Jason Ross

Letter to Archbishop John Wester to Urge Pope Leo XIV to Call a Peace Conference to Stop Nuclear War Signed by Prominent Peace Organizations and Activists

On Friday, July 31, at an online Roundtable Conference, “Solve the Immigration Crisis With Development: The Strategic Significance of Pope Leo’s Encyclical,” sponsored by EIR News Service and the International Peace Coalition, Jack Gilroy, a long-time peace activist with the Pax Christi New York State Council, Veterans for Peace, Ban Killer Drones, and the International Peace Coalition of the Schiller Institute, released the news that he, in collaboration with other leading peace activists, has written a letter to the U.S. Catholic Archbishop John Wester, the strongest advocate in a U.S. Archdiocese working for the banning of nuclear weapons. (Wester’s Santa Fe, New Mexico diocese is the home of Los Alamos.) The letter urges the Archbishop to request that Pope Leo XIV convene an emergency international peace conference with Presidents Putin, Xi, and Trump, to halt the present wars, stop the expansion of nuclear weapons to Russia’s border, and ban nuclear weapons, as we face the greatest threat of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Over 130 prominent peace activists and several leading peace organizations have already signed the letter. 

Gilroy stated at the conference that, in organizing support for the diplomatic initiative called for in this letter, “It’s primarily Pax Christi and the International Peace Coalition that have worked together for the past three weeks to fulfill what the International Peace Coalition is all about: to try to prevent war—nuclear war—and to use development as the alternative, as the answer, to the constant military buildups.”

“All of that is possible”, Gilroy stated, “but we asked, ‘Where are we going to find the answer?’ And we are looking back at history, and we think diplomacy can work, does work. But getting diplomacy started is… extremely difficult.” 

In recounting the history of diplomacy to stop a nuclear war, Gilroy cited the famous case of Pope John XXIII, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which is detailed in the letter. A trio of concerned citizens—US journalist Norman Cousins, an influential Soviet citizen, and Belgian monk Fr. Felix Morlion—just happened to be discussing the need for nuclear disarmament when President Kennedy announced on national TV a blockade of Cuba in response to the discovery that Soviet missiles had been placed there. With the consent of Kennedy and Khrushchev, Morlion contacted the Pope, to whom he was an advisor, and urged him to help diffuse the crisis, which seemed to be heading toward WWIII.

The Pope agreed and delivered a very stirring message for peace. It stated in part: “With your hand on your conscience may each one hear the anguished cry which is raised to the skies from all parts of the earth: Peace, peace! We renew this solemn plea today.” This poignant cry for peace had a tremendous effect on both Kennedy, the first Catholic president, and Khrushchev, who saw that it was published in full on the front page of Pravda. Khrushchev characterized the speech as “the first ray of real light” during the crisis. Cousins then served as a liaison between Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Pope until the Pope’s death on June 3, 1963. Seven days later, Kennedy delivered his American University commencement address, which was the most powerful and visionary call for peace by a US president in the 20th Century. Cousins had written the first draft, and Kennedy refused to give the Pentagon intelligence community, or the State Department, any say.

As Jack Gilroy states in the letter to Archbishop Wester, “With this in mind, we were thinking it might be time for something similar to happen today.” Pope Leo XIV, he noted, had already suggested something along these lines at the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he prayed that the bombings would ‘serve as a call to the international community to renew its commitment to pursuing lasting peace for our whole human family—a peace that is unarmed and disarming,’ Perhaps the Vatican or another neutral location such as Vienna or Geneva could be the venue.”

Gilroy concludes the letter with this appeal to Archbishop Wester: “Would you be able to help bring this recommendation to Pope Leo? We believe you, as a strong and highly-respected advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons, would be the ideal diplomat to encourage Pope Leo to bring Putin, Trump, and Xi Jinping together to plan an end to nuclear weapons and to pave a new road of economic conversion from a war economy to economic development for all people everywhere. Your intercession and the strong leadership of Pope Leo could move us away from the sheer madness we are now experiencing.”

