Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has said preventative wars risk plunging the whole world into conflict when asked about the justification for the US and Israeli attack on Iran.
"If states were to be recognized as having a right to 'preventive war,' according to their own criteria and without a supranational legal framework, the whole world would risk being set ablaze," Parolin told Vatican News on Wednesday.
"This erosion of international law is truly worrying: justice has given way to force; the force of law has been replaced by the law of force, with the conviction that peace can arise only after the enemy has been annihilated".
Parolin said it was a moment of great sorrow because the peoples of the Middle East - including its Christian communities - have "once again been plunged into the horror of war, which brutally shatters human lives, brings destruction, and drags entire nations into spirals of violence with uncertain outcomes".
He added that peace and security should be "cultivated and pursued through the possibilities offered by diplomacy, especially diplomacy exercised within multilateral bodies, where states have the possibility of resolving conflicts in a bloodless and more just way".
