Pope Francis arrives to visit the community at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh. Photo: CNS Amid the rubble and bombed out remains of four churches destroyed by Islamic State militants, Pope Francis paid tribute to Iraqi Christians who endured persecution and even death.
But visiting Mosul and Qaraqosh in northern Iraq on Sunday, he also urged the Christians to live up to their faith and honour the sacrifice of those who died by promoting peace and reconciliation.
Much of Mosul’s old city centre remains in ruins or under reconstruction. And Pope Francis stood in Hosh al-Bieaa, church square, facing some of those ruins: the remains of the Syriac Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic churches all destroyed between 2014 and 2017.
His message was clear: “If God is the God of life – for so he is – then it is wrong for us to kill our brothers and sisters in his name.
“If God is the God of peace – for so he is – then it is wrong for us to wage war in his name.
“If God is the God of love – for so he is – then it is wrong for us to hate our brothers and sisters.”
In Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad, Pope Francis listened to the stories of Christians forced to flee, the fear many have to return and the encouragement of Muslim neighbours committed to making the city a thriving, multicultural metropolis again.
Choirs
But he also heard choirs of children singing in welcome, women ululating to honour his arrival and the cheers of young people waving flags.
Fr Raid Adel Kallo, pastor of Mosul’s Church of the Annunciation, told the Pope that he and many of his people left the city in June 2014; at that point, he said, his parish had 500 families. “The majority have emigrated abroad,” but 70 families have returned. “The rest are afraid to come back.”
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by US and coalition forces battered the city but the biggest, most horrifying blow came in early June 2014 when militants of the Islamic State group launched an offensive. They controlled the city for three years, terrorising the population, executing hundreds and kidnapping, raping and selling women. They blew up major landmarks, both Muslim and Christian. They destroyed libraries and museums and tens of thousands of lives.
Offering prayers “for all the victims of war and armed conflict,” Pope Francis said Mosul is concrete proof of the “tragic consequences of war and hostility.”
“Today, however, we reaffirm our conviction that fraternity is more durable than fratricide, that hope is more powerful than hatred, that peace more powerful than war,” the Pope said. “This conviction speaks with greater eloquence than the passing voices of hatred and violence, and it can never be silenced by the blood spilled by those who pervert the name of God to pursue paths of destruction.
Dr Rana Bazzoiee, a 37-year-old paediatric surgeon, who fled Mosul to Erbil in 2013, told reporters, “I don’t like to remember that moment.”
Before the Islamic State fighters came, “we were living here in Mosul all together – Christians, Muslims” – and “we couldn’t believe something like that would happen. I think nobody stayed here. All the Christians left.”
Explaining that her Muslim and Yazidi friends helped her in those dark days, Dr Bazzoiee said she is not angry, and she hopes the Pope’s visit will help the process of getting life back to normal.
“Why not?” she said. “We lived together for a long time in Mosul.”
After the prayer service and a private visit to the ruined churches, Pope Francis took a helicopter trip about 20 miles away to Qaraqosh, a majority Christian city that also suffered devastation at the hands of the Islamic State group. Fewer than half of the city’s inhabitants have returned since the militants were ousted in 2016.
Mounir Jibrahil, a 61-year-old maths teacher, said he came back in 2016, but only finished rebuilding his house last year.
Safer
“Now it’s safer here,” he said. “It’s great to see the Pope; we never expected him to come to Qaraqosh. Maybe that will help to rebuild the country, finally bringing love and peace.”
The largest crowds of the Pope’s March 5-8 visit to Iraq lined the streets in Qaraqosh. While security concerns meant leaving the Popemobile in Rome and using an armoured Mercedes-Benz in the town, the Pope had the window down and the driver going slow enough that the police and security officers on foot did not even have to jog.
Bells pealed to welcome the Pope to the Syriac Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, desecrated during its use as a base by Islamic State fighters, who turned the courtyard into a shooting range.
While much of the city still needs to be rebuilt, Pope Francis said the presence of the jubilant crowds inside and outside the church “shows that terrorism and death never have the last word.”
“The last word belongs to God and to his son, the conqueror of sin and death,” the Pope said. “Even amid the ravages of terrorism and war, we can see, with the eyes of faith, the triumph of life over death.”
With Muslim and Yazidi guests joining Catholics in the church, Pope Francis told the people that “this is the time to restore not just buildings but also the bonds of community that unite communities and families, the young and the old together.”
