Our Columnists
March 08, 2021
On Sunday, in Mosul, Pope Francis held a prayer service for the victims of war in a square surrounded by four churches—all now just piles of stone.Photograph by Andrew Medichini / AP / Shutterstock
Despite marauding isis fighters and a raging pandemic, Pope Francis made a historic pilgrimage this weekend to Iraq, the birthplace of Abraham, who was the first prophet to embrace belief in a single God, and the patriarch of the world’s three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Vatican News called it the “most difficult and most important journey” of Francis’s eight-year pontificate. It was taxing physically, too. The eighty-four-year-old Pope, hobbled by sciatica, limped badly as Iraqis sang in Aramaic, the language of Christ, and (unmasked) dancers from Iraq’s diverse tribes, religions, and ethnic groups performed along a red carpet. “I am the pastor of people who are suffering,” the Pope told Catholic News Service last month, when asked why he insisted on making the trip. En route to Iraq, Francis told reporters, “This is an emblematic trip, a duty to this land so martyred for so many years.” isis once boasted that it would invade Rome and defeat Christianity. Instead, the Bishop of Rome went to the heart of what had been the Islamic State caliphate.
Visiting the Biblical lands of Ur and the Nineveh Plains fulfills a long-standing Vatican quest. In 1999, Pope John Paul II talked of his yearning to visit Mesopotamia, the cradle of early human civilization, to mark the second millennium since Christ’s birth. The United States tried to stop the trip for fear that it would be interpreted as support for President Saddam Hussein. In the end, Saddam balked, and John Paul reportedly wept when the visit was cancelled. This time, the Iraqi government ecstatically welcomed the Pontiff. “Muslims are more excited than Christians,” President Barham Salih told me, on the eve of the Pope’s arrival. “It will show that extremists can’t invoke the name of God or Abraham.” Billboards across the country—including many that were emblazoned with the isis flag from 2014 to 2017, when, at its heights, the jihadi movement controlled about one-third of the country—were festooned with giant pictures of Francis. Large yellow-and-white Vatican flags fluttered beside the red-white-and-black Iraqi flags on light poles along major streets.
Part of Francis’s mission was to support Iraq’s dwindling Christian population, which has plummeted—from 1.5 million to less than three hundred thousand—since the U.S. invasion, in 2003. The northern city of Mosul had more than sixty thousand Christians before 2003; that number has declined by nearly half because of strife unleashed by the American intervention and the rise of Sunni jihadism. In 2014, isis declared its new caliphate in Mosul and ordered the remaining Christians to convert, pay a religious levy in gold, leave—or face the sword. During isis rule, I saw graffiti spray-painted across homes in the Christian villages around Mosul that invoked God’s will to eradicate Christianity. I visited churches that had been looted, torched, and smeared with feces by isis fighters. By then, the last Christians had fled the area; thousands who could trace their heritage back two millennia abandoned Iraq altogether. The ouster of isis, in 2017, didn’t alleviate fears. “We are at a critical time in our history in this land,” Archbishop Bashar Warda, who hosted the Pope in Erbil, on Sunday, told me at the time. “Christian families have ten reasons to leave and not one reason to stay.” On his arrival, Francis told Iraqi Christians that even though they are “small like a mustard seed,” they should persevere.
But, at a moment when Iraq—and much of the world—seems ever more divided, the Pope’s broader mission was to urge coexistence. “This blessed place brings us back to our origins,” Francis told a group of Christians, Muslims, and minority faiths, when he prayed on the dusty plains of Ur, Abraham’s birthplace, on Saturday. “The greatest blasphemy” is “hating our brothers and sisters,” he said, as the desert wind blew his cape. “Hostility, extremism, and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion. We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion.” The Abrahamic religions, he added, “need one another.”
One of the most striking parts of the trip was the Pope’s summit with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is the highest marja, or religious authority, for most of the world’s two hundred million Shiites. Many of the billboards across Iraq had images of the two men, and dubbed the occasion “the historical meeting between minarets and bells.” Sistani, who is ninety, lives in southern Najaf—the burial place of Imam Ali, the fourth Muslim caliph, who Shiites believe was the rightful heir of the Prophet Muhammad. (Shiite means follower of Ali.) Sistani is more than reclusive: he is almost never seen in public or in the media, and has turned down proposed visits by other world leaders. Unlike his Shiite brethren in Iran, Sistani distinguishes religion from politics, although he backed a democratic constitution after the fall of Saddam Hussein and has been hugely influential—in a country that is more than sixty per cent Shiite—in telling Iraqis that their vote is more valuable than gold.
