{"id":126,"date":"2008-10-22T08:47:06","date_gmt":"2008-10-22T08:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/religious-cleansing-the-ongoin.html"},"modified":"2008-10-22T08:47:06","modified_gmt":"2008-10-22T08:47:06","slug":"religious-cleansing-the-ongoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/religious-cleansing-the-ongoin.html","title":{"rendered":"“Religious” cleansing: The ongoing nightmare of Iraqi Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Iraqi<\/span>For Iraq’s Christians, “the Surge” has been more like “the Purge” as ethnic and religious fighting continues to decimate this ancient and once-thriving Christian population. Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi Christians numbered about 1.5 million. Now the figure is less than half that, due to expulsion, exodus, and murder. The situation has forced Iraq’s Christians into desperate decisions<\/a>, and in March, the leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, died while being held by kidnappers<\/a>.
\nNow the situation in Mosul is growing especially dire. Reuter’s Vatican correspondent, Phil Pullella, reports today <\/a>that the Vatican is calling on the Iraqi government and human rights groups to do more to protect Christians in Mosul, where half of the minority community has fled after attacks and threats.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Reuters, Pope Benedict’s spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said the Vatican was asking itself if there was “insufficient willingness” on the part of Iraqi authorities to protect Christians.
\n“We are extremely worried about what we are hearing from Iraq,” Lombardi said
\nLast Friday in Geneva, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said about half of the Christians in Iraq’s northern town of Mosul, nearly 10,000 people, had fled in the period of about a week.
\n“The situation in Mosul is dramatic. The victims are Christians and many thousands of people are fleeing precisely because they are subjected not only to the fear of periodic attacks but a systematic campaign of threats,” Lombardi said.
\n“This is extremely worrying and we ask ourselves if these people are sufficiently protected by the authorities or if the authorities are not able to protect them or if there is scarce willingness to protect them,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Reuters photo above shows a displaced Christian woman with a sleeping baby in a room inside al-Saida monastery in Al-Qosh village, 28 miles north of Mosul. “Such is the plight of some 1,500 Christian families who in the past two weeks have fled homes in Iraq’s ethnically mixed, and stubbornly violent, city of Mosul.”
\nAmazingly, religious freedom in Iraq was only incorporated as a goal of the U.S. and Iraqi governments last year, after five years of war. This Monday is the 10th anniversary of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA)<\/a>. There would be no better opportunity, and no better example than Mosul, to take up the cause of Iraq’s church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Iraq’s Christians, “the Surge” has been more like “the Purge” as ethnic and religious fighting continues to decimate this ancient and once-thriving Christian population. Before the U.S. invasion, Iraqi Christians numbered about 1.5 million. Now the figure is less than half that, due to expulsion, exodus, and murder. The situation has forced Iraq’s Christians…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n"Religious" cleansing: The ongoing nightmare of Iraqi Christians - Pontifications<\/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\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/religious-cleansing-the-ongoin.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Religious" cleansing: The ongoing nightmare of Iraqi Christians - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For Iraq’s Christians, “the Surge” has been more like “the Purge” as ethnic and religious fighting continues to decimate this ancient and once-thriving Christian population. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}