Prayers

You may remember that a few years back, I had the pleasure of helping arrange a visit to Chicago by the Latin archbishop of Baghdad, John Sleiman. He is a Discalced Carmelite from Lebanon, and I have kept in touch with him by email since. He is a gentle and holy man, and he and his flock have suffered much in the chaos of the war.

An article in the Chicago Tribune reports that the situation is about to get worse:

Christians are fleeing in droves from the southern Baghdad district of Dora after Sunni insurgents told them they would be killed unless they converted to Islam or left, according to Christian leaders and families who fled.

Similar episodes of what has become known as sectarian cleansing raged through Baghdad neighborhoods last year as Sunnis drove Shiites from Sunni areas and Shiites drove Sunnis from Shiite ones, but this marks the first apparent attempt to empty an entire Baghdad neighborhood of Christians, the Christians say.

The exodus began three weeks ago after a fatwa, or religious edict, was issued by Sunni insurgents offering Christians a stark choice: to convert to Islam and pay an ancient Islamic tax known as jizyah, or to depart within 24 hours and leave their property behind. If they did neither, they said, they faced death.

Sunni gunmen have been enforcing the edict by knocking on doors, posting leaflets on walls and with a dozen or so kidnappings and a shooting -- actions that have prompted hundreds of Christians to leave an area that was once home to one of Baghdad's largest Christian communities.

Most of the Christians in Iraq are not Latin rite. The Chaldean community has its religious roots in the church founded, according to tradition, by Thomas, the Apostle. So it is one of the truly ancient churches that is facing this crisis. We tend to think that any Christians there are recent converts. As I have mentioned before, the fact is, there are families there that have been Christian for almost two millennia.

Please pray for Archbishop Sleiman and his people, for all those whose lives continue to be disrupted by violence and sectarian hostility in the name of God there and elsewhere in the world.