The two old men, both frail and stooped from age, were quite a contrast. The Argentine-born Pope was clean-shaven and dressed in a pristine white cassock and cap; the Iranian-born Ayatollah wore a black turban, and his long gray beard fell onto his black robes. When the Pope arrived, doves were released as a sign of peace. Francis removed his shoes, in keeping with Muslim custom. The two men held both of each other’s hands as they spoke in the spartan home, off a narrow alley, that the Ayatollah rents; Sistani is famed for living as an ascetic. Francis, who took the subway when he was a cardinal and generated headlines when, as Pope, he went out to buy his own eyeglasses and orthopedic shoes, is also frugal. He has opted to live in the sparer quarters of a guesthouse, instead of the Vatican’s papal apartments. The clerics’ common emphasis is on helping the poor and oppressed. In their first encounter, neither the Pontiff nor the Ayatollah wore a mask. The Pope was vaccinated in January; Iraq received its first doses—fifty thousand, a gift as part of China’s vaccine diplomacy—only last week, amid a second wave of covid-19. Sistani had not had his shots yet.
Catholics and Shiites have one thing in common when it comes to leadership: throughout their histories, both have believed that their top clerics are empowered to interpret the word of God—and are infallible. In contrast, many Protestants and Sunni Muslims believe that clerics are mere advisers or guides, and that an individual’s relationship with God is personal. As a result, the words of the Catholic Pope and the Shiite Ayatollah have inordinate influence on their flocks. And, in Najaf, the two men had a common message of tolerance among faiths. Sistani, who reportedly did much of the talking in their meeting, which lasted roughly forty minutes, said that Christians should “live like all Iraqis, in peace and security, and with their full constitutional rights,” according to a statement from the Ayatollah’s office. Religious authority had an important role “in protecting them, and others who have also suffered injustice and harm in the events of past years.” The Vatican said that Pope Francis, in turn, praised the Ayatollah for using his powerful voice “in defense of the weakest and most persecuted” during the violence that has beset Iraq during the past two decades. Sistani has repeatedly urged reconciliation among the country’s divisive sects, ethnicities, and tribes.
Notably absent from the Pontiff’s trip were Iraqi Jews, who trace their roots back to Biblical Babylon and for millennia were one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. Before the First World War, a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish, and Jews had important government posts. Sassoon Eskell became the first minister of finance, and played the same kind of role in creating a new national financial system that Alexander Hamilton did in the United States. In 1936, four years after Iraq’s independence, Hebrew was one of Iraq’s six official languages. But the birth of Israel, followed by the Arab-Israeli wars and the rise of a virulent Iraqi nationalism during Baathist rule, led Jews to flee. The Vatican said that Jews had been invited to the papal prayer event in Ur, but the community—Iraq’s Catholic Church could identify only a dozen individuals in the country—is almost extinct.
During Francis’s first foreign outing in fifteen months, the dangers to the leader of the world’s roughly 1.3 billion Catholics—or some eighteen per cent of the global population—were visible as helicopters hovered over his armored convoy. Soldiers lined the streets, and snipers were positioned on rooftops. isis still has more than ten thousand active fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to Pentagon and United Nations estimates. Iraq is also home to several Shiite militias aligned with Iran that have recently attacked bases where U.S. troops support Iraq’s counterterrorism campaign.
On Sunday, the Pontiff witnessed the challenge for all faiths when he toured Mosul, which was Iraq’s second-largest city until it was conquered by isis. Less than four years after the jihadis fled, large parts of this ancient site along the scenic Tigris River are still in ruins and uninhabitable. Much of the destruction is also from massive bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition that backed Iraqi forces during the nine-month campaign to drive out isis, whose forces operated from homes, churches, mosques, hospitals, and businesses for cover. Francis held a prayer service for the victims of war in a square surrounded by four Christian churches—all now just piles of stone.
“How cruel it is that this country, the cradle of civilization, should have been afflicted by so barbarous a blow, with ancient places of worship destroyed,” the Pope said. He honored the thousands of Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities who “were cruelly annihilated by terrorism, and others forcibly displaced or killed.” And he appealed to the faithful to demonstrate that “fraternity is more durable than fratricide, that hope is more powerful than hatred, that peace more powerful than war.”
The joyous reaction among the thousands of Iraqis who turned out during the Pope’s visit, despite the physical dangers and the pandemic, provided symbolic hope in a war-ravaged land. But, almost two decades after Saddam’s ouster, the Iraqi government has still not addressed the core grievances and injustices that have riven the country, its faiths, and its political factions. The Pontiff’s historic visit provided four days of wonderment, but perhaps not much more.
No comments:
Post a Comment