GOD’S grace is vital for this dark time, said Auxiliary Bishop Patrick Power of Canberra and Goulburn as Australian troops prepared to go to war against Iraq last week.
Bishop Power, who has publicly campaigned for peace, was commenting hours after Prime Minister John Howard announced on March 18 that Australia would join the United States-led war against Iraq.
‘I’m terribly disappointed this day has arrived,’ Bishop Power said. ‘There was certainly an air of inevitability about it with all that’s gone on in recent days and weeks.
‘Now my thought is to pray, especially to pray for the most vulnerable in it all – to pray for the people in Iraq, for the military personnel involved and for the world, that the relationships between countries and cultures will not further deteriorate.’
Australian Catholic Social Justice Council chairman, Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba, commenting on the release of the council’s latest publication War in Iraq: Is it Just?, said Pope John Paul II, leading Vatican officials and bishops’ conferences worldwide, warned repeatedly that the ‘coalition of the willing’ had failed to meet the conditions for a just war.
Chairman of the Catholic-Muslim dialogue in Brisbane archdiocese, Dr Nasir Butrous, said no matter how noble the outcomes of the war may be, the means were unacceptable.
Dr Butrous, who migrated from Iraq 10 years ago, said the way to achieve noble outcomes was not through war.
Executive officer of Brisbane archdiocese’s Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, Peter Arndt, said people must continue the intensified prayer which the Pope called for at the start of Lent.
The Australian Catholic bishops, in a statement issued for Ash Wednesday, said: ‘Our thoughts go out to the Iraqi people who have suffered so terribly over many years, that they might be spared further conflict and destruction in their homeland’.
