Iraqi Catholics Mourn John Paul
By Caryle Murphy and Naseer Nouri
washingtonpost.com
Apr 08, 2005
BAGHDAD, April 7 — In a city where churches have been bombed by
Muslim insurgents and Christians are an imperiled minority, several
hundred Catholics gathered at St. Joseph’s Chaldean Church on Thursday
to attend a special Mass for Pope John Paul II.
Under a golden, late afternoon sun, the worshipers passed through a
protective cordon of red-bereted soldiers from the newly trained,
mostly Muslim Iraqi army. Inside, amid air smoky with incense,
a tearful congregation recalled the Polish-born man who had given
help and hope to Iraq’s dwindling Christian communities.
“The pope won the hearts of everybody because he worked for the
good of all,” said Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly, the head of Iraq’s
Chaldean Catholic Church. John Paul’s death “was a loss not only for
Iraqi Catholics and Christians but indeed it was a loss for the whole
world,” the patriarch said.
Delly concelebrated the Arabic-language Mass with the heads of three
other Catholic communities here — Latin, Armenian and Syrian —
and a representative of the papal nuncio’s office.
“John Paul II has been very close to Iraqis,” Archbishop Jean Sleiman
of Baghdad’s Roman Catholic, or Latin, community said in an interview
this week. “Christians need a protector, or father, someone who
protects them, and I think the pope is one who protected them.”
John Paul opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and criticized the
U.S.-inspired U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Sleiman and Delly both recalled the pope’s disappointment at not
being able to visit Iraq in 1999. “Officially, the regime said it
couldn’t protect him,” Sleiman said, adding that he thought Saddam
Hussein had been “afraid the pope would have more crowds than him.”
Many in the congregation said it was a service they could not miss,
despite the violence that makes travel risky in the Iraqi capital.
“I did not care if it is dangerous to come here today,” said a
government employee who gave only her first name, Haifa. “If I die,
I will die here in the church with Jesus. When you have a soul of
faith, it kills every fear inside your body.”
Iraqi soldiers in pickup trucks were stationed several blocks from
the church in all directions, searching cars, asking for ID cards
and politely asking anyone not going to the service to take an
alternative route.
Most Christians appeared happy with the extensive security. “I feel
so safe,” said Abu Adwar as he walked to the church with his wife
and two children. “And did you notice that there was no American army
around? It is a full Iraqi operation.”
Iraq now has an estimated 800,000 Christians, but another 300,000 have
emigrated since 1991, said Yonadam Kanna, one of six Christians elected
to Iraq’s new National Assembly. Sleiman said his Roman Catholic
community had 60,000 members before the 1991 Persian Gulf War; now
it has around 5,000.
In a display of solidarity, five Shiites, including a black-turbaned
cleric from Iran, attended the Mass for the pope at St. Joseph’s.
“It is a big honor to come here and join our friends and brothers at
this service,” said the Iranian, Ali Akbar Hakim.
“We lost a man who was a symbol for peace, justice and faith in the
world, and we wish that God will replace him with a man like him,”
Hakim said of the pope. “We wish that God will take him to heaven
and give his family and friends the patience to withstand this loss.”
Washington Post Staff Writers