For the first time in history, a Pope will visit Iraq from Friday to comfort the Christian minority decimated by conflict and the harshness of life and to extend a hand, in a spectacular gesture, to Shiite Islam.
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In the cradle of Christianity, which the wars have left bloodless and which continues to be marked by the violence of the Islamic State (IS) group, Pope Francis will meet with the highest religious authority dand a part of the Shiite world, the great Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in Najaf, south of Baghdad.
It is also the first trip of the sovereign pontiff since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, Having been vaccinated, as well as the crowd of journalists and clergymen who accompany him. During your three-day visit, 84-year-old Argentine pope will visit a diverse but small Christian minority at least amid a population of 40 million Iraqis exhausted after 40 years of wars and economic crises.
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The papal program is as ambitious as the historic trip: until Monday, the pontiff will visit a cathedral that was the scene of a hostage-taking in 2010 in Baghdad, the city of Ur, in the southern desert of Iraq, Najaf and ISIS-destroyed churches in Mosul (north).
According to ‘AFP’, the Pope’s program includes a visit to a cathedral in which a hostage-taking was presented for more than 11 years.
the dad, father it will travel about 1,650 kilometers mainly by plane. Welcome messages and calls for coexistence have been placed throughout its journey. Roads have been paved, security checkpoints have been installed and renovation work has been undertaken in places that until now had never been on official visitation programs.
“The pope’s message is that the Church is on the side of those who suffer,” Najeb Michaeel, the Catholic Chaldean archbishop of Mosul and Aqra, told AFP. “The pope will send a strong message even here where crimes against humanity and genocide have been perpetrated“, Assures the prelate, who had to flee from the jihadists in Mosul.
The Christian community in Iraq is one of the oldest and one of the most diverse, In which the Chaldeans -Catholians-, the Orthodox Armenians and Protestants stand out.
In the time of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) there were about 1.5 million Christians, about 6% of Iraqis. But today there are at most 400,000, 1% of the population, estimates William Warda, of Hammurabi, 1 local minority advocacy NGO.
(You may be interested: The places Francisco will visit in Iraq)
Before exile, most Christians were in the province of Nineveh, With capital in Mosul. Here, shop windows and prayer books are in modern Aramaic.
Cradle of exile
When in 2014, ISIS jihadists occupied Mosul, the Pope Francis he supported the international military campaign to bolster Iraqi forces. Then he said he wanted to go and support the Christians in Iraq.
In 2019, the sovereign pontiff condemned the bloody repression of a popular revolt against power that shook especially in Baghdad and in southern Iraq. It is in this southern region where the pope will go on Saturday, to Ur, where Patriarch Abraham was born, according to tradition.
But Iraq was already in the minds of the Vatican even before the Vatican arrival of Pope Francis.
In 2000, Saddam Hussein threw a bucket of cold water at the last minute in hopes of John Paul II, who planned to make a pilgrimage to the country. Nineteen years later, the patriarch of the Chaldean Church of Iraq, Louis Sako, received from Iraqi President Barham Saleh an official invitation addressed to the pope to come to “cure” the country of often confessional violence.
This is Pope Francis’ first trip since the beginning of the pandemic.
Ammar Salih. EFE / Zaid Al-Obeidi. AFP
the covid-19 delay the trip but neither the confinement, imposed for the duration of your visit, nor the announcement that the Vatican ambassador to Baghdad tested positive for coronavirus they have changed the program. The only incident is that the pope will be deprived of crowd baths.
Imprisoned in a Vatican monastery since his resignation eight years ago, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI judged this trip to be “very important” but also “dangerous”, both for security reasons and as a result of the covid.
Several Vatican security teams have visited Iraq, a theater of intense geopolitical tensions, to organize security. Provincial commissions are in charge of shielding the potato circuit. On Friday morning, the papal plane will land in Baghdad with about 150 people on board, half journalists.
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Pope Francis will again lend a hand to Islam. In 2019 in the United Arab Emirates, he signed with Sheikh Ahmed the Tajeb, magnet of Azhar, the highest institution of Sunni Islam, a document encouraging dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
In Iraq, Pope Francis will meet with Shiites, the majority in Iraq but a minority in the world – 200,000,000 of the 1.8 billion Muslims – when he meets the great Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
For Najaf Governor Louai al-Yasseri, it is a “historic visit” while Sistani, though physically invisible, has become a compass for the past three decades. the Shiites of Iraq and the rest of the world. “There is talk of a religious leader followed by 20% of the world’s population: his visit means a lot, his meeting with the great ayatollah will have a huge impact.”
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
* With information from AFP