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Meet Robert Waldrop (left), one of the leading lights of the Catholic Worker movement in the United States. Bob runs the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma, US. His powerful words - more than the way he looks - remind me of a biblical Old Testament prophet speaking truth to power!

The Catholic Worker movement was founded by the late Dorothy Day, who campaigned in defence of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless, and Peter Maurin. On her 75th birthday, Day was described by a Jesuit magazine as the individual who best exemplified “the aspiration and action of the American Catholic community during the past forty years.”

In the best traditions of the Catholic Worker movement, Bob has also been vocal in the anti-war movement within the Catholic Church, in line with Pope John Paul II’s opposition to the war in Iraq. He feels that US Catholic Bishops have not done enough to conscientise Catholics about the evils of war, invasion and occupation.

This is an open letter from Bob to His Eminence Francis Cardinal George, OMI, Archbishop of Chicago

Dear Cardinal George

I have read the news reports and the Archdiocesan statement concerning the disruption of an Easter mass that you celebrated at your Cathedral. Your official statement says, in part. . . “This is a profoundly disturbing action. . . It is a sacrilege that should be condemned by all people of faith and good will.”

Although I actively oppose the unjust war the United States is waging on the people of Iraq, I agree that the demonstrators action was disturbing and sacrilegious.

However, theirs was not the first sacrilegious act of that day. The sacrilege commenced when you ascended to the Altar of God and began to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with your hands dripping with the blood of the innocent in Iraq whom you and most of the other United States Catholic Bishops have so callously abandoned to their grisly and violent fates. Like the rest of the US Bishops save one, you issued no canonical declaration forbidding Catholics of the Archdiocese of Chicago from participation in the unjust war on the people of Iraq. A review of your website finds no pastoral letter instructing the souls entrusted to your care about the Church’s teachings on unjust war and condemning the war on the people of Iraq as unjust. Like nearly all of your confreres in the US hierarchy, you have preached a gospel of moral relativism and moral laxism that makes a mockery of the Church’s teachings on life. You claim you want “peace”, but you have done nothing to actually support peace other than to offer pious platitudes and hypocritical rhetoric from your position of safety in your palatial Chicago residence.

Your holidays and festivals I detest, they weigh me down, I tire of the load. When you spread out your hands, I close my eyes to you; though you pray the more, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds before my eyes; cease doing evil, learn to do good. Make justice your aim, redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow. Isaiah 1

I am obviously just an obscure Catholic Worker. You and all the other bishops have consistently ignored everything I have had to say to you since I started writing bishops on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 2001. Which is fine with me, I am not interested in collecting letters of denial from bishops and cardinals making excuses for their moral cowardice. The charism of the Catholic Worker movement is faithfulness to the Gospel of Justice and Peace - even when all of the United States bishops save a small handful choose Nationalism over Catholicism. So once more I write again these words of inconvenient faithfulness, to remind you that God is watching every moment of your reign as Archbishop and Cardinal and you will one day be accountable for these actions.

God was watching when you refused to properly catechize your people about unjust war.

God was watching when you refused to forbid Chicago Catholics from participating in an unjust war.

God was watching when you dined with the Tyrant-Emperor George Bush, and you did not condemn him as a murderer and prosecutor of an unjust war.

A reading from the book of the Prophet Micah. . .

And I said, Listen you leaders of Jacob, house of Israel! Is it not your duty to know what is right, you who hate what is good, and love evil? You who tear their skin from them and their flesh from their bones? They eat the flesh of my people and flay their skin from them, and break their bones. They chop them in pieces like flesh in a kettle, and like meat in a caldron. When they cry to the Lord, he shall not answer them, rather shall God hide from them at that time, because of the evil they have done.

Thus says the LORD regarding the prophets who lead my people astray; Who, when their teeth have something to bite, announce peace, But when one fails to put something in their mouth, proclaim war against him.

Therefore you shall have night, not vision, darkness, not divination; The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be dark for them.

