The Christian Century

“When I went to Washington as the pope’s envoy just before the outbreak of the [Iraq] war, [President Bush] told me, ‘Don’t worry, your eminence. We’ll be quick and do well in Iraq.’ Unfortunately, the facts have demonstrated afterward that things took a different course—not rapid and not favorable. Bush was wrong.”

—Retired Cardinal Pio Laghi, recalling a conversation with President Bush on March 5, 2003

“I don’t know what to feel other than pain, agony. They didn’t teach me how to deal with anything like this at the seminary.”

—Lutheran pastor Michael Clark of Wichita, Kansas, on the arrest of his congregation’s president, Dennis Rader, the alleged “BTK serial killer,” charged, tried and convicted of torturing and killing ten people