On the front page of last week’s edition, we reported about the mass religious persecution that is taking place in Iraq, especially in the city of Mosul, where Christians were told they would have to convert to Islam or pay a tax or get out of the country.
On the day the paper hit the streets, I had a chance to sit down with the Syrian Catholic Patriarch of Syria and Iraq, Ignatius Joseph III Younan. He was in the U.S. to help raise awareness about the persecution of the Church in the Middle East as well as to visit with his friend Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio. The two know each other from the 1980s when they both served in Newark, N.J.
Here was a Patriarch from the Middle East sitting in the Brooklyn Bishop’s residence and telling us, “We Christians in the Middle East are facing the most dangerous situation and the most challenging to our survival.”
“All the churches in Mosul have been abandoned. No Holy Mass has been said,” he explained. “Twenty-five churches, convents, manuscripts, icons” all have been destroyed by looting and fire. Christians are leaving their homeland and seeking refuge in Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq.
Christians, who have been in Iraq, long before the founding of Islam, are being extinguished from their homes because of a strain of Islam that practices barbarism and intolerance.
The Patriarch says that Iraqi Christians feel they have been abandoned by Western countries who are not living up to their ideals of religious freedom and democracy.
“They are more interested in oil and in political strategy” rather than trying to protect innocent people who are being slaughtered.
Patriarch Younan says he is not surprised by what is happening. He has been warning Europeans and Americans for years that fundamental Islamic extremists, who tolerate no other beliefs, have been on the rise.
“But we were not believed. We told them that it will lead surely to sectarian war between majority and minorities. And now the opposition in Syria and Iraq are those extremist factions,” he said.
“We don’t think it is too late for the Western countries, the so-called civilized countries, to still have a role in the region, although the Western countries are not so believed by the majority of people of the Middle East. They are not convinced that the West will help them get democracy and live in peace. We don’t understand why the Western world would keep silent faced with the abominable acts of cleansing communities because of religion.”
The Patriarch would like to see influence brought upon the more affluent Arabic countries to intervene and help stop the spread of intolerance.
“I was told that it’s better to go, to bring the voice, although perhaps in the desert, to the American people, American Catholics. They are very good Catholics. We know by experience.
“But it’s sad to say the representatives of the administration, they really do not care.
“And, of course, we have to tell the silent majority to keep praying, praying that the Lord Jesus will wake from sleeping in the boat, because the apostles are drowning. We have to keep praying,” he said.
The following day, the Patriarch was in Washington, D.C., telling his story to whomever would listen. However, right now, the plight of Christians in the Middle East is falling on deaf ears.