And he thanked the international organisations, particularly the Catholic organisations, that are helping fund the reconstruction of homes, schools, churches and community halls in the city.
Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan did likewise, specifically mentioning Aid to the Church in Need, the Knights of Columbus and L’Oeuvre d’Orient, a France-based charity.
And, on the eve of International Women’s Day, Pope Francis paid special tribute to Mary – a photo of a decapitated statue of her from Qaraqosh made the news around the world – and to “all the mothers and women of this country, women of courage who continue to give life in spite of wrongs and hurts.”
Plea to honour martyrs by remaining faithful
Visiting a Baghdad cathedral “hallowed by the blood of our brothers and sisters” murdered in a terrorist attack that shook the world, Pope Francis said their sacrifice must motivate faith and a commitment to working for the common good.
The Syriac Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Deliverance, sometimes referred to as Our Lady of Salvation, is now a shrine to 48 Christian martyrs who died on October 31, 2010, when militants belonging to a group linked to al-Qaida laid siege to the church, detonating explosives and shooting people; 48 worshippers – including two priests – died inside and more than 100 people were wounded.
Photos of the dead, including a three-year-old, hang over the altar.
Attack
According to the Vatican, before the terrorist attack and the 2014-2017 war against Islamic State militants, some 5,000 Syriac Catholic families frequented the cathedral; now, it said, no more than 1,000 families belong to all three Syriac Catholic parishes in the capital.
Pope Francis met in the church with the nation’s bishops and a representative group of priests, religious, seminarians and catechists. They came from the Syriac Catholic community, but also Chaldean Catholic, Armenian Catholic and Latin-rite Catholic parishes.
The Pope told them that the memory of the 48 – whose sainthood cause is underway – and of the countless other Christians killed in the decade since, should “inspire us to renew our own trust in the power of the cross and its saving message of forgiveness, reconciliation and rebirth”.
“Christians are called to bear witness to the love of Christ in every time and place,” he said. “This is the Gospel that must be proclaimed and embodied in this beloved country as well.”
Syriac Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan welcomed Pope Francis to the cathedral, telling him the 48 “mixed their blood with that of the Lamb,” and showed “their oppressed, killed or uprooted brothers and sisters in Iraq and the Middle East” that the risen Lord continues to walk with his people.
Cardinal Louis Sako of Baghdad, the Chaldean Catholic patriarch, told the Pope that the Syriac Catholic cathedral and its martyrs are a poignant and powerful sign of what Christians throughout the country have endured and survived over the past decade.
While the number of Christians in the country has plummeted in the past 20 years, the cardinal said, many have remained and have “preserved the faith, our spiritual serenity and our fraternal solidarity”.
“This paternal visit of yours,” he told the Pope, “gives us the strength to overcome adversity, reassures us that we have not been forgotten and generates in us the confidence and enthusiasm to continue our journey of faith and evangelical witness.”
Pope Francis said he understood how the country’s small Christian community, which has been present in the country since the first century, could lose its enthusiasm.
“We know how easy it is to be infected by the virus of discouragement that at times seems to spread all around us,” the Pope told them. “Yet the Lord has given us an effective vaccine against that nasty virus. It is the hope born of persevering prayer and daily fidelity to our apostolates.”
“With this vaccine, we can go forth with renewed strength, to share the joy of the Gospel as missionary disciples and living signs of the presence of God’s kingdom of holiness, justice and peace,” Pope Francis said.
Zagharit
The women in the congregation responded several times to his speech with zagharit, an ululation of praise or honour.
With the representatives of the various Catholic communities wearing masks and socially distanced inside the church, the Pope also encouraged them to reach out to one another and to other Christians.
Pope Francis said they should think of a prized carpet. “The different churches present in Iraq, each with its age-old historical, liturgical and spiritual patrimony, are like so many individually coloured threads that, woven together, make up a single beautiful carpet, one that displays not only our fraternity but points also to its source.”
“God himself is the artist who imagined this carpet, patiently wove it and carefully mends it, desiring us ever to remain closely knit as his sons and daughters,” the Pope said.
But, being human and prone to sin, individuals and groups can create knots that stop the process of weaving, he said. The knots “can be untied by grace, by a greater love; they can be loosened by the medicine of forgiveness and by fraternal dialogue, by patiently bearing one another’s burdens and strengthening each other in moments of trial and difficulty”.