Then shall the seers be put to shame, and the diviners confounded; They shall cover their lips, all of them, because there is no answer from God. . . .

Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem reduced to rubble, And the mount of the temple to a forest ridge.

So as it turns out, when you condemn these young people, you condemn yourself.

Which is worse? A prince of the church who by any objective judgment is a moral coward who has preached a false gospel of moral laxism and relativism regarding an unjust war? Or a few young people, who hear the cries of the victims, and in despair act out in such a public manner? Is it not true that your own abject failure as a Cardinal Archbishop provoked these young people to such a rash action? Are you not, then, a “secondary disrupter” of your own Mass, and thus have a significant share in the responsibility for their deeds? Have not your actions — or rather, inactions — violated the inalienable rights of the people of Iraq to life? Who, then, is really at fault in this matter? These young protestors? Or a cowardly Cardinal Archbishop, who shuts his eyes, ears, and heart to the cries of the people of Iraq for justice and peace and is a scandal before the entire world?

I write these words to you, in remembrance of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers who have died in this unjust war on the people of Iraq. One day you will meet them and they will tell you of their terror, pain, and fear and they will ask you, “Why, in the name of God, did you not do something serious to stop this from happening?”

I pray that God has mercy on your soul and brings you to an understanding of the grave evil and moral disorders that you and the other United States Catholic Bishops foster and encourage by your moral cowardice in the face of this unjust war on the people of Iraq

Sincerely,

Bob Waldrop
Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House
1524 NW 21st
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106
www.justpeace.org

A Prayer to Our Lady of Sorrows for Those Who Will Die Today in War

Our Lady of Sorrows,
we pray for all those who will die
today because of war and economic chaos,
especially the children.
Prepare them for the agony, despair,
and terror of the violence that is upon them.
Comfort them and
hold them close to the bosom of
thy most Immaculate Heart
as they drink deeply of the bitter cup
which is forced upon them.
Wipe their tears, calm their fears,
welcome them to peace and safety.
Eternal rest grant to them,
and may perpetual light shine upon them.

Our Most Holy Lady of Sorrows,
Overturn the thrones of tyranny, scatter the unjust,
give us your grace and strength to
stand against the demonic powers
which prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

Unlikely.

You see, war is a profitable business in the United States. Apart from boosting weapons sale, it is also Big Business for mercenary private contractors and “reconstruction” companies, which stand to make huge profits. The United States spends close to US$1 trillion on “defence” and it has over 700 military bases around the world.

Disruptions in global oil production - as a result of the chaos that war brings - keep the price of oil high. And this ensures record profits for the oil companies, which have close ties with the movers and shakers in Washington. The US administration also aims to seize strategic control of remaining oil reserves in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

But there is a glimmer of hope: that people will listen to the call of the anti-war movement to reject war and build a new world of peace and justice.

The seeds have been planted in the United States and the stalks are sprouting, as you can see from this encouraging development, reported by Democracy NOW!:

Antiwar Candidate Donna Edwards Defeats Incumbent Rep. Albert Wynn in Key Maryland Primary

