{"id":3345,"date":"2007-11-29T15:45:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2007\/11\/in-baghdad-things-are-the-most-difficult-theyve-ever-been-for-christians.html"},"modified":"2007-11-29T15:45:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T15:45:00","slug":"in-baghdad-things-are-the-most-difficult-theyve-ever-been-for-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/11\/in-baghdad-things-are-the-most-difficult-theyve-ever-been-for-christians.html","title":{"rendered":"In Baghdad: “Things are the most difficult they’ve ever been for Christians”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A leading Christian in Iraq is speaking out about conditions there — and, not surprisingly, the picture he paints is grim<\/a>:<\/p>\n

An Anglican clergyman in Baghdad, who has seen his flock murdered and forced into exile by Muslim extremists, says Christians there are worse off now than under Saddam’s rule and are probably suffering more than any time in history. <\/p>\n

The Rev. Canon Andrew White, an Anglican priest known as the “Vicar of Baghdad,” speaks to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley for a segment on the persecution of Christians in Iraq to be broadcast this Sunday, Dec. 2, at 7 p.m. ET\/PT. <\/p>\n

“There’s no comparison between Iraq now and [under Saddam],” says White. “Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians – probably ever in history,” he tells Pelley, referring to the nearly 2,000 years of Christian history in the area. That’s because White estimates that 90 percent of Iraq’s Christians, once thought to number over a million, have either fled or have been murdered by Islamic extremists during the religious civil war. <\/p>\n

That includes his own church leaders and most of the men of his parish. “They are mainly killed. Some are kidnapped,” says White. “Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed.” Their bodies were never recovered. “This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here, but it\u2019s not easy to get the bodies,” White tells Pelley. <\/p>\n

White invited 60 Minutes cameras to an underground Baghdad service for what’s left of his congregation, mostly the old, the ill and those who cannot afford to flee. The purge is almost complete in the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, once a Christian stronghold, and the recent surge of American troops also has stemmed some of the violence. “I don\u2019t see a lot of [Christian murder victims] anymore,” says Army Col. Rick Gibbs. “But when we first arrived, we saw lots of that. It would not surprise my soldiers to walk down a street on patrol and see three or four bodies laying in the street with a bullet behind their head,” says Gibbs. <\/p>\n

At the height of the violence, churches were bombed and the Army did not guard them, Gibbs says. “[Christians] feel that if we are overtly protecting the churches, that someone underground covertly will come in and murder the Christians because they are collaborating with the U.S. forces,” Gibbs tells Pelley. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A leading Christian in Iraq is speaking out about conditions there — and, not surprisingly, the picture he paints is grim: An Anglican clergyman in Baghdad, who has seen his flock murdered and forced into exile by Muslim extremists, says Christians there are worse off now than under Saddam’s rule and are probably suffering more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-ripped-from-the-headlines"],"yoast_head":"\nIn Baghdad: "Things are the most difficult they've ever been for Christians" - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/11\/in-baghdad-things-are-the-most-difficult-theyve-ever-been-for-christians.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Baghdad: "Things are the most difficult they've ever been for Christians" - 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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}