Why the pope’s visit matters for Iraq’s Christians
Pope Francis began a three-day tip to Iraq Friday — the first for a sitting pontiff. The visit comes at a fraught time for the country, which remains wracked with political instability, economic collapse and sectarian violence, alongside an ongoing battle to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
The trip, in the face of a litany of potential risks, is particularly rich in symbolism for Iraq’s embattled minority Christian communities, whose numbers dwindled amid the widespread insecurity that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and later, the threat of the Islamic State.
WHAT CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES REMAIN IN IRAQ?
Since the early days of the religion, an array of Christians have lived in what is today Iraq. Many groups, including Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac Christians, maintained traditions distinct from the Christianity of the West.
But like Iraq’s once prosperous Jewish and other minority religious groups, in recent decades vast numbers of Iraqi Christians have left for safety elsewhere, with many seeking asylum in the West. These days several hundred thousand Christians remain in Iraq, according to estimates, compared with around 1.5 million before the U.S. invasion in 2003.
WHAT THREATS AND PERSECUTION HAVE IRAQ CHRISTIANS FACED?
Over the years, Iraq’s Christians have suffered repression under former strongman Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence during the U.S. occupation and the threat of annihilation by the Islamic State, which seized territory in Iraq in 2014 for several years.
Iraq’s Christian churches have been the repeated targets of bombings, and community members have been killed, harassed and forced from their homes.
In an event rich with somber symbolism for Iraqi Christians, Pope Francis spoke Friday with bishops and other religious figures at Our Lady of Salvation, a Syrian Catholic church where an al-Qaida-affiliated gunman killed 58 people in 2010.
An image of Pope Francis has been painted on the protective blast wall that now surrounds the church.
WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF THE POPE’S VISIT?
The pope’s visit is set to put the spotlight on the heavy toll that years of war, repression and instability have taken on the country’s now-diminished Christian communities.
Before taking off for Baghdad, Pope Francis said he was duty-bound to visit a place “martyred for so many years.”
The pope’s travel plans have been moderated by the pandemic. Nonetheless, thousands of Iraqis lined roads around the airport to catch a glimpse of the pontiff.
In his first speech of the trip, at Iraq’s presidential palace, Francis praised Iraq’s historic multiculturalism and called for the protection of Iraq’s Christian communities as a requisite for ensuring a stable future for the country.
“Their (Christian Iraqis) participation in public life, as citizens with full rights, freedoms and responsibilities, will testify that a healthy pluralism of religious beliefs, ethnicities and cultures can contribute to the nation’s prosperity and harmony,” he said.
Also on the trip, Pope Francis plans to visit the Iraqi Christian town of Qaraqosh, to said at a mass at the Chaldean Church in Baghdad, and attend an interreligious meeting at the Plain of Ur, which according to religious teachings was the hometown of Abraham, a common historical patriarch for Christians, Jews and Muslims.