral certainty I say to you it [the Iraq War] does not meet even the minimal standards of the Catholic just war theory. . . . I hereby authoritatively state that such direct participation is intrinsically and gravely evil and therefore absolutely forbidden.”
The stage was set for a moral debate that persists to this day.
Catholic servicemen and women, wherever they serve, have their own “diocese,” called the Military Ordinariate. Fifteen years ago this week, the ordinariate’s archbishop, the Most Rev. Edwin F. O’Brien, addressed all the chaplains under his command worldwide in a pastoral letter commemorating the Feast of the Annunciation. The letter offers a fascinating insight to the war.
Archbishop O’Brien’s March 25 letter addressed the issue directly — sort of. He told his priests that they could comfort those in combat units under their pastoral care who might be troubled in conscience thus:
“Given the complexity of factors involved, many of which understandably remain confidential, it is altogether appropriate for members of our armed forces to presume the integrity of our leadership and its judgments and therefore to carry out their military duties in good conscience.”
Archbishop O’Brien continued:
“Long after the hostilities cease the debate likely will continue as to the moral justification for the armed force recently initiated by the United States and its allies. It is to be hoped that all factors which have led to our intervention will eventually be made public and that the full picture of the Iraqi regime’s weaponry and brutality will shed helpful light upon our President’s decision.”
Archbishop O’Brien’s letter was careful not to endorse the war, or to indulge in the patriotic rhetoric that James Cardinal Gibbons had employed in 1917 to urge Catholics to enlist in World War I. Instead, the archbishop pointed to the abiding secrecy surrounding the genesis of the war and its conduct. Many “complex factors” contributed to the war policy. We have yet to hear the whole story, he wrote.
An aside: Had he written this letter fifteen years later, would he have merely told his flock, “just follow your conscience”?
Well, he didn’t. And we note that Archbishop O’Brien is not talking about secret troop movements and other battlefield arrangements. Rather, he is addressing the unspoken reasons that caused the country to go to war in the first place. They had not been revealed by the war’s advocates.
Well, not yet. “The debate likely will continue” — indeed, it cannot end — until “all factors which have led to our intervention [are] made public,” he wrote. Only then will we know the truth about the “integrity of our leadership.”
Archbishop O’Brien was hopeful, but he didn’t appear to be holding his breath. He made it clear that, while U.S. servicemen might enter the battle with a clear conscience, their leaders have a greater burden to bear. If they have lied, the powerful who have broken the Commandments of God and sent men and women in harm’s way to fulfill their own venal designs will face our Lord at a moment of His own choosing.
Then everything that is hidden will be revealed. The punishment for the unrepentant will be harrowing, and eternal. That is why we pray for our nation’s leaders at every Mass — because the temptations of power are so great, and the punishment for its abuse is so severe.
Are We There Yet?
On October 9, 2004, Archbishop O’Brien traveled to Front Royal, Va., to dedicate the beautiful St. John the Evangelist Library at Christendom College. In a reception attended by some 400 people, I had the opportunity to speak with him briefly. He listened intently, perhaps because I had hung a makeshift sign around my neck: “I’m sorry, I have laryngitis.” He charitably allowed me to struggle through a question.
“Your Excellency,” I croaked, “in March of last year you wrote that, when all factors which led to our intervention in Iraq were made public, we would be able to judge the president’s decision to go to war. Do we know enough today to make that moral judgment?”
The archbishop nodded in encouragement as I struggled through my question. The group surrounding us grew quiet as he pondered his answer.
After a long, silent pause, he sighed, smiled, and raised his eyes towards the ceiling. That was all.
As the war became more unpopular in both the UK and the U.S., British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood by Bush’s side and declared that “history will vindicate us.” In 2009, his successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, removed all British troops from Iraq and initiated an inquiry into Blair’s role in the decision to invade.
The verdict came in 2016, when, after an exhaustive investigation, a commission led by Sir John Chilcot issued a devastating report condemning Blair. Blair replied by denying that he had lied in the run-up to the war, praising British soldiers lost in Iraq and insisting that they had not died in vain.
No similar commission was set up in the United States to review President Bush’s role in the war, but the voters rendered their own decision, handing both houses of Congress to the Democrats in 2006 and the White House to Obama in 2008. On May 14, 2015, President Bush’s brother Jeb, a presidential candidate at the time, said that “knowing what we know now…I would not have gone into Iraq.”
The war divided not only the party and the country, but Catholics as well. Many of the faithful who supported the war in 2003 later changed their minds, but many more did not. Strained revisions of Just War Theory appeared supporting the war, even as Catholic prelates in the Middle East condemned the invasion and the widespread chaos that ensued. Former Bush speechwriter Bill McGurn wrote a column somehow interpreting Pope Benedict’s April 2008 White House visit to mean that Benedict had come to his senses and now supported Bush’s Iraq policy.
Tony Blair emotionally defended his own role in the Iraq War, but George W. Bush has remained silent. In 2008 and 2014 he expressed his “regrets” regarding the war, but to this day we can find no public statement by the former president regarding the plight of millions of his fellow Christians who have been killed, persecuted, or exiled in the chaos that St. John Paul II predicted would one day come to pass.
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