Washington cardinal says US war on Iran ‘not morally legitimate’

Robert McElroy goes further than pope has done and says conflict fails ‘criterion of right intention’

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Cardinal Robert W McElroy, the archbishop of Washington, has said that the US-Israeli war with Iran is “not morally legitimate”, going further than the pope has done in his more moderate appeals for an end to the war.

In an interview with the Catholic Standard this week, McElroy said “the criterion of just cause is not met because our country was not responding to an existing or imminent and objectively verifiable attack by Iran.”