Several days ago, the Catholic Spirit -- the newspaper of the archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul -- arrived in my mailbox. The paper focused, in large part, on the war in Iraq. As I turned its pages, however, I realized it was covering a war I didn't recognize.

The day the paper arrived, American newspapers were flooded with stories about Iraqi forces' ruthless use of women and children as human shields. They also reported that Saddam's irregular troops were executing reluctant soldiers, and that Iraqi civilians were increasingly greeting American troops as liberators.

Yet reading the Catholic Spirit, one would think that America -- and America alone -- was to blame for the "human tragedy" unfolding in Iraq. The paper deplored the war's civilian casualties, but said not a word about Saddam's grotesque use of women and children as cannon fodder. One op ed piece blamed the United States for a "never-ending spiral of violence" in Iraq, while another urged Americans to respond to Saddam as Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi supposedly would -- with love and forgiveness. I counted seven anti-war items to one pro-war guest commentary.

The Catholic Spirit is not alone in its views on the war. The leaders of many Christian denominations share them. How are the people in the pews to judge the credibility of such claims? For starters, they could review what church officials have said about past wars, and evaluate their assertions about the current war in that light.

Most mainline American church leaders strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War. We know now, of course, that Operation Desert Storm liberated Kuwait from Saddam's brutal clutches with astonishingly few casualties. But in 1990, high-profile church officials insisted that the coming war was theologically illegitimate, and predicted "unspeakable loss of lives." The National Council of Churches condemned U.S. plans to free Kuwait, faulting America's "illogical pursuit of militarism and war." One council representative, a Methodist bishop, denounced the United States as the "real aggressor."

In the years leading up to World War II, church leaders were also in the forefront of America's peace movement. In a recent issue of the Weekly Standard, Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation details this embarrassing and largely forgotten episode in American church history.

According to Loconte, as Hitler rolled through Europe, many American church officials seemed more interested in denouncing their own nation than in protesting the Führer's crimes. John Haynes Holmes, a New York Unitarian minister, was typical. "If America goes into the war," he intoned in 1940, "it will not be for idealistic reasons but to serve her own imperialistic interests."

Like their counterparts today, World War II-era church leaders called repeatedly for "peace at any price." Between 1938 and 1941 -- as Hitler bombed London and marched into Paris -- church groups issued 50 statements insisting that a just and durable peace was possible. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the famous Baptist preacher, insisted that American entry into the war could not be justified. "We see clearly," he wrote, "that a war for democracy is a contradiction in terms, that war itself is democracy's chief enemy."

Predictably, Christian leaders also urged Americans to meet Hitler's aggression with love and forgiveness. Here's Albert Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary: "If your enemy hunger, feed him -- and understand him." Some leaders claimed that Hitler would respond positively to worldwide peace marches, which would show him that violence was unnecessary. "Without military opposition," Palmer wrote ingenuously, "the Hitlers wither away."

Why do church leaders find it so hard to understand the requirements of war? Too frequently, they reflexively quote the Beatitudes -- "blessed are the peacemakers" -- while forgetting the bedrock Christian teaching on original sin. History's lesson is clear: Where ruthless tyrants threaten great evil, it's both dangerous and morally irresponsible to urge a free people to "turn the other cheek."

The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- one of the 1940s' Christian realists -- understood this well. Niebuhr berated his fellow theologians for their "sentimental illusions" about the nature of the evil that Hitler represented. Christian forgiveness alone, he wrote, could never stem this horrific tide. As a result, Christians had a duty to confront evil at a more fundamental level.

Niebuhr declared that those who failed to resist Hitler's tyranny were assisting in its triumph. "This form of pacifism," he warned, "is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence." Today's church leaders -- loath to face up to their many past mistakes -- would do well to ponder Niebuhr's words.

-- Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.