From Bob Novak's column:
"Even before last week's interview, McCarrick had opposed withholding communion as a ''sanction'' against offending Catholics. He fortified that position last week by asserting that abortion is only one issue even if it's the most important one. That fits the claim made by Catholic Democrats that Cardinal Arinze's position raises questions about sanctions for advocating capital punishment or even war in Iraq.
Actually, the Catholic catechism asserts that ''the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.'' As far as war in Iraq is concerned, it apparently meets the catechism's definition of ''just war.'' "
Oh really?? Here's what Novak neglected to mention (after a 30 second google search):
From the catechism:
2267 The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.
"If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
"Today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender 'today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent.' [68]
And...(raising the question which part of "No" don't you understand?")
New York Times
January 14, 2003
By FRANK BRUNI
VATICAN CITY, Jan. 13 -- Pope John Paul II today expressed his strongest opposition yet to a potential war in Iraq, describing it as a "defeat for humanity" and urging world leaders to try to resolve disputes with Iraq through diplomatic means.
"No to war!" the pope said during his annual address to scores of diplomatic emissaries to the Vatican, an exhortation that referred in part to Iraq, a country he mentioned twice.
"War is not always inevitable," he said. "It is always a defeat for humanity."