Church Leader Points to Bush’s Moral Dilemma

Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning of the Episcopal Church, back from Baghdad and a visit with President Bush, said Friday that the Episcopalian in the White House “is focused on a military response, yet he still has an inward struggle. I feel he sincerely would like to find another way.”

Browning made his remarks in a telephone interview after he joined other Protestant and Eastern Orthodox church leaders in a news conference Friday at the United Nations, where they urged America to avoid a Persian Gulf war.

In his Thursday afternoon meeting with Bush at the White House, Browning said, the President had on his desk an Amnesty International report on atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait. Browning said Bush asked him: “ ‘What is a moral response to this?’ He said he cannot read the report without complete revulsion.”

Browning said he answered that the Iraqi acts were evil but that devastation from war would be so significant it would not regain what was lost: “I said that war would not be to our national interests. If it comes to war, we will have the wrath of Arabs for years to come.”

Bush, a lifelong Episcopalian, has kept in touch with the New York-based bishop since the 1988 election. Browning delivered a homily at Bush’s inauguration and met with him once before at the White House. They also talked this fall at the dedication of the National Cathedral in Washington.

“I saw a lot of stress and strain on his face,” Browning said, referring to their Thursday talk. He said he thought the President felt intensely that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein “needs to have judgment fall on him.”

Browning said the Iraqi leader “has to be dealt with, but I’m still hopeful that (Bush) will see a way other than a military response--one in which the Arab leadership participates in a solution in concert with the United Nations.”

Unlike their gradual opposition to the Vietnam War, U.S. Catholic and Protestant church leaders have came out quickly and solidly against a gulf war. S1