The Pope’s historic trip to Iraq.

Regarding travel, there are very few papal firsts left. Ever since Pope St. Paul VI travelled to the Holy Land in 1964 — the first foreign papal trip since the 19th century — the pace of papal travel has accelerated to the point where it is now no longer remarkable. But Iraq is a first.

Pope Francis arrived in Iraq on Friday morning for a three-day visit. His determination to make the trip was personal; the general view in Rome was that he should wait until COVID-19 cases stop surging. The Vatican’s own ambassador in Baghdad was just infected and will spend the visit in isolation.

But Francis is determined and his trip has three purposes.

The first is to comfort and strengthen the Christian community in Iraq. Before the second Iraq War in 2003, there were some 1.4 million Christians in Iraq; today, there are only about 250,000. Many fled in the upheaval after the American invasion; most of those remaining left when the Islamic State took over parts of the country between 2014 and 2017 and began a campaign of ruthless anti-christian massacres and persecution.

The nadir of anti-christian bloodletting took place in 2010, during the Divine Liturgy at the Syro-catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad, where dozens were massacred as they worshipped. Pope Francis made that church his first pastoral visit upon arrival. The papal visit is an act of solidarity with local Christians.

Second, the trip completes the manifest desire of Pope St. John Paul II. For the Great Jubilee year of 2000, John Paul planned a series of biblical pilgrimages. He went to Egypt — land of the exodus — and then made his epic Holy Land visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He completed it in 2001 with a voyage in the footsteps of St. Paul to Syria, Greece and Malta.

John Paul had wanted to begin in Iraq, with a visit to the biblical city Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abraham, but Saddam Hussein made it impossible for him to go. Pope Francis, on the eve of his departure to Iraq, made reference to those frustrated plans and said that he would not “keep the people waiting twice.”

The third reason is closest to Pope Francis’ heart. Two years ago in the United Arab Emirates, he launched his “human fraternity” project. Signing joint declarations with the most senior Islamic clerics, Pope Francis proposed fraternity as the remedy for a world riven by conflict. His argument is that such fraternity must begin with believers across confessional and theological lines. For Christians and Muslims, he proposes that such fraternity be rooted in the common spiritual paternity of Abraham.

On Saturday, Pope Francis meets with the venerated leader of Iraq’s Shia Muslims, Grand Ayatollah al-sayyid Ali al-husseini al-sistani in the holy city of Najaf. The meeting is the high point of the fraternal dimension of the visit; billboards all over Iraq carry the images of both men.

Pope Francis has reversed the priorities of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, on relations with Islam. Benedict put an emphasis on theology, suggesting that Islam could learn from Christianity’s long and fraught working out of the relationship between religion and politics, and between faith and violence. Islam, he believed, would have to find its own theological answers to those questions, rooted in its own understanding, above all, of the nature of God.

That approach, not without difficulties, bore significant fruit, leading to the historic visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, to the Vatican. Abdullah would later host a major inter-religious meeting in Madrid (it was illegal to hold it in Saudi Arabia itself ).

In relation to Islam, as in other areas, Francis prefers

RELIGION, BY ITS VERY NATURE, MUST BE AT THE SERVICE OF PEACE AND FRATERNITY.

to prioritize practical encounters over theology. Hence his visits to Egypt and the U.A.E. have emphasized the bond of common humanity, a brotherhood rooted in a common piety, even if according to different understandings of God’s revelation.

“Religion, by its very nature, must be at the service of peace and fraternity,” Francis said upon arrival in Baghdad. “The name of God cannot be used to justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression.”

A common front against religious extremism gets a ready welcome in Iraq and elsewhere, as Muslims themselves are the first and most numerous victims of Islamist violence.

In Egypt and the U.A.E., Francis met, in a certain sense, with the centres of religious power and material wealth in the Islamic Middle East. Iraq is different. There, the Muslim experience is of decades of repressive rule, war and impoverishment. Thus, in Iraq, Francis is leading with his own personality, a heart that has a preference for the poor and the weak, those excluded from power and influence.

Christians are a tiny percentage of the Iraqi population, less than two per cent. Across the Middle East, Christians communities are beleaguered, diminishing and even disappearing. Whether this courageous visit will expand the space for them in their native land, where they have lived before Islam even existed, remains to be seen.