Catholic groups were well represented at a Jan. 27 rally against the Iraq War that drew tens of thousands to the nation's capital to protest the current war policy and President George W. Bush's plan to send 21,500 additional soldiers to Iraq.

Retired Bishop Walter F. Sullivan of Richmond, Va., a former bishop-president of Pax Christi USA, was one of the speakers at the rally, which preceded a march past the Capitol. Some rally participants stayed in Washington to lobby members of Congress Jan. 29.

The rally was organized by United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 1,300 organizations that have declared their opposition to the war.

"Pax Christi from the very beginning has condemned the invasion of Iraq as unlawful and immoral, as well as (condemned) the four-year war that has devastated this country and led to the deaths of thousands and thousands of innocent people," Bishop Sullivan told Catholic News Service Jan. 29. "Our fundamental belief is that violence only begets more violence and that war is not the solution to any human problem."

Bishop Sullivan added, "My concern is on behalf of the 3,000 American service personnel who have lost their lives and the 25,000 who have been maimed for life.... Then, our concern (is) for ... the families who have borne the brunt of the conflict, and of course the Iraqi people."

"An estimated 200,000 of them have died" and there are "2 million refugees," he said, lamenting the "lives displaced and homes plundered and destroyed."

"The question for me is why are we there in the first place and what do we hope to accomplish?" he asked. "Our only answer is 20,000 more troops."

Franciscan Father Kevin M. Queally, assistant vice president of mission effectiveness and ministry at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pa., responded to a faculty member's e-mail asking if anyone from the campus was going to the rally, and reserved a van from the Dorothy Day Center there. A group of six from the school went, and while at the rally met a Pax Christi group that had taken a separate car to Washington.

"It was a wonderful day," Father Queally told CNS Jan. 30. "I've been to lots of marches. There were no talks from the podium, at least what I heard, that (were) embarrassing; maybe there were a couple of words that shouldn't have been said."

On the St. Francis campus, he said, "there are a lot of people who are, shall we say, very unhappy with the way things are progressing" with the war. Father Queally, 56, said he found the situation "eerily reminiscent of Vietnam. Them telling us we need more troops. In Vietnam it (the troop level) went to the nth degree --- 500,000 troops. ... Do they think we're dumb? It feels like we've been down this road before."

Judy Coode, chair of the national council of Pax Christi USA, said she ran into Pax Christi groups from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y.

"And those are just the ones that I saw.... We had folks who got on a plane Saturday morning in Georgia and went straight to the rally," said Coode, who is also communications manager of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns.

Franciscan Sister Marie Lucey, associate director for social mission of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, said she and LCWR national director Sister Carole Shinnick, a School Sister of Notre Dame, marched with a Pax Christi group after the rally.

The Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, with provinces in California, Colorado and New York, bought an ad Jan. 26, the day before the rally, in The Washington Post. It bore only the community's name, its Web site, the locations of its three provincial headquarters and a picture of a dove flying over the earth with the message "Peace Now."

Not everyone who is against the war descended on Washington. A Jan. 27 rally, which organizers said drew 10,000 people, was held in San Francisco.

In Washington, where the U.S. Park Police years ago stopped making crowd estimates, rally numbers varied widely, from some police officers' private estimates of under 100,000 to organizers' claims of 500,000.

Bishop Sullivan put the figure at 200,000. Father Queally said the size was "awesome, just a huge crowd.... I've been to stadiums that seat 100,000 --- Penn State's stadium seats 100,000 --- we maybe could have filled it twice."

Maryknoll Father Jim Kosski, who was at the rally, said published estimates in The Washington Post and The New York Times citing the under-100,000 figure for the crowd size were "not too accurate, not too fair. They should know that if you fill the Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, you've got X-thousand number of folks."

---CNS