IRAQ: Pope John Paul made a dramatic appeal yesterday for world prayer to avert war and sent an envoy on a peace mission to Saddam Hussein to try to persuade Iraq to co-operate with the international community.
The Vatican said Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a retired Frenchman who has carried out numerous delicate papal missions, would leave for Baghdad today.
A statement said his mission was to show the Pope's concern and ask "Iraqi authorities to reflect seriously on the need for an effective international co-operation based on justice and international law aimed at guaranteeing the people [of Iraq] the supreme good of peace".
It was the most concrete step the Pope has taken in an attempt to defuse the crisis.
Vatican spokesman Mr Joaquin Navarro-Valls said that Cardinal Etchegaray, undertaking his third mission to Iraq for the pope in the past 15 years, would deliver a personal message from the pontiff to the Iraqi president.
The wording of the Vatican statement made clear Cardinal Etchegaray would tell the Iraqis they should co-operate fully with UN weapons inspectors.
In his appeal for peace, made in St Peter's Square for his weekly blessing, the Pope said it sometimes appeared that only God could now stop a conflict.
"At this hour of international worry, we all feel the need to look to God and beg him to grant us the great gift of peace," the 82-year-old Pope said.
"The difficulties on the world horizon present at the start of this new millennium lead us to believe only an act from on high can make us hope in a future that is less bleak," he added.
In the past weeks the Vatican has been involved in a flurry of diplomatic initiatives to try to avert a conflict. The Pope held talks with German Foreign Minister Mr Joschka Fischer on Friday and they made a joint appeal for peace. He will meet Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Mr Tareq Aziz on Friday and UN Secretary-General Mr Kofi Annan later this month.
By making clear it would not consider an attack on Iraq as a "just war", and warning the world of the wider consequences, the Vatican has put itself on a collision course with Washington.
In Christian teaching, the use of force must meet tough conditions of moral legitimacy to be considered a "just war".
Last week Archbishop Renato Martino, Cardinal Etchegaray's successor as head of the Vatican's justice and peace department, said a conflict would unleash terrorism and kill civilians.
Dr Martino also said the latest evidence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction from US Secretary of State Colin Powell was unconvincing and vague. The tone for the Vatican's opposition to war was set last month when Civilita Cattolica, a magazine whose texts are approved by the Secretariat of State said the war was motivated in part by economic reasons, would spark terrorism and destabilise the Middle East. - (Reuters)