Jack Gilroy stated in his presentation at the July 31 conference that one of the signers of the letter, Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, Washington, D.C., was the lead speaker at a peace conference in Nagasaki, Japan on July 25, where, before many Japanese public officials, Kuznick brought up the significance of widely circulating this letter internationally. Several Japanese figures have already signed. Kuznick has also discussed this appeal to the Pope in a recent Consortium News webinar, “How Close Are We to Nuclear War?”, with fellow letter signer, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and Co-Founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), hosted by Consortium News Editor-in-Chief, Joe Lauria.

As we head into the proverbial “Guns of August,” Gilroy’s letter makes clear that “we are getting as close to nuclear war as we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. That crisis ended with diplomacy that saved the planet, and Pope John XXIII was a key figure in making that happen.” Today, he is calling on prominent figures around the world to urge Pope Leo XIV to play the same role, and he is calling on more peace activists and organizations to sign the letter.

This letter was written in collaboration with the Pax Christi New York State Council, and Rosemarie Pace, Ed.D., PCNYS Coordinator; USA Palestine Solidarity Working Group; Pax Christi International Sudan Working Group.

This is a link to the letter, with the list of signers:

The letter has been endorsed by 7 recipients of the annual Pax Christi USA “Teacher of Peace” Award: Jim Albertini (2010); Roy Bourgeois (1997); Marie Dennis (2022); James W. Douglass (1994); Kathy Kelly (1998); William Quigley (2003) and Martin Sheen (1999). Archbishop Wester is this year’s recipient of the “Teacher of Peace” award.

Some of the many prominent individuals endorsing the letter include: Professor Richard Falk; Ira Helfand; Professor Peter Kuznick; former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich; Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Founder, Schiller Institute), Melissa Parke (Executive Director of ICAN); Susan Schnall (President, Veterans for Peace USA); Col.(ret) Lawrence Wilkerson; Col.(ret) Ann Wright, and Professor Ivana Hughes (President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation). Please consult the entire list for more on these and all other endorsers, and their organizational affiliation.

U.S. organizations that have endorsed the letter include Veterans for Peace and Historians for Peace and Democracy.

For more information, and/or to add your name to the letter, please contact Ron Bettag at ronbettag@gmail.com

(PDF)

November 4—On October 26 of this year, Colterm, the city-owned heating company of Timisoara, a major city in western Romania, was declared insolvent, and was shut down. Since 2006, Colterm was supposed to pay millions of euros for its CO₂ emissions. Unable to afford the expense, Colterm was consequently fined 21.6 million euros under the Government Emergency Environmental Ordinance 196/2005 with regard to the Environment Fund. This, combined with other accumulated debt, forced Colterm into bankruptcy. Thus the hospital in Timisoara had to put all newborns into the one room with electric space heaters; all other patients just got an extra blanket. As this is being written, the outside nighttime temperature is projected to be 34°F.

Unlike in 1989, after the overthrow and execution of Ceausescu, when there was a media furor in the West about the condition of malnourished children in orphanages—and medical personnel remarked on the eerie silence from children too weak to cry—now we have a different eerie silence, from the West: not a word about the deliberate starvation of women and children in Haiti and Afghanistan, or the devastating effects of the Green New Deal.

Nor is Colterm an isolated case; it is the trumpet of a prophecy, coming to a neighborhood near you! Perhaps it’s time to heed the Wake-Up Call issued by CLINTEL and the Schiller Institute.

Who Saw it Coming?

Lyndon LaRouche warned about this even before August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon abandoned the FDR Bretton Woods monetary system, with its fixed exchange rates, in favor of turning financial markets into a gambling casino.

Who Did It?

