A recent article in the New York Review of Books ("The Suicide Bombers" by Avishai Margalit – 16 January, 2003) claimed that in the course of the twentieth century, civilian causalities of war rose from 5 per cent in World War One, to 50 per cent in World War Two, to 70-90 per cent in the Vietnam War. Even if the accuracy of these figures might be disputed, the historical record itself makes very plain that the prohibition on targeting civilians in war has been significantly eroded.

One token of this is the way the wholesale destruction of cities became an acceptable part of strategic military thinking during the 1930s. This concept was first put into practice by the Germans over Poland, Holland and England, and culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.

The rise of insurgency movements in the Third World from the late 1940s, and of terrorist movements across the globe from the late 1960s, took the logic at work in this thinking even further, often avoiding military objects and making civilians and non-combatants the prime targets.

The attacks of September 11 are the most powerfully emblematic examples of the very different sort of war in which the civilised world now finds itself embroiled. In this case, however, the silence imposed on the victims has been broken by their relatives and by the publication of stories and recollections of their lives. The recent series in Der Spiegel on the victims of the bombing of German cities in World War Two, which killed 600,000 people, including 75,000 children, is another example of how the silence imposed on the victims of war can be broken.

Kierkegaard remarked once that "numbers are the negation of truth." We see this most starkly in the recitation of statistics about people killed in war. Each "number" represents a unique individual, a unique mystery of personality, killed usually in a most hideous way. The sheer numbers of those killed obscures the humanity that makes their deaths such a monstrous crime. The obscurity imposed upon the victims in this way is itself part of what the Holy Father has described as the "defeat for humanity" that war entails.

It is part of the tragedy of the human condition that war is not always avoidable, and that sometimes it is forced upon us by the tyranny and injustice of others. Charity requires us to defend those we love and those we are responsible for, and this includes the silent victims of war who cannot speak to us of the injustice they have suffered. It is the role of the Christian community to help give these victims a voice, and to echo with that voice "Yes to life! No to death! No to war!"