Pope Calls for Broad Mideast Peace : Religion: Patriarchs are convened to consider the Catholic church’s regional role in aftermath of war.

Pope John Paul II on Monday told an unprecedented meeting of church leaders from countries most directly involved in the Gulf War, including an American archbishop and an Iraqi patriarch, that peace in the Middle East cannot be lasting unless the full gamut of regional problems are promptly and effectively addressed.

“Any wait-and-see attitude in the search for solutions or in the promotion of dialogue constitutes a serious risk of aggravating existing tensions,” the Pope warned.

The stern papal lecture opened a two-day meeting to consider a regional role for the Roman Catholic church in the aftermath of war. The Pope, who had pleaded persistently and fruitlessly for peace since the Gulf crisis flared last summer, seeks to bridge the West-East, Christian-Arab gap exacerbated by war in Middle Eastern countries, where about 4 million Catholics are an often beleaguered minority.

Among the invited patriarchs, the Pope said, are “witnesses to great trials . . . that have hit and decimated entire populations, that have sown mourning and destruction and have awakened distrust and rancor inherited from the past. Because, in fact, the temptation to turn to war was present well before August, 1990.”

Meeting with John Paul and leaders of the Vatican Curia are bishops or cardinals heading national episcopal conferences in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and North Africa, and patriarchs representing Eastern rite Catholic churches in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, as well as the Latin rite patriarch of Jerusalem.

John Paul will hear the delegates in turn, including Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk, president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, and Chaldean Patriarch Rafael I Bidawid of Baghdad, as they assess the church’s “spiritual and material situation” in the wake of war.

During the crisis, the 68-year-old Iraqi patriarch, who heads a half-million-member church, publicly praised Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s “just cause.”

Speaking to reporters after a prayer meeting in Rome on Sunday, Bidawid appealed for “solidarity of all nations, especially the ones that participated in this war--which is no longer a war, it is a true genocide--and I think that they will have very heavy consciences for what they committed.”

Of Hussein, Bidawid told reporters: “I think that he in his conscience thinks that he did his duty. Therefore, I don’t think that he has the slightest intention of resigning.”

In welcoming Bidawid on Monday, John Paul tactfully said, “We can all imagine with what impatience the Iraqis, Christians and Muslims await a true peace for today and tomorrow.”

On the eve of the war, the Pope had called for an international peace conference as a means of averting violence. In opening the ad hoc meeting whose participants and political overtones make it a unique gathering at the Vatican, the Pope again affirmed the international underpinnings of Middle Eastern trauma.

“Questions of singular importance arise: the effective respect of the principle of territorial integrity of the states; the solution of unresolved problems which for decades have been a source of continuous tension; the regulation of traffic and sales of all kinds of arms; agreements on disarmament of the region.

“It is only when an answer can be given to these questions that the peoples of Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians and Cypriots will be able to coexist peacefully,” the Pope said.

The Vatican calls for an international agreement to guarantee a homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel’s right to secure borders, as well as the departure of all foreign troops from Lebanon. One of the Pope’s underlying concerns is the survival of Christian minorities in the Islamic Middle East.

“Peace and justice go hand in hand,” John Paul said Monday. “It has been more than 40 years now that the Palestinian people have been wandering, and that the state of Israel has been threatened and challenged. We cannot forget that, since 1975, the Lebanese people have been living a long agony, and even today their national territory is occupied by non-Lebanese forces.”

Individually, the seven patriarchs who gathered with their Western counterparts in the Apostolic Palace on Monday do not cast large shadows at home. In summoning them, John Paul seems to be hoping that the Arab Catholic leaders, with the bishop of Rome as their sponsor, may contribute to peace and simultaneously help insulate their communities from postwar discrimination.

The largest of the Eastern rite churches represented here is the Lebanon-based Maronite Catholic Church, whose 2.1 million members are led by Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir. Next in size is the Melkite Catholic Church, based in Damascus, Syria, where its 1 million members are headed by Patriarch Maximos V. Hakkim.

About 50,000 of Bidawid’s Chaldean Catholics live in the United States, many in the Detroit area. The smallest Eastern rite churches at the meeting are the Cairo-based Coptic Catholic Church of 152,000 members, led by Patriarch Stephanos II Ghattas; the Beirut-based Armenian Catholic Church of 143,000 members, led by Patriarch Jean Pierre XVIII Kasparian, and the 100,000-member Syrian Catholic Church, led by Patriarch Ignatius Anthony II Hayek--and which, despite its name, is based in Beirut.

The sole Latin rite prelate from the Middle East is the patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, a Palestinian who was appointed by John Paul and whose 63,000 faithful live in Israel, the occupied territories and in Jordan.