An example of how we fail as a nation

Taken from a homily by Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton delivered on Sunday, June 1, 2008:

... Over the past few weeks, I've been to three or four different parishes and I notice in the Prayer of the Faithful, there's always a prayer for our young men and women serving our country -- sometimes they say "defending our country" -- in Iraq. I'm not against praying for our soldiers who are over there waging war, but I have not heard, in the Prayer of the Faithful, a prayer for the people of Iraq.

"Love your enemies." If these are our enemies -- and I don't understand why they are, but if they are -- we must love them and pray for them rather than continue to kill them.

This past week, and this is an example, it seems to me, of how we fail as a nation, 111 nations, in an international meeting that took place in Dublin, Ireland, signed onto a treaty to ban cluster bombs. I don't know if you've heard of such weapons, but the United States produces more of them than any other nation in the world.

We have used them consistently in Afghanistan, now in Iraq, and we refused to sign the treaty. We're not going to give up these weapons. But a cluster bomb is a huge bomb that is dropped from 35,000 feet, descends toward the earth, and then before it strikes, explodes and hundreds of tiny bomblets are dropped.

These come down then, and as the heat of the earth rises and meets them, they explode and they're filled with tiny pellets of steel that fly in every direction, cover two or three football fields -- that's how far they go -- and when they strike people, they tear them apart.

In Iraq, we've been using these cluster bombs. Recently I read an interview with a doctor who is part of the group called "Doctors for Iraq" and he had gone with some other doctors in to the city of Fallujah after we had bombed that city of 350,000 people with cluster bombs. He said, "In the third day of the siege, they used the cluster bomb. And in that day we didn't work as doctors, we just collected the heads of children and women. Heads and limbs, and I remember our duty was just to find the appropriate limb with the appropriate body and head so we can put in one bag so we can prepare it for being buried. That night was six hours. It was so long, six hours.

"And then there was this famous picture on Al Jazeera, of a child, his brains opened, [he lost] all his brains. It was famous picture. I've carried that child with my hands…[he was one] of eight, four children and four women. All of them are just pieces."

That's what a cluster bomb does and we as a nation refused to reject that kind of weapon. There's something wrong with that sort of attitude, it seems to me, especially when you measure it against Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount....

Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton is a longtime national and international activist in the peace movement. Bishop Gumbleton is a founding member of Pax Christi USA and an outspoken critic of violence and militarism. The rest of this homily is here.