Lajolo
The Vatican foreign minister thinks that the prisoner abuse scandal was worse than the wanton murder of 3,000 people. Maybe Dan Schutte or the St. Louis Jesuits can whip out a new guitar hymn called “Moral Myopia” for this Sunday’s Masses. From AP, with thanks to LGF:
ROME – The scandal of prisoner abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq has dealt a bigger blow to the United States than the Sept. 11 attacks, the Vatican foreign minister told an Italian newspaper.
In an interview published Wednesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo described the abuses as “a tragic episode in the relationship with Islam” and said the scandal would fuel hatred for the West and for Christianity.
Hmm. Does Archbishop Lajolo have anything to say about the jihads against Christians in Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, and elsewhere? Are they not tragic episodes in the relationship with Islam? To say nothing of 9/11 itself.
“The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than Sept. 11. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves,” Lajolo was quoted as saying in La Repubblica.
Lajolo said that “intelligent people in Arab countries understand that in a democracy such episodes are not hidden and are punished … Still the vast mass of people — under the influence of Arab media — cannot but feel aversion and hate for the West growing inside themselves.”
And, he added, “the West is often identified with Christianity.”
The remarks were not the first by Lajolo on the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In the wake of the scandal, he had said that a democracy should punish those responsible and their direct superiors.
The Vatican paper, L’Osservatore Romano, has also run some harsh comments in the past days. On Monday, it criticized what it called a Pentagon cover-up and took sharp aim at the photograph of a soldier holding a prisoner by a leash.
I haven’t been following L’Osservatore. Does anyone know what it has reported about the jihads against Christians mentioned above, and others?