3/03/03
THE IRAQ WAR AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
The
Roman Catholic Church is quite opposed to the coming U.S. war in Iraq, and it
has been spearheading protests worldwide against such an action of the
U.S. In my opinion, the Vatican has
orchestrated the conflict in order ultimately to bring down the U.S. and to
obtain for itself the role of the world’s superpower, as it is prophesied in
Revelation 17. The rulers of many
nations in the world are helping the Vatican in this endeavor, perhaps even including
George W. Bush. On March 1, 2003 this
news story was released showing Church-led protests in the Philippines:
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15,000 Join Church-Led
Rally in Philippines Against Iraq War
MANILA -- About
15,000 people marched across the streets of
the Philippines capital on Friday in the biggest
protest here in
recent weeks
against the prospect of a U.S.-led war in Iraq.
The
demonstrators including students, leftist militants, priests
and nuns marched
on a seaside park for a prayer rally led by
anti-war Roman
Catholic Bishop Teodoro Bacani, AFP
reported.
They were joined there by independent-minded
Vice-President
Teofisto
Guingona, three senators and one member of the
House of
Representatives.
Guingona quit
President Gloria Arroyo's cabinet last year and
has since
campaigned against U.S. President George W.
Bush's
preemptive doctrine against international terrorism.
Arroyo, herself,
is a strong supporter of Bush.
A police
spokesman told AFP that an estimated 15,000 people
joined the
peaceful gathering, making it the largest anti-war
demonstration in
the Philippines in recent weeks. Bacani read a
message to the
crowd by Cardinal Jaime Sin, the
highest-ranking
Catholic prelate in the mainly Roman Catholic
Philippines, who urged Filipinos to remain
"a people of peace."
"We just
have to trust in God," he said. "Let us pray that the
leaders of the
world may uphold peace."
The church leadership in the anti-war
protests in this Catholic
outpost in Asia
is consistent with Pope John Paul II's campaign
to persuade Bush
and allied nations against resorting to force to
rid Iraq if its
alleged weapons of mass destruction.
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The
Roman Catholic Church will get credit for promoting peace, even as the U.S. is
heading towards destruction.
And at the same time Protestant evangelicals will be blamed for the war. Here is another sample article prominently labeling George W. Bush as a Protestant evangelical (http://www.msnbc.com/news/878520.asp?), hence Protestant evangelicalism can be blamed for starting the war:
A higher calling: It is
his defining journey—from reveler to revelation. A biography of his faith, and
how he wields it as he leads a nation on the brink of war
By Howard Fineman
NEWSWEEK
March 10 issue — George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. HIS TEXT ISN’T news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.” The author is Oswald Chambers, and, under the circumstances, the historical echoes are loud. A Scotsman and itinerant Baptist preacher, Chambers died in November 1917 as he was bringing the Gospel to Australian and New Zealand soldiers massed in Egypt. By Christmas they had helped to wrest Palestine from the Turks, and captured Jerusalem for the British Empire at the end of World War I…
Bush believes in God’s will—and in winning elections with the backing of those who agree with him. As a subaltern in his father’s 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then emerging evangelical movement in political life. Now they form the core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century. Bible-believing Christians are Bush’s strongest backers, and turning them out next year in even greater numbers is the top priority of the president’s political adviser Karl Rove. He is busy tending to the base with pro-life judicial appointments, a proposed ban on human cloning (approved by the House last week) and a $15 billion plan to fight AIDS in Africa, a favorite project of Christian missionaries who want the chance to save souls there as well as beleaguered lives. The base is returning the favor. They are, by far, the strongest supporters of a war—unilateral if need be—to remove Saddam…
The presidential campaign was Texas on a grander scale. As he prepared to run, in 1999, Bush assembled leading pastors at the governor’s mansion for a “laying-on of hands,” and told them he’d been “called” to seek higher office. In the GOP primaries, he outmaneuvered the field by practicing what one rival, Gary Bauer, called “identity politics.” Others tried to woo evangelicals by pledging strict allegiance on issues such as abortion and gay rights. “Bush talked about his faith,” said Bauer, “and people just believed him—and believed in him.” There was genius in this. The son of Bush One was widely, logically, believed by secular voters to be a closet moderate. Suddenly, the father’s burden was a gift: Bush Two could reach the base without threatening the rest. “He was and is ‘one of us’,” said Charles Colson, who sold the then Governor Bush on a faith-based prison program.
For his public speeches, he hired Michael Gerson, a
gifted writer recommended to him by Colson, among others. A graduate of Wheaton
College in Illinois (“the Evangelical Harvard”), Gerson understood Bush’s
compassionate conservatism. More important, he had a gift for expressing it in
stately, lilting language that could appeal, simultaneously, to born-agains and
to secular boomers searching for a lost sense of uplift in public life.
The Bush campaign conducted its more-controversial
outreach below radar, via letters and e-mail. Only once was it forced to reach
out in a raw public way. After John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, Bush
made his infamous visit to South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, the
ultrafundamentalist and officially anti-Roman Catholic school. Strategists were
opaque in public, unapologetic behind the scenes. “We had to send a
message—fast—and sending him there was the only way to do it,” said one top
Bush operative at the time. “It was a risk we had to take.” Bush won.