The news lately has been filled with re-evaluations of the war in Iraq. It would seem that the overwhelming majority of politicians, military leaders and citizens now recognize that the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake for us, for our allies and for the Iraqi people, with potential negative implications for decades ahead. Of course, it is easy to be critical when looking backward. Who among us cannot today predict the outcome of the Super Bowl a few weekends ago? The trick is to be able to see the likely outcome of an action beforehand, and many of today’s war critics voted for the war four years ago.

However, I was reminded that in March 2003, just three weeks before the war in Iraq began, the late Pope John Paul II sent Cardinal Pio Laghi as his personal representative to meet with President Bush at the White House. Cardinal Laghi is a lifelong Vatican diplomat, who served as the papal representative to the United States from 1980 to 1990. The cardinal spoke for about a half hour with the president.

A few months earlier, the pope had spoken about the threat of this war, declaring: “War is always a defeat for humanity.” Other Vatican officials had said that a preventive war in Iraq would be immoral. The message that the cardinal now brought from the pope was that a war in Iraq would be a “disaster.” He acknowledged that America’s formidable war machine would make quick work of Saddam Hussein’s much inferior defenses, but that “unmanageable human problems would, quickly follow.” “Even if the war has a ‘fortunate’ outcome, what happens to the Kurd problem in the north? What happens to the Shiite Muslims, who represent a majority in Iraq but are pro-Iranian? The risks,” the Vatican warned, “are frightening.”

Cardinal Laghi pleaded, “Do you realize, Mr. President, what you will unleash inside Iraq by occupying it? The difficulty of the language, the disorder, the conflicts between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds?” And, finally, he warned that the war would result in further instability in the region and a new gulf between Islam and the West.

Sadly, the pope’s envoy left the meeting hoping for the best, the war had not yet begun, but suspecting that he had not been heard and that everything was already decided.

He was right on all counts. The disaster has now happened. The conflicts among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds have given way to open civil war. The entire region and every nation in the region is at risk of a wider war. And we see a deepening of the distrust and animosity between Muslims and the West. The Holy Father’s assessment of the results of this war was remarkably prescient.

But my point is not: “We told you so.” Well, to be completely honest, I guess there is some of that. But I want to make a broader point as well. There is a notion sometimes in contemporary American society that religion ought to have no role in the public sphere. There is a notion that pluralism demands the exclusion of religious belief from all activities of governance, voting and decision making.

Perhaps the fundamental tenet of secularism is the social irrelevance of religion, calling for its exclusion from the secular affairs of the society and from education, and its relegation to the private forum of conscience, or at best to the hushed confines of the sacristy. If the demands of religion conflict with a course of action you have chosen, American secular pragmatism tells you that you should dismiss the religious demands and act “rationally,” assuming, all the time, that religion is inherently irrational. This is exactly what the Bush administration appears to have done with the pope’s advice.

But, as we can see from the case of the pope’s insight into the situation in Iraq and his assessment of the likely outcome of the war, religion can provide a perspective and intelligence that the national intelligence agencies sometimes lack. Religion can provide a wider and broader context for moral decision making than is otherwise available.

Religious bodies can provide and should provide an alternative voice and independent vision that can challenge the state, which is sometimes blinded by its own agenda and calculus of power.

The Rev. Monsignor Michael J. Henchal is the religious leader for St. Bartholomew’s Church in Cape Elizabeth and St. Maximilian’s Church in Scarborough.