Envoy of Pope visits Baghdad in peace bid

POPE John Paul II will dispatch an envoy to Iraq in a plea for peace and to encourage Baghdad to co-operate with the United Nations, the Vatican said yesterday.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, will leave for Baghdad today with a counsellor, Monsignor Franco Coppola.

The mission will seek to “show to all the plea of the Holy Father in favour of peace and to help the Iraqi authorities to make a series of reflections on the need for effective international co-operation, based on justice and international rights, with the aim of assuring this population the supreme good of peace,” Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement yesterday.

The Vatican opposes a new Iraq conflict, and top clerics have said a preventive strike would have no legal or moral justification. The pontiff has previously said war against Iraq would be a “defeat for humanity.”

John Paul reiterated his concerns on Saturday, saying “it has become ever more urgent to announce the ‘Gospel of peace’ to a humanity greatly tested by hatred and violence.”

Cardinal Etchegaray has served as the Pope’s envoy to trouble spots before, most recently to the Holy Land.

On that trip last year, he tried to help end the standoff between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen holed up in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. He has also visited Iraq on missions for the Pope. The Pope plans to meet with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz on Friday, the day weapons inspectors are to deliver a crucial progress report to the UN Security Council. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was expected to meet with the pontiff on February 18.

Cardinal Etchegaray leaves Rome at the same time a prominent conservative American Catholic, Michael Novak, holds meetings with senior Vatican officials to defend the hard-line US position on Iraq.