Pope will bring a message of hope to Iraq

Early tomorrow morning (Friday), Pope Francis will depart from the Vatican for the 33rd apostolic journey of his pontificate outside of Italy. Iraq will be the 51st country that the Holy Father will have visited since the inauguration of his papacy eight years ago this month.

It is a visit that the Pope has wanted to make for a long time, and one that the people of Iraq – particularly the Christians – have longed for.

The Pope’s visit will come as the realisation of a dream of his predecessor, Pope St John Paul II. The Polish Pontiff had planned to travel to Iraq at the end of 1999. That trip never took place because Saddam Hussein decided to postpone it, after months of negotiations.

I worked in Rome in the early 2000s when the Vatican tried hard to prevent the US-led invasion of Iraq, urging a peaceful solution. John Paul II had insisted: “No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.” He even dispatched two papal legates, one to Washington and another to Baghdad to try to ease tensions.

His work was in vain, and US troops invaded Iraq on March 13, 2003 unleashing a horrendous war and stoking sectarian tensions that had long bubbled under the surface.

Everything that the Pope and Catholic leaders in Iraq warned about came to pass. The Christian population before the US invasion was 1.5 million, today there are fewer than 400,000 Christians in the land of Abraham.

Martyred

Many Iraqi Christians have been martyred, many others have been driven from their ancient homeland. They have paid a heavy price for holding their ancient faith.

Pope Francis is going there first and foremost as an exercise of his Petrine ministry to confirm the faith of the beleaguered Christian community. When Jesus re-asserted St Peter’s primacy on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, he instructed him: “Feed my lambs…look after my sheep”. Francis comes to Iraq as the chief shepherd of the universal Church to comfort a community that has suffered and continues to suffer for faithfulness to Christ.

Please God, the papal visit will highlight the plight of the Christian community in Iraq and further underline the bonds of our common humanity that unite the followers of the three great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

As Catholics in Ireland, Iraq seems so far away and the Christians there so different from us. And yet, we are part of the same family united in Christ under the leadership of the Successor of St Peter. This visit should serve to focus our minds as individual Catholics and parish communities on the needs of the Church universal. Iraqi Catholics need our prayerful solidarity, but they also need to know that we care about them and their wellbeing. It is important that we keep our politicians aware of the suffering they endure, but also the hope they have to be part of rebuilding a better Iraq with their Islamic compatriots.

Francis will be keen to emphasise bridge-building with the Muslim world and to focus on what unites rather than what divides. If he is successful in this, he will leave Iraq a better country that he finds it. My prayers will be with Pope Francis as he undertakes this arduous pilgrimage of hope.