In a declaration issued today, August 12, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue called for “a clear and courageous stance on the part of religious leaders, especially Muslims, as well as those engaged in interreligious dialogue and all people of good will,” on the violence Jihadists of the self-proclaimed Caliphate are inflicting violence on Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities in Iraq.
The memory of that brutal June evening in his home near Mosul, Iraq, brought 48-year-old Joseph, now a refugee in Lebanon, to tears.
"These people know no limits of humanity, decency, or respect for human life," he said of the Islamic State fighters.
Meeting with Catholic News Service August 8 at the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center in Beirut, he and other Catholic Iraqi refugees asked that their real names not be used to protect their identities as they shared the traumatic experiences that led to their exodus.
“The Holy Father would probably have liked to be there with those poor people,” Cardinal Fernando Filoni told the Vatican Television Center. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples met Francis in St. Martha’s House at 6:00pm on Sunday,August 10, ahead of his departure which could be today, but there have been some logistical hick-ups. Cardinal Filoni is being sent to Iraq as a papal envoy to express the Church’s solidarity to the people.
One of the biblical readings at the Sunday Mass at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Syriac Catholic Church here contained a passage from Ephesians, complete with the warning "do not leave room for the devil."
The passage had a particular poignancy for the 300-plus parishioners attending the overflow Mass because, as one parishioner explained, "The devil is loose in our homeland."
All but a handful of the parish families are recent immigrants from Iraq. A church service in Arabic and Aramaic makes them feel more at home in their new country.
“Hatred is not to be carried in the name of God! War is not to be waged in the name of God!" This was Francis’ desperate call at the Sunday Angelus, just a few days before he is due to embark on his first trip to Asia.
They arrived bristling with heavy weapons and waving black flags from about a dozen Humvees, seized from the Iraqi army and supplied originally by the United States.
When the terrified residents looked out of their windows, they saw that Kosho, their traditional walled village in the mountains of northern Iraq, had been surrounded by jihadists. More than 200 bearded militants had besieged the village.
A draw was the result of the Hamas-Israeli first round of mini-wars that lasted for 28 days. Hamas failed to force Israel to end the blockade imposed on Gaza. Israel also failed to bomb Hamas into total surrender and demilitarization. The Cairo talks are following the same paradigm of the Paris talks, leading to nowhere, and its decisions are abiding to nobody, forcing both sides to a regressive position of a status quo ante.
The awful choice facing the refugees of Sinjar, Iraq,is be captured and killed, or risk dying of thirst. They face an excruciating dilemma — attempt to flee and risk being captured and killed by insurgents, or remain on Mount Sinjar in the hope that aid will somehow get through.
"It is time to take a principled stand: the situation calls for concrete action, a gesture of solidarity in the face of an existential crisis—‘we will either be or will not be.’”
It is an angry condemnation of an indifferent world. The words are unpolished and bitter. They exude disillusionment; they reject a world obsessed with consumption, in awe of comfort, blind to evil and deaf to the cry of the innocent. "In fact, speeches are good for nothing, so too declarations that rehash condemnations and indignation; the same can be said for protest marches."
Fr. Paolo Thabit Mekko, the Iraqi Chaldean priest of Qaraqosh, had spent the past few months reopening wells and getting electricity generators going for refugees that fled Mosul after Iraq’s second major city fell into the hands of ISIS jihadists. Now, he too finds himself living the life of a refugee, along with the thousands of fugitives who were expelled from the Nineveh Plain and scattered in streets, churches and across the majority Christian Ankawa suburb of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