Antiwar Democrat Donna Edwards joins us to talk about her defeat of eight-term Congress member Albert Wynn in Tuesday’s primary vote. The Maryland race had been described as “a bellwether contest in the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.” If Edwards wins in November, she’ll be the first African American woman elected to Congress from Maryland.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Barack Obama swept the Potomac primaries Tuesday, beating Senator Hillary Clinton in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. While much of the country is focused on the race for the presidential nomination, another primary in Maryland drew national attention. In the state’s Fourth Congressional District, Democratic activist Donna Edwards defeated eight-term incumbent Albert Wynn in a fiercely contested race.
The race was a rematch of the 2006 primary election, when Wynn held onto his seat by a few thousand votes. This time around, Donna Edwards defeated Wynn by a wide margin, receiving about 60 percent of the vote, while Wynn got about 35 percent. The race has been described by The Nation magazine as “a bellwether contest in the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.”
Edwards ran a populist, antiwar campaign that drew support from national liberal groups. She criticized Wynn for his votes tied to Iraq and the housing crisis. If she wins in November, she will be the first African American congresswoman to represent Maryland.
Donna Edwards joins us now on the phone from Maryland. Welcome to Democracy Now!
DONNA EDWARDS: Hi, Amy. It’s great to be on Democracy Now! this morning.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, despite the very severe weather, the polls were open, what, an extra hour and a half last night?
DONNA EDWARDS: That’s exactly right.
AMY GOODMAN: You have been declared the winner. Can you tell us what you think did it this time around? You lost to Wynn last time by a very small percentage.
DONNA EDWARDS: Right. I mean, I lost in 2006 by a very narrow margin. But I think that this time we put together, you know, a campaign operation that really built on the momentum of 2006, carrying a message of, you know, the need to focus on working people, on healthcare, on getting out of the war in Iraq, on an education system that works for all our children. And people took that message, they believed the change was important and required, and they cast their votes yesterday, and it was an overwhelming victory.

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He had a lot of blood on his hands. A mass murderer. But he was held in high esteem by Western leaders (and Asean leaders too: they were practically falling over one another to pay tribute to him). Why?

More than 500,000 - perhaps close to a million - were massacred in the mid-1960s, as a result of a purge on suspected communists and sympathisers, which also targeted peasants. The CIA even chipped in by supplying a list of people it wanted eliminated, as John Pilger describes:

The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. “British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time… There was a deal, you see.”

Then came the invasion of East Timor, which led to a loss of some 180,000 lives. This was carried out with a wink and a nod from then President Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Tens of thousands of Indonesians were also killed in places like Aceh and West Papua.

Mainstream foreign commentators tend to say, well, okay, he was responsible for mass murder, but look, he improved and modernised the Indonesian economy - as if that could somehow compensate for mass murder.

But really, did he improve the lot of Indonesia’s poor?

Many of the poor over there don’t seem to think so.

Listen to Allan Nairn, an award-winning journalist who has reported from Indonesia, speaking on Democracy Now! on the reaction to Suharto’s death:

Well, among the people in the poor compounds where I was, I guess the reaction was summed up by one woman who works in the market. She sells vegetables and cakes in one of the traditional markets. And she said, “Oh, Suharto, he died of overeating. He ate too much money. He ate so much that there wasn’t enough left for anybody else to eat.” People didn’t care, or they said good riddance. That seems to be the reaction among the poor.

But among those who made money off of Suharto, there seems to be some sadness. There also seems to be some sadness for the US ambassador. That quote you read defending Suharto, that’s the same argument that was used to defend Stalin. They said, oh, he killed a lot of people, but he developed the country economically. So if you buy that logic, the US should have been defending Stalin, as well.

In fact, if you compare Indonesia this day to Malaysia, a neighboring country which started out at the same economic level, after Suharto and the army got done with Indonesia, wages in Indonesia are about a sixth of what they are in Malaysia. There was growth in the sense—in Indonesia, in the sense of multinationals like Exxon coming in and taking the gas. People were coming in and taking the gold, new mines coming in and taking out their minerals, creating an export platform for Nike, etc. But in terms of lives of the poor—hunger, life expectancy, health, nutrition—people in Malaysia ended up doing much better, because there they took away power from the army, they put restrictions on the multinationals, and they had a different form of development. So the idea that Suharto’s mass murders were somehow balanced by economic progress he gave to the people is just factually incorrect, and it’s not surprising that poor people don’t seem bothered by his passing.

And I just want to add, if Suharto’s economic performance was that impressive, why then has there been a continuing exodus of poor Indonesians leaving their shores in search of jobs abroad - jobs that are often dirty, dangerous and degrading - leaving them pitifully vulnerable to exploitation?

John Pilger describes what the deal was, and why exactly Suharto was held in high esteem by Western leaders:

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia”. In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened”. Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil”.