A year after the expulsion of Christians from the Nineveh Plain, the Pope’s “personal envoy” to Iraq retraces the history of Christianity in Mesopotamia, dispelling misleading stereotypes and recalling the Vatican attempts to stop the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It is almost a year ago now that Islamic State jihadists “cleaned out” the Niniveh Plane expelling the more than 100,000 Christians who lived there, forcing them to abandon their villages overnight. Villages which had been historical landmarks of local Christian communities in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, since time immemorial. In the night August 6-7, 2014, in Qaraqosh, Kramles, Tal Kaif, Bartella and other towns in the Plane, militias of the self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate crushed the resistance forces represented by the Kurdish Peshmerga and the armed forces of the Kurdish Regional Government. Within hours, a mass exodus began, with many escaping with nothing but the shirts they had on their backs.
Since then, Christians in Mosul and the Nineveh Plane continue to live as refugees. Most of them are concentrated in Erbil and in other parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. Their misfortunes have become emblematic of the pressures and violence that are threatening the survival of Christian communities in the very lands where Christianity was born. But the global media system reports their hardships in an abstract and misleading way, making commonplace comments and using catchphrases that narrows everything down to the present day and ends up obscuring the real dynamics of complex phenomena.
The latest such Western “pseudo-narration”, is that which boils down the many thousand-year-old stories of Eastern Christianity to a list of exotic names – Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Armenians, Maronite Copts – and identifies the most famous jihadist groups as the only risk factor – first al-Qaeda, then Al-Nusra, then Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant which has recently been “simplified” to “Islamic State” as part of a marketing strategy – without any mention to the long-term processes, key steps, the string-pullers and recent as well as not international complicities which have led to the current state of affairs: wars, suicide bombings and ethnic and religious cleansing, basically, what Francis refers to as “a world war fought piecemeal”.
A precious antidote to the sloppiness of this single-minded approach, which does not respect the thousand-year-old history of Eastern Christians, is Cardinal Fernando Filoni’s book “La Chiesa in Iraq. Storia, sviluppo e missione, dagli inizi fino ai nostri giorni” (“The Church in Iraq. History, development and mission from the early days to today”). While the future of Iraq’s fragile democracy is a mystery given the chaos that reigns there, this geo-political context makes it difficult to make any predictions about the fate of Christians too. The history of the lands of ancient Mesopotamia – the Prefect of the Propaganda Fide Congregation writes –“is an intermingling of people and a web of events. And yesterday’s history is not separate from today’s history”. For this reason, “knowing the history of Near Eastern Christianity and Mesopotamia in particular” is the only way to “understand the rationale and dramatic events of that region and to appreciate the life, culture and testimony of faith of Christians there and the reasons why they are so attached to their homeland as well as the hatred of their enemies”.
The cardinal’s work can be likened to a sort of “operation-truth”. His dense 255-page essay tells the story of the local Christian communities of Mesopotamia, with historical precision and in a language that is accessible. From the apostolic teaching of Addai and Mari, disciples of St. Thomas the Apostle, to today’s suffering. The greatness and the miseries of the Eastern Church, which sprung up without ever being “formally under the jurisdiction of Rome or Constantinople”, are recounted along with the most surprising consequences. The book tells the stories of 12-year-old Patriarchs who inherited their title, of Christians who were killed by Germanic forces at Turkish orders, of British troops who in the days of the protectorate “softened” the revolts in Kirkuk with toxic gas. It is a known fact that ever since the first plantatio Ecclesiae, Christianity in Syria with its roots in ancient Persian territories, has always had to deal with the upheavals that have arisen throughout history, crushing people and nations, undergoing risky operations and taking providential escape routes in order to survive.
Revisiting this collective adventure, Cardinal Filoni does away with commonplace statements and misleading axioms such as that which attributes the decline of Mesopotamian Christianity to the arrival of Aram Muslim conquerors. In reality - the cardinal stresses based on the most up-to-date documents and historical research - the Eastern Church which opted for Nestorianism (and therefore followed the theology of the Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius, condemned by the Council of Ephesus), experienced its greatest expansion in Persian territory in the 13th century when Islamic conquerors had already destroyed the Persian empire centuries before. At that time the Eastern Church had 20 metropolitan sees and 200 episcopal sees, it had opened missionary posts and taken the Gospel message as far as China. After taking Baghdad in 1258, the Mongols even installed the Catholicos (who was the most senior figure in the Assyrian Church of the time) in an old caliphate building. At the end of 1200, the legendary Catholicos Yaballaha III had come up with a plan to convert the Mongolian population to Christianity and conceived a political alliance between them and the Christian West with a view to defeating Muslim forces.
