The meeting between Francis, the global leader of the Catholic Church, and al-Sistani, the highest religious authority of Iraqi Shi'ism, is due to take place in the city of Najaf.

The pope will also visit the cities Baghdad, Mosul and Ur on the visit scheduled for March 5-8.

The Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad, Cardinal Louis-Raphael Sako, said the meeting with Sistani would be a ‘private visit' between the two religious figures ‘without formalities'.

Sako said he hoped the two figures would sign the document on "human fraternity for world peace", an interreligious text condemning "extremism". Pope Francis signed the document with the leading Sunni scholar, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, in 2019.

Iraq once counted more than 1.5 million Christians, but the community has been ravaged by successive conflicts. Now, an estimated 400,000 Christians remain in Iraq.

Many Christians have expressed hope that the pope's visit will highlight the challenges facing the community, including prolonged displacement and little representation in government.

In addition to meeting with al-Sistani, Pope Francis will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kazimi, before going to the Presidential Palace and meeting with the country's President Barham Salih.

Other events scheduled during the Papal visit include:
• visiting the Syriac Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad, where 48 Christians were killed by terrorists in 2010
• celebrating Mass in the Chaldean Cathedral of St. Joseph's in Baghdad
• participating in an interfaith meeting near the ruins of the ancient city of Ur
• presiding at a "prayer of suffrage for the victims of the war" in Mosul
• offering Mass in the Franso Hariri Stadium, Erbil, which can accommodate nearly 28,000 people.

Pope Francis will return to Rome on the morning of Mar 8. And, as has become custom, it is expected that he will hold a press conference with journalists accompanying him on the papal plane.

Sources

Aljazeera

La Croix International

He says their situation will deteriorate as access to international aid tightens.

"This is now the third year of displacement for the Iraqi Christians. It's very tough. Donations are becoming less, while global attention is waning," Ra'ed Bahou, regional director of the Pontifical Mission says.

Jaar and Bahou's comments were made at a conference hosted by the Vatican Embassy in Amman and the Catholic charity, Caritas Jordan.

The conference focused on refugees' needs and sought better cooperation between Catholic leaders, who were exploring income-generation projects for the refugees

Jaar has devoted his ministry to aiding Iraqi and Syrian refugees flooding into Jordan from neighboring conflicts for more than a decade.

"They have finished their money and they aren't allowed to work. How can they live in human dignity?" he asks.

The Jordanian government says it hosts 1.5 million refugees and its budget, water, electricity and other services are overburdened by the numbers, Daniela Cicchella of U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR explains.

Of these, she says 700,000 refugees of 42 nationalities are registered with the agency in Jordan.

Jaar says UNHCR is doing its best to preserve and protect the dignity of the refugees in Jordan.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: BBC News

He was a tyrant, they said, who, after 14 years of marriage, wouldn't let their sister, Rana, 31, have her own mobile phone. He isolated her from friends and family, guarding her jealously.

Although Diyaa and Rana were both from Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city in Iraq, they didn't know each other before their families arranged their marriage. It hadn't gone especially well.

Rana was childless, and according to the brothers, Diyaa was cheap. The house he rented was dilapidated, not fit for their sister to live in.

Qaraqosh is on the Nineveh Plain, a 1,500-square-mile plot of contested land that lies between Iraq's Kurdish north and its Arab south.

Until last summer, this was a flourishing city of 50,000, in Iraq's breadbasket. Wheat fields and chicken and cattle farms surrounded a town filled with coffee shops, bars, barbers, gyms and other trappings of modern life.

Then, last June, ISIS took Mosul, less than 20 miles west. The militants painted a red Arabic ‘‘n,'' for Nasrane, a slur, on Christian homes.

They took over the municipal water supply, which feeds much of the Nineveh Plain.

Many residents who managed to escape fled to Qaraqosh, bringing with them tales of summary executions and mass beheadings.

The people of Qaraqosh feared that ISIS would continue to extend the group's self-styled caliphate, which now stretches from Turkey's border with Syria to south of Fallujah in Iraq, an area roughly the size of Indiana.

In the weeks before advancing on Qaraqosh, ISIS cut the city's water. As the wells dried up, some left and others talked about where they might go.

In July, reports that ISIS was about to take Qaraqosh sent thousands fleeing, but ISIS didn't arrive, and within a couple of days, most people returned. Diyaa refused to leave. He was sure ISIS wouldn't take the town. Continue reading

Sources

• Eliza Griswold is the author of ‘‘The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.'' The article above is from The New York Times.
• Image: Middle East Eye

Assyrian priest Father Aprem Pithyou, of the Ancient Church of the East in Strathmore, Wellington, says his people need more humanitarian aid and wants Immigration NZ to accept more Assyrian refugees currently in Turkey and Jordan.

Aprem came to New Zealand from Iraq with his family in 1989 to escape persecution under Saddam Hussein's regime and is one of about 5000 to 6000 Assyrian Christians in New Zealand.

While some are from Syria most are from the Plain of Nineveh in Iraq, which has been home to the Assyrians for thousands of years.

In June the region's major city Mosul and surrounding, predominantly Christian towns fell to Isis militants.

"It's a very, very bad situation we haven't faced before. They want to establish an Islamic state in Iraq and Syria and go back to what we call the dark centuries." says Aprem

Since then hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians on the Plain of Nineveh have been displaced from their homes by force.

The Assyrian Church of the East is the modern continuation of the ancient church of the Persian empire which fell out of communion with the rest of the Christian world in the 5th century when, for political as well as theological reasons, it officially adopted Nestorian Christology.

In the 16th century a split occurred in the Church of the East.

A part of the church which became known as the Chaldean Catholic Church joined the Roman Catholic Church.

Another, smaller group separated in the second half of the 20th century and took the name Ancient Church of the East, under its own patriarch who resides in Baghdad.

Source

• New Zealand Herald
• Cenew
• Image: layman.org

But sometimes a footnote can help illuminate a tragedy's unhappy whole.

For decades, the Middle East's increasingly beleaguered Christian communities have suffered from a fatal invisibility in the Western world.

And their plight has been particularly invisible in the United States, which as a majority-Christian superpower might have been expected to provide particular support.

There are three reasons for this invisibility.

The political left in the West associates Christian faith with dead white male imperialism and does not come naturally to the recognition that Christianity is now the globe's most persecuted religion.

And in the Middle East the Israel-Palestine question, with its colonial overtones, has been the left's great obsession, whereas the less ideologically convenient plight of Christians under Islamic rule is often left untouched.

To America's strategic class, meanwhile, the Middle East's Christians simply don't have the kind of influence required to matter.

A minority like the Kurds, geographically concentrated and well-armed, can be a player in the great game, a potential United States ally.

But except in Lebanon, the region's Christians are too scattered and impotent to offer much quid for the superpower's quo.

So whether we're pursuing stability by backing the anti-Christian Saudis or pursuing transformation by toppling Saddam Hussein (and unleashing the furies on Iraq's religious minorities), our policy makers have rarely given Christian interests any kind of due.

Then, finally, there is the American right, where one would expect those interests to find a greater hearing.

But the ancient churches of the Middle East (Eastern Orthodox, Chaldean, Maronites, Copt, Assyrian) are theologically and culturally alien to many American Catholics and evangelicals.

And the great cause of many conservative Christians in the United States is the state of Israel, toward which many Arab Christians harbor feelings that range from the complicated to the hostile. Continue reading

Source

• Ross Douthat in The New York Times

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009.