c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ In an authoritative new collection of pronouncements on social issues, the Vatican on Monday (Oct. 25) condemned wars of aggression as “immoral” and said it is “a profanation and a blasphemy” for terrorists to call themselves martyrs.

The 525-page “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church” offers moral and ethical judgments concerning the family, labor, economics, politics, international relations, the environment, war and peace. It labels abortion “a horrendous crime” and rules out same-sex marriages.

Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, president of the council, told a news conference that the compendium “contains a series of indications for the use of social doctrine in the church’s pastoral field and in the life of Christians, the lay faithful above all.”

But Martino and other officials refused to apply the pronouncements directly to controversies over the decision by President Bush to invade Iraq or the support by Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, for abortion rights.

Asked if the compendium’s statement that “a war of aggression is intrinsically immoral” means that the Vatican would consider the attack on Iraq “illegitimate,” Martino referred the questioner to a statement by Pope John Paul II to Bush at a Vatican audience June 4. There, the pope said the Vatican’s opposition to the Iraq war was “unequivocal.”

The compendium upholds the “right and duty” of a state under attack to defend itself “even using the force of arms.” It reiterates the church’s concept of a “just war” as a response of last resort to “lasting, grave and certain” damage and as an action that does not “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

The Vatican has said that neither the first Gulf War waged by the United States against Iraq in 1991 after Baghdad invaded Kuwait nor the preventive strike against Iraq last year met the “just war” criteria.

In an apparent reference to Iraq, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and other acts of violence done with religious justification, the compendium asserts that “no religion may tolerate terrorism and much less preach it.” The document denounces suicide bombers.

“It is a profanation and a blasphemy to declare oneself a terrorist in God’s name,” it says. “To define as `martyrs’ those who die while carrying out terrorist attacks distorts the concept of martyrdom, which is the witness of a person who gives himself up to death rather than deny God and his love. Martyrdom cannot be the act of a person who kills in the name of God.”

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls brushed aside a question about whether a Catholic may vote for Kerry, who has supported laws permitting abortion.

Some U.S. prelates have said they would refuse to give Communion to Kerry, a Catholic, and conservative Catholics have urged his excommunication.

Navarro-Valls said that “the Holy See has never entered nor intends to enter into” the merits of the election of an American president. But he said that the local church can offer Catholic voters “ethical elements for a knowledgeable moral judgment.”

The compendium, in preparation for five years, draws on the Bible; writings by early church fathers, saints and scholars; rulings by ecumenical councils; the messages of seven popes; and other documents issued by the Vatican over the centuries. It has a detailed 166-page index by topic.

It rejects sterilization and abortion as “morally illicit” and says that abortion “in particular is a horrendous crime and constitutes a particularly serious moral disorder.”

“Far from being a right, it is a sad phenomenon that contributes seriously to spreading a mentality against life, representing a dangerous threat to a just and democratic social coexistence,” the compendium says.

While asserting that “homosexual persons are to be fully respected in their human dignity,” it says that God’s plan calls for them to exercise chastity and does not justify “a right to marriage between persons of the same sex and its being considered equivalent to the family.”

“If, from the legal standpoint, marriage between a man and a woman were to be considered just one possible form of marriage, the concept of marriage would undergo a radical transformation, with grave detriment to the common good,” it says.

The compendium says that traditional church teaching does not rule out capital punishment, but it points to the growing number of countries abolishing or suspending the death penalty as proof that “cases in which it is absolutely necessary to execute the offender are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

It praises public opposition to the death penalty and moves to halt its application as “visible manifestations of a heightened moral awareness.”

The compendium also supports the right to conscientious objection if rulings by civil authorities “are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or to the teachings of the Gospel.”

MO/PH END RNS