Cleanse your hearts of anger, live the Gospel, Pope says at Mass in Erbil
Having witnessed or even experienced persecution for their faith, the Christians of Iraq must be careful not to harbour thoughts of revenge, Pope Francis told them.
After a full morning paying tribute to the victims of Islamic State violence, Pope Francis reached the last major event of his trip to Iraq: Mass on Sunday afternoon with some 10,000 people at Erbil’s Franso Hariri Stadium. Many ignored the social distancing measures put in place, and few wore the masks they were required to have because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region in northern Iraq, hosts Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands of displaced people, particularly Christians, from Mosul, Qaraqosh and other towns that had been under the thumb of Islamic State militants in 2014-2017.
After blessing the altar with incense, Pope Francis blessed a partially restored statue of Mary from a parish in Karmless. The Islamic State militants decapitated the statue and cut off its hands. The restoration re-attached the head, but left the hands dangling.
“Here in Iraq, how many of your brothers and sisters, friends and fellow citizens bear the wounds of war and violence, wounds both visible and invisible,” the Pope told the crowd. “The temptation is to react to these and other painful experiences with human power, human wisdom,” but the path of Jesus was to serve, to heal, to love and to offer his life for others.
Referring to St John’s Gospel account of Jesus cleansing the temple, Pope Francis said Jesus did not want his Father’s house to be a marketplace, and “neither does he want our hearts to be places of turmoil, disorder and confusion.”
“Our heart must be cleansed, put in order and purified,” the Pope said.
Cleansed
Anything that leads a person away from God or causes them to ignore the suffering of others must be cleansed, he said. “We need the baneful temptations of power and money to be swept from our hearts and from the Church.”
But, the Pope told them, “to cleanse our hearts, we need to dirty our hands, to feel accountable and not to simply look on as our brothers and sisters are suffering.”
Through his own suffering, death and resurrection Jesus “liberates us from the narrow and divisive notions of family, faith and community that divide, oppose and exclude, so that we can build a Church and a society open to everyone and concerned for our brothers and sisters in greatest need.”
“At the same time,” the Pope said, “he strengthens us to resist the temptation to seek revenge, which only plunges us into a spiral of endless retaliation.”
With faith in Jesus and the experiences of the past decade, Pope Francis told them, the Holy Spirit sends them forth “as missionary disciples, men and women called to testify to the life-changing power of the Gospel.”
At the end of Mass, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil thanked the Pope for traveling to Iraq during the pandemic, telling the pontiff he made real the saying, “Do not be afraid.” The archbishop said Iraqis must give life to the Pope’s message of peace, brotherhood and forgiveness.
Then Pope Francis addressed the crowd – and those watching on television: “Now the time I must leave for Rome draws near. But Iraq will always remain with me in my heart. I ask all of you, dear brothers and sisters, to work together in unity for a future of peace and prosperity that leaves no one behind and does not discriminate against anyone. I pray that members of the different religious communities, together with men and women of good will, cooperate to strengthen the bonds of fraternity and solidarity at the service of the good and for peace. Salaam, salaam, salaam, shukran and God bless everyone, God bless Iraq, Allah ma’akum (God be with you).”
Violence is a ‘betrayal of religion’ – Pope
Travelling to the birthplace of Abraham, Pope Francis urged believers to prove their faith in the one God and father of all by accepting one another as brothers and sisters.
From a stage set on a dusty hill overlooking the archaeological dig at Ur, Abraham’s birthplace about ten miles from modern-day Nasiriyah, the Pope called on representatives of the country’s religious communities to denounce all violence committed in God’s name and to work together to rebuild their country.
“From this place, where faith was born, from the land of our father Abraham, let us affirm that God is merciful and that the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters,” the Pope told the representatives.
“Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion,” he insisted.
Pope Francis arrived in Ur after a 45-minute early morning meeting in Najaf with 90-year-old Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s most authoritative figures.
At the large interreligious meeting later, with the Ziggurat of Ur, a partially reconstructed Bronze-Age pagan temple, visible in the haze, Pope Francis insisted that when Jews, Christians and Muslims make a pilgrimage to Abraham’s birthplace, they are going home, back to the place that reminds them they are brothers and sisters.
Representatives of Iraqi’s Shiite Muslim majority, its Sunni Muslim community, Christians, Yazidis and Mandaeans, a group that claims to be older than Christianity and reveres St John the Baptist, joined Pope Francis at Ur.
