From the Editor’s Desk
- First Published June 4, 2024
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Editor's Note:
Two years ago, in June of 2022, I wrote this in my editor’s note:
As this issue goes to press, the world watches in heart-wrenching dismay the violence being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine, staggering violations of human dignity reported in disturbing textual detail and hauntingly graphic images. Over fifty years after Paul VI’s 1965 exhortation to the United Nations, “No more war, war never again,” Pope Francis has cuttingly condemned this most recent conflict as “a cruel and senseless war,” where “the powerful decide and the poor die.” War is “a barbarous and sacrilegious act!”1
In February of this year, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) put the number of civilian casualties of the war at more 30,000. A US intelligence report declassified in December 2023 estimated that casualties among Russian troops are around 315,000. Meanwhile, a new horror is unfolding in the Middle East. Gaza officials report that at least 30,000 people have been killed in the Israel–Hamas war. A statement from the Jesuit Curia in Rome mourned the inability of the parties involved and the international community to end the crisis:
Almost six months of war in Gaza, and the guns have not fallen silent. We, the members of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), like so many other Catholics, Christians, men and women of all faiths and non-believers, refuse to be silent. Our voices continue to be lifted up in prayer, in lament, in protest at the death and destruction that continue to reign in Gaza and other territories in Israel/Palestine, spilling over into the surrounding countries of the Middle East. . . .