COLLARED NITWITS:

Hannan stands up for war on Iraq: Retired archbishop recalls Nazi horrors (Bruce Nolan, 11/13/02, The Times-Picayune)

It was too much for retired Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans to take. As his younger brother bishops Tuesday moved toward telling President Bush how deeply skeptical they are of the morality of a war against Iraq, Hannan, at 89 still the peaceable fraternity's most reliable hawk, rose and argued the other side.

When the globe's only superpower "allows some despotic power to rule the earth, or parts of the earth, we're in terrible shape" morally and politically, he told an audience of about 250. [...]

Attending as a nonvoting observer, Hannan is the senior archbishop in the United States and something of a legend among his colleagues for his relative conservatism in a generally liberal group. As a seminarian in Rome in the late 1930s, he watched Hitler and Mussolini gather power, and as a paratroops chaplain saw the devastation of World War II.

Those experiences shaped his appreciation of military strength, applied early, to oppose tyranny. For that reason, decades later, he was among a tiny handful of bishops who unsuccessfully resisted publication of a Catholic bishops' document deploring the nuclear arms race as immoral.

The modern clergy of almost every denomination are a source of nearly continual embarrassment. If he weren't still around, who would have risen and said the same? Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2002 1:23 PM