Catholic church seeks to stop US-North Korea conflict

The Vatican’s former representative to the United Nations says Pope Francis is closely following the situation between the United States and North Korea.

The two countries are trading insults, with North Korea threatening to send four missiles into the sea off Guam, as a response to President Donald Trump’s escalating rhetoric.

“The only way forth is that of dialogue, because the way of conflict is always wrong, says Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi.

The current crisis shows how international relations can easily break down when there is a determination “to violate the minimum standard of common sense in dealing with other people,” he adds.

“That’s why you need to invest time, energy, money, resources in preventing the necessity of arriving at these boiling points of crisis.”

U.S. and South Korean Catholic bishops have also called for the U.S. and North Korea to deescalate the current threat of war between them.

Bishop Oscar Cantu, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ international justice and peace committee, has written to Secretary Rex Tillerson urging Washington to avoid war and find a dialogue-based solution to the current tensions with Pyongyang.

Cantu says while the threat posed by North Korea should not be “underestimated or ignored,” the “high certainty of catastrophic death and destruction from any military action must prompt the United States to work with others in the international community for a diplomatic and political solution based on dialogue.”

He also says he and his colleagues support South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s proposal to reopen negotiations with North Korea. Catholic bishops in South Korea aslo back this proposal.

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