As typically happens in history however, the pendulum swung the other way and at the start of the 14th century the Mongols led by Tamerlane embraced an intolerant and fanatical Islam which destroyed the imposing structure of the Eastern Church. Almost completely wiped out by a persecution, the likes of which have never been seen in the history of Eastern Christianity. It entered the modern age a fraction of what it had once been and in the 15th century came under the control of the Ottoman Turks and was subjected to their rigid system of religious discrimination imposed on the “people of the Book” according to rules created based on the Quran. It was not just external factors that weakened the Church of the East, says the cardinal, shelving some more common places. There were also “internal” dynamics that were even more devastating. Of course, there were factors such as “isolation, the invasive religious politics of Islam, the Mongolian conquests topped by the Ottoman domination which concluded with the Armenian, Syrian, Assyrian and Chaldean genocides at the start of the 20th century. But the most delicate crisis arose within the Church itself as a result of Patriarchal chaos, the absence of a pastoral life among the clergy, the episcopal sees which turned almost into family estates, the lack of priestly training” (p.61). In the regions that were not occupied by the Ottomans, political power lay in the hands of Kurdish emirs but the chiefs of Assyrian tribes managed to stay relatively independent. The Catholicos, supreme religious authority, became the guardian of ethnic cohesion, a cohesion that was constantly put to the test by tribal clashes. In that period of isolation, the structure of the Eastern Church drew on aspects of Assyrian ethnicity, adopting tribal customs and practices that were unknown to other Christians of the East. This involution included the transformation of the rank of Catholicos into a hereditary feudal position which was passed down from uncle to nephew within the same family.
From that moment on, ritualistic parochialism and a sectarianism based on ethnicity became a recurring temptation even within the Christian communities of Mesopotamia. This trend slowed partly thanks to the arrival of Latin missionaries from the 16th century on. Disproving yet another historical commonplace, Cardinal Filoni points out their positive and healthy contribution to local Eastern Churches. The Franciscans, then the Dominicans, the Carmelites and the Jesuits “brought new life and spiritual energy the Chaldean Church in particular (this was the part of the Assyrian Church that entered into communion with Rome through a complex non-linear series of events which began in 1552, the details of which the author reconstructs in his book, Ed.), organizing and sustaining its piety, religious life and the educational formation of the clergy and the people”.
According to the book, the most recent period of hardship suffered by Iraqi Christians – along with their fellow citizens – did not begin with the arrival of the Islamic State “cut throats”: it started much earlier and can be dated back to the US-led military invasion in the spring of 2003, which aimed to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Describing this slice of history, Cardinal Filoni offers an eye-witness account of facts and operations: as the Holy See’s Nuncio to Iraq and Jordan, he stayed put in Baghdad even when the American bombs started falling and when the post-war attacks took place. He watched these horrors unfold from the ochre-coloured Nunciature building which had nothing but the Vatican flag to defend it. It was partly because of his experience on the ground that Pope Francis sent him twice as his personal envoy to meet and bring comfort to Christians other ethnic and religious groups who were forced to abandon their homes as the jihadist offensive advanced.
The years preceding the Iraqi Freedom operation and those which followed, remain imprinted in the cardinal’s memory, with all their grey areas. After the attack on the Twin Towers, Filoni recalls, “the Bush administration hastened to suspect Saddam Hussein as the perpetrator”. To justify a war, Iraq was “falsely accused of receiving uranium supplies from Niger”. During the course of 2002, the cardinal recalls, “it was clear that the Bush Administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s regime from the Middle East, a regime which was also unpopular in Israel. (…). The “pleasant” dimension of theory used to persuade the public, said democracy had to be brought to the country. President Saddam Hussein tried to launch a State reform, leaving open the possibility of him stepping down and passing the helm onto his son Qusai”.
In a brisk but articulate reconstruction of events, Cardinal Filoni recalls that Saddam “sought ways out in the face of international military pressure but no one was prepared to give him any credit”. The “Apostolic Nunciature in Baghdad received envoys whoa sked for advice. The advice was to ban all weapons of mass destruction, a provision which Saddam got the Council of tribal chiefs to approve within 48 hours”. But despite the two peace missions John Paul II sent to Washington and Baghdad, the US showed no intention of backing down from their decision to attack Iraq and the Pope’s attempts proved futile; George W. Bush did not budge an inch even in the face of the Pope’s tough admonitions against the war.” Then, once the war had ended and the military occupation began, “the country was plunged into the most violent and chaotic mess imaginable; humiliation, revenge, stealing, pillaging, arson, raids on public and private buildings cast Iraq into the darkest period of its entire existence”. Many find it convenient for the media to keep silent about this recent past. In the years that have followed, Filoni stressed, new horrors and scourges have added to this mix, leading the Iraqi population into the “difficult situation” in which it find itself today.