Delegation
Farmon Kakay, a member of a delegation from Iraq’s small Kaka’i community, a pre-Islamic religion and ethnic group related to the Yazidis, told Catholic News Service, “To see His Holiness is big news for me. We want the Pope to take a message to the government to respect us.”
Faiza Foad, a Zoroastrian from Kirkuk, had a similar hope that Pope Francis’ visit would move the government and Iraqi society as a whole to a greater recognition of religious freedom for all.
Wearing a white dress trimmed in gold and decorated with sequins, Ms Foad told CNS that even though her religion is not an Abrahamic faith, participating in the meeting was a sign that all people are members of the one human family.
In fact, Rafah Husein Baher, a Mandaean, told Pope Francis that “together we subsist through the war’s ruins on the same soil. Our blood was mixed; together we tasted the bitterness of the embargo; we have the same identity.”
From the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and through the reign of terror of the Islamic State group, “injustice afflicted all Iraqis,” she told the Pope. “Terrorism violated our dignity with impudence. Many countries, without conscience, classified our passports as valueless, watching our wounds with indifference.”
Just as Abraham set out from Ur and became patriarch of a multitude of believers in the one God, Pope Francis said, those believers must return to Abraham, recognise themselves as brothers and sisters and set out to share the news that God loves every person he created.
“We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion,” the Pope said. “Indeed, we are called unambiguously to dispel all misunderstandings. Let us not allow the light of heaven to be overshadowed by the clouds of hatred!”
Attachments
Called like Abraham to trust in God and to set out on the paths he indicates, believers must “leave behind those ties and attachments that, by keeping us enclosed in our own groups, prevent us from welcoming God’s boundless love and from seeing others as our brothers and sisters.”
No individual or group can live in peace or achieve progress alone, he said. “Isolation will not save us.”
The answer is not “an arms race or the erection of walls” either, the Pope said. “Nor the idolatry of money, for it closes us in on ourselves and creates chasms of inequality.”
The journey of peace, he said, begins with “the decision not to have enemies.”
It means spending less money on weapons and more on food, education and healthcare, he said. It means affirming the value of every human life, including “the lives of the unborn, the elderly, migrants” and everyone else.
Pope: Living the beatitudes can change the world
Pope Francis told Iraqi Christians that when they suffer discrimination, persecution or war, the Eight Beatitudes are addressed to them.
“Whatever the world takes from us is nothing compared to the tender and patient love with which the Lord fulfils his promises,” the Pope told the congregation sitting inside and outside the Chaldean Catholic Cathedral of St Joseph on Saturday.
“Dear sister, dear brother, perhaps when you look at your hands, they seem empty, perhaps you feel disheartened and unsatisfied by life,” he said in his homily. “If so, do not be afraid: The beatitudes are for you – for you who are afflicted, who hunger and thirst for justice, who are persecuted. The Lord promises you that your name is written on his heart, written in heaven!”
According to the Vatican, the liturgy marked the first time Pope Francis celebrated a eucharistic liturgy, ‘the Holy Qurbana,’ in the rite of the Chaldean Church. While the Pope recited the prayers in Italian, Cardinal Louis Sako, the Chaldean patriarch, and members of the congregation prayed in Chaldean, a modern form of Aramaic. The Bible readings were in Arabic.
d Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein attended the liturgy, which included a prayer for government officials, asking God to help them be “examples of honesty for the common good” and “know how to collaborate for a renewed world in which liberty and harmony reign.”
One of the prayers of the faithful, recited in Arabic, echoed the Pope’s homily. “Benevolent father, sustain your holy Church with the strength of the Spirit so that it would courageously witness to Christ and would be for our country a sign of reconciliation and solidarity among all the children of Abraham, our father in faith.”
In his homily, Pope Francis told the people that while “in the eyes of the world, those with less are discarded, while those with more are privileged,” it is not that way with God, which Jesus made clear in the beatitudes.
Worldly
Jesus overturned the worldly order of things, he said. “It is no longer the rich that are great, but the poor in spirit; not those who can impose their will on others, but those who are gentle with all; not those acclaimed by the crowds, but those who show mercy to their brother and sisters.”
“The poor, those who mourn, the persecuted are all called blessed,” he said, not the rich and powerful.
The beatitudes “do not ask us to do extraordinary things, feats beyond our abilities,” the Pope said. But “they ask for daily witness.”
