Three United States cardinals have urged the creation of a “genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation” as the US faces “the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War”. Source: OSV News.
Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, released a joint statement yesterday, focusing on the “enduring ethical compass” for foreign policy that Pope Leo XIV provided in his January 9 address to members of the diplomatic corps accredited the Holy See.
In their statement, the cardinals pointed to “events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland” that “have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace”.
The US recently staged a military intervention in Venezuela during which President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured and brought to the US to face federal narcotrafficking and weapons charges. President Donald Trump declared the US would “run” Venezuela, although the administration has since been working with Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.
In recent weeks, Mr Trump has also vowed to acquire Greenland – a semiautonomous region of the Denmark – either through purchase or military force, and has threatened to levy tariffs on several European nations, including Denmark itself, that have opposed the plan.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, continues attacks initiated in 2014, and has been classified as a genocide in two joint reports from the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.
“The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations,” cardinals said in their statement.
“The balancing of national interest with the common good is being framed within starkly polarised terms.”
The three cardinals stressed that “our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination.”
They continued: “The building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarisation and destructive policies.”
FULL STORY
US cardinals call for ‘genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation’ (By Gina Christian, OSV News)
