Vatican criticizes execution of Saddam Hussein

(Dec. 30, 2006) The Vatican on Saturday criticized the execution of former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein as a "tragic" event and warned that it risked fomenting a spirit of vendetta and sowing fresh violence in Iraq. Saddam was hanged at dawn on Saturday in Baghdad. The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill the dictator in 1982. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days. "A capital punishment is always tragic news, a reason for sadness, even if it deals with a person who was guilty of grave crimes," said Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi. "The position of the Church against capital punishment has been restated often," he said. The Catholic Church teaches that only God, the author of life, and can end a life. "The killing of the guilty party is not the way to reconstruct justice and reconcile society. On the contrary, there is a risk that it will feed a spirit of vendetta and sow new violence," Fr. Lombardi said. "In these dark times for the Iraqi people, one can only hope that all responsible parties truly make every effort so that glimmers of reconciliation and peace can be found in such a dramatic situation," he added.
The war in Iraq was the cause for one of the biggest rifts between the Vatican and the United States government. In the build-up to the invasion in 2003, the late Pope John Paul sent senior cardinals to U.S. President George W. Bush urging him not to invade and to Saddam urging him to abide by international resolutions. Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace criticised the U.S. authorities at the time of Saddam's capture in December 2003 for releasing TV pictures of soldiers checking his teeth "as if he were a cow", images that he said needlessly humiliated the man. In an interview published in an Italian daily earlier in the week, Cardinal Martino said executing Saddam would mean punishing "a crime with another crime."
Meanwhile Cardinal Paul Poupard, the head of Vatican's Pontifical Council for Inter-religious dialogue said: "We pray to the Lord and for the dead and the living so that this will not become an occasion for new violence." "We are always sad when men take lives which belong to the Lord," Poupard told the Italian news agency ANSA.
Earlier on Friday, the Apostolic Nuncio to Iraq, Indian Archbishop Francis Assisi Chullikat, also defended the Church’s stand in favour of life. Speaking to Vatican Radio he said, "Respect for life must be defended by the local clergy, especially by the Iraqis." "Some of them," he said, "have made declarations and intervened.” “For them the issue should be dealt with according to the teachings of the Church," Archbishop Chullikat added.