Again

Monday, July 16, is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the most important Carmelite family feast day of the year. I take this opportunity again to ask you to remember my friend, Jean Sleiman, Latin Archbishop of Baghdad, and his people. In 2004, I helped organize his visit to America -- he is a Discalced Carmelite himself -- and I stay in touch periodically by email. There is a small community of friars in Iraq, some foreign-born, but some Iraqis.

The situation for Christians in Iraq continues to deteriorate. Most of them are not Roman Catholic, but belong to much more ancient Christian churches although today they recognize the authority of the pope. There is credible historical evidence that there were Christians in the area in the second century. Before the war, there were about 1.2 million Christians in Iraq out of a population of 25 million. Ironically, Saddam Hussein was often kinder to Christians than to other Muslims, and Christians suffered little or no persecution or hatred from their Muslim neighbors. That has changed radically, not in terms of official government positions but in terms of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists on all sides. There have been kidnappings and murders of clergy and slaughter of Christian families. It is estimated that well over half of Iraq's Christians have fled the country and most others have been displaced. Caritas, a Catholic relief organization, has estimated that it is far worse -- a population that was once 1.2 million people has been reduced to only about 25,000.

Here are a couple of quotes from people who have fled:

"There is no future for Christians in Iraq for the next thousand years," says Rayid Paulus Tuma, a Chaldean Christian who fled his home in Mosul after two of his brothers were gunned down gangland style. His pessimism is shared by Srood Mattei, an Assyrian Christian now in Kurdistan: "We can see the end of the tunnel—and it is dark."

So please pray for all these people. Were the violence to end tomorrow, the chances that they will ever be able to return to their homeland are almost nonexistent.

Many Iraqi Christians of the Assyrian rite came to the United States decades ago and settled near Detroit and Chicago. Every year in mid-August a large pilgrimage group comes to Holy Hill, and it is always the biggest pilgrimage of the year.