“The blessed are those who live meekly, who show mercy wherever they happen to be, who are pure of heart wherever they live,” he said.
The beatitudes are not a call for a moment of heroics, but about imitating Jesus each day, Pope Francis said. “That is how the world is changed: not by power and might, but by the beatitudes.”
The Mass was the final public event of Saturday that saw Pope Francis travel to Najaf, a centre of spiritual and political power for Iraqi Shiite Muslims, and then to Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, about ten miles outside of Nasiriyah.
Papal trip to Iraq influences Muslims beyond Iraq’s borders, analyst says
Pope Francis’ historic visit to the Middle East’s most conflict-riven nation gives hope and comfort to Iraqis of all faiths, and some would even say to Arabs beyond Iraq’s borders. “The Pope’s visit has been very well received by Muslims in the region. Did you see anyone on the news protesting against his visit? I myself am a Muslim, and we are very excited,” said Dania Koleilat Khatib, an analyst affiliated with the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. “I think it’s well-received by most people. There is no survey, so I can”t say how many people, but this is an impression I have,” she told the Catholic News Service by phone from Dubai. Ms Khatib referred to a tweet by Sheikh Ahmad el-Tayeb, grand imam of al-Azhar University and a top authority in Sunni Islam, who wished Pope Francis well in Iraq. The sheikh welcomed Pope Francis’ “message of peace, solidarity and support to all Iraqi people” and expressed hope that “his trip achieves the desired outcome to continue on the path of human fraternity.” Many Middle Eastern newspapers, such as the Saudi Arab News daily, and satellite television stations ran live feeds of Pope Francis’ pilgrimage to Iraq, where he has urged interreligious tolerance and fraternity and rejection of violence and terrorism.
Pope and Shiite leader affirm importance of dialogue
In a low-key meeting followed closely in Iraq and beyond, Pope Francis and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the influential leader of Shiite Muslims in Iraq, spent 45 minutes speaking privately.
The 90-year-old ayatollah, who turns down most meeting requests, issued a statement after his encounter in Najaf with the Pope on Saturday, saying that world religious leaders should work to hold “great powers” to account, calling upon them “to give priority to reason and wisdom, to reject the language of war, and not to expand concern for their self-interests over the rights of people to live in freedom and dignity.”
Pope Francis “underlined the importance of collaboration and friendship among religious communities so that, cultivating mutual respect and dialogue, they can contribute to the good of Iraq, the region and all humanity,” the Vatican said in a statement.
The meeting, the Vatican said, also gave the Pope a chance to thank the ayatollah and the Iraqi Shiite community, which “raised their voices in defence of the weakest and the persecuted, affirming the sacredness of human life and the importance of the unity of the Iraqi people” when Islamic State militants were on a rampage from 2014 to 2017.
In Iraq – like in Iran, Bahrain and Azerbaijan – more than 60% of Muslims are Shiite. Worldwide, though, Shiites are a minority, making up less than 15% of the Muslim community. Most Muslims are Sunni. The two communities, which share the fundamental beliefs of Islam, separated early in the religion’s history in a dispute over who should lead the community after the death of Mohammad.
For the Shiites, the obvious choice was Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, whom they believe was designated by Muhammad.
Imam Ali
Imam Ali, as the Shiites refer to him, is buried in Najaf, a sacred city and pilgrimage site for Shiite Muslims. Ayatollah al-Sistani lives near the shrine in a modest home, which is where he met the Pope.
As the Pope arrived, aides to the Muslim leader released doves in a sign of peace.
Unlike Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his Iranian counterpart, Ayatollah al-Sistani does not believe his spiritual role should give him a political office, although his speeches and judgments often have political ramifications. During the offensive of the Islamic State militants, he urged Muslims – both Shiite and Sunni – to join forces to defeat them, and he has supported the rights of members of minority groups and religions to live in peace in the country.
Observers saw the Pope’s meeting with the ayatollah as a major first step toward creating the kind of understanding Pope Francis has with Sheikh Ahmad el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, who is an authority recognized by many Sunni Muslims around the world. The Pope held a major meeting with the sheikh in Egypt in 2017 and, in February 2019, signed with him a document on human fraternity and interreligious dialogue.
In Pope Francis’ encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, on fraternity and social friendship, he wrote that he was “encouraged” by his dialogue with the Muslim leader and by their joint statement that “God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters.”