Mosul reopens Chaldean Catholic Church
MOSUL: With chants and ululations, Iraqi Christians celebrated the inauguration of a recently-restored Chaldean Catholic Church in Mosul on Friday, years ater militants turned it into a religious police office.
Around 300 faithful atended the first mass in the 80-year-old church of Um Al Mauna -“Our Lady of Perpetual Help” ater it was fully renovated. They prayed and took photos on mobile phones.
“I’ve been waiting for this day,” 74-year-old former school director Ilham Abdullah said.
“We hope that Christian families will come back and life will return to what it used to be” in Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Mosul, Iraq’s second city, has historically been among the Arab world’s most culturally diverse cities -- a place of mosques, churches, shrines and tombs.
But when the Daesh militant group swept into Iraq in 2014, they announced their area from Mosul, and their onslaught forced hundreds of thousands of Christians in the Nineveh province to flee.
On the outside wall of Um Al Mauna the militants wrote “no entry, by order of the Daesh Hesba Division (the religious police),” tasked with imposing harsh rules.
“I feel like I have been brought back to life,” said Abdel Masih Selim, a 75-year-old retired banker, who fled the rule of Daesh in Mosul, setling in Arbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
Salim, who came to Mosul specially for the mass, said Chaldeans “have come to see their church that they were forced to abandon when Daesh oppressors ruined it.”
Raphael Sako, the patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic church, said despite the difficulties, Iraq’s Christians have a future in the country.
“This is our country and our land,” he said during the inauguration. “We are here to stay even if there aren’t many of us let.”
Today, the small church has restored its former design, with its two red-painted domes carrying large crucifixes, and a renovated bell tower.
In its courtyard, photos show the state of the building ater it was saved from Daesh, and others illustrated the restoration process.
In Mosul, several other churches and monasteries are being renovated, but reconstruction is slow, and many Christians have not returned.