A small group of elite bankers and Davos billionaires demanded “regime change” (now being undertaken through the Green New Deal) at an Aug. 2019 conference of central bankers in Jackson Hole, WY. They have apparently succeeded in wresting control of finances out of the hands of elected governments, and establishing dictatorial control to divert all revenues and investments onto the green track. Now, with the huckster’s excuse that these vital energy sources should be taxed because they are contributing to catastrophic climate change, these bankers are using green blackmail to cut fossil fuel energy production worldwide. To show their lying hypocrisy, they shut down nuclear plants, despite nuclear being entirely “carbon-free.” In this way, real shortages were created, such as the Dutch making huge cuts in their natural gas production. In turn, these shortages became the subject of feverish speculation, driving prices up, and up, towards the infamous 1923 Weimar, Germany levels.
We have now reached the critical point of the famous “triple curve,” warned about by the greatest economist of the 20th and the early 21st century, Lyndon LaRouche. This is the critical point of 1923-Germany-style hyperinflation, where disinvestment in the physical economy and unlimited printing of money fuel exponential inflation. In 1923 Germany, people would run to the store for their groceries right after work, because by morning the price would have doubled! This is now happening in most of the world, the result of decades of endless bailouts of the financial sector—bailouts handed over to elite bankers and hedge fund speculators by Western governments. Combine this with the disinvestment in the physical economy, a trend accelerated by COVID (which made the bailouts easier to camouflage), and the economies of Western Europe and the USA have now reached the point of the unfortunate person whose monthly disposable income is less than the interest he or she owes on their credit card debt. Unfortunately, the damage wreaked by this hyperinflationary crisis is rapidly spreading around the world, and can only be mitigated by great powers such as the U.S., Russia, and China, working in collaboration. WE ARE IN BIG TROUBLE!

What Is To Be Done?

LaRouche diagnosed the disease fifty years ago; he has also provided the cure: his Four Laws.

1. We must protect the commercial banks and cut loose the investment banks, as per FDR’s Glass-Steagall law of June 16, 1933. Under this system, the government must protect the commercial banks, and erect an impervious firewall to separate them from the speculative investment banks, which will no longer have access to commercial banks’ assets, nor have the privilege of being bailed out by taxpayer money.
   Both Russia and China have made significant moves in this direction: Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered long-term contacts for natural gas deliveries, at much lower prices than those charged by the “loan-shark” speculators on the spot market. China is also a bright light here, cracking down on speculators, and preventing John Q. Public from being skinned alive by the money masters.
2. We must immediately make agreements with other countries to set up our own national banks, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States or the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in Germany after WWII, so that state credit for productive investments can supply the physical economy with the necessary funds for explosive growth. Issuance of such credits must be guided by the principles of high energy-flux density and an optimal increase of the productive capacities and powers of labor through an emphasis on scientific and technological progress.
   China’s construction of 30,000 km of high-speed rail and its eradication of poverty are exemplary.
3. We must establish fixed parities between the currencies of participating sovereign states and make treaties to pursue well-defined infrastructure and development projects. These treaties taken altogether, will represent a de facto New Bretton Woods System as intended by Franklin Roosevelt, with the explicit intention of providing credit for the industrial development of the formerly colonized countries.
   China’s Belt and Road Initiative is exemplary.
4. We must urgently increase the productivity of the world economy to accommodate a growing world population, now more than eight billion. Such an increase in productivity must be facilitated by an international crash research program for the development of nuclear fusion as well as other advanced technologies, such as optical biophysics and life sciences, to find solutions for challenges such as the coronavirus. This should be coupled with international cooperation in space technology and travel, towards the next higher economic platform for the world economy.
   In Defense of Common Sense
   Everything we use in our day-to-day life requires energy. Even more important, the future of our children and grandchildren requires power sources of greater and greater energy densities, such as advanced fission reactors and—as fast as a crash program will get us there—nuclear fusion. Energy is a utility needed to promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, and should not be manipulated for private profit. Speculation in energy and housing should be made illegal. Do you like to eat? Natural gas is a feedstock for fertilizer, now rising beyond the budget of farmers; crop yields will collapse, and food may become a luxury. Do you need a car to go to work? Heat your house? Take a bath? Then you had better tell your representatives to turn the tables, and skin the green agenda alive. Keep gasoline prices rationally low; keep electricity low; build nuclear power plants, and ditch super-expensive and unreliable windmills and solar power.
   Join the Schiller Institute to create a beautiful future of development and growth!