Pope Benedict XVI issued an urgent appeal Sunday to military and
political leaders to consider the safety of Libyan civilians and ensure
they have access to emergency aid in his first comments on the U.S.-led
military assault on Libya.
The pope didn't identify which leaders
he was referring to in comments at his traditional Sunday blessing.
Significantly, he didn't demand an immediate end to the U.S. and
European air and missile strikes.
Rather, he directed his appeal
in general to "those who have the political and military responsibility
to take to heart the safety and security of citizens and guarantee that
they have access to humanitarian aid."
Benedict said the outbreak
of hostilities had sparked "great fear and alarm in me" and said he was
praying for peace in the region.
Two weeks ago, Benedict lamented
the deaths and humanitarian crisis caused by the fighting between
Moammar Gadhafi's forces and rebels.
The Vatican has been
remarkably quiet since then, and particularly since the U.N. Security
Council authorized military force to halt Gadhafi's crackdown: the
Vatican newspaper reported on the developments matter-of-factly, without
commentary.
That was not the case eight years ago in the run-up
to the Iraq war, when Pope John Paul II voiced emphatic opposition to
U.S.-led military action and sent an envoy to Washington to try to avert
it.
Yet in 1994, nearly two years into Bosnia's civil war, John
Paul called for humanitarian intervention to end the suffering and said
the church endorsed action to disarm aggressors.
In 1998, the
Vatican opposed NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia launched after Serbia's
leader Slobodan Milosevic refused to sign a peace deal for separatist
Kosovo, but John Paul also said the international community couldn't
remain quiet as innocents were forced from their homes amid repression
and violence.
On Sunday, Avvenire, the influential newspaper of
the Italian Catholic bishops' conference, said the Libyan "war" was
necessary and justified, "animated by the noble motives of humanitarian
intervention."
In a front-page editorial, Avvenire praised the
French for having recognized the rebels diplomatically and "taken up the
flag of interventionism with the aim of canceling out its past links to
the dictators of the Maghreb and relaunching French grandeur in the
Mediterranean."
Recently, the Vatican has been chastened for what
some in the Arab world considered interference in internal affairs: The
pre-eminent institute of Islamic learning in the Sunni Muslim world
froze talks with the Vatican earlier this year after Benedict called for
better protection of Christians in Egypt.
Benedict's appeal had followed the New Year's bombing on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria that killed 21 people.