{"id":4436,"date":"2006-11-22T09:04:25","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T09:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-road-to-damascus.html"},"modified":"2006-11-22T09:04:25","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T09:04:25","slug":"the-road-to-damascus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-road-to-damascus.html","title":{"rendered":"The Road to Damascus"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Syria on the Iraqi refugee situation:<\/a><\/p>\n

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According to Mgr Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Catholic leaders in Syria are grappling with a massive 25,000 refugees desperate to escape from Iraq. During a recent visit to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the prelate stressed that Syria had received the vast majority of refugees and added that the Iraqis arriving in Damascus had been given \u201ca warm welcome\u201d for which they were very grateful. He said that the refugees had packed into Damascus, with the authorities allowing them in without visas and supporting the efforts of Catholic leaders to provide accommodation and access to health care.<\/p>\n

Bishop Audo went on to thank ACN for the emergency packages dispatched since the Iraqis began arriving in Syria after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He explained that in recent months there had been an explosion in the number of refugees from Iraq and that ACN\u2019s help had also funded urgent hospital operations for the refugees. The bishop reported that another part of the aid was going towards catechesis for up to 300 children. \u201cThere is a big need to help the people in Damascus. We cannot provide a solution for all the problems but we are doing whatever we can. We are very grateful to Aid to the Church in Need.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Cover\"<\/a> Do go read the news page and more of the ACN site if you never have before. What they do is exactly what the name of the group suggests: support the work of the Church in the poorest areas of the globe, in projects ranging from assisting in the support of impoverished religious communities, catechetical materials (see the post below the one I quoted for how the group helped in a simple project in Nicaragua) and so on. Their largest and most well-known effort is their Bible for Children, now available in 150 languages.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Syria on the Iraqi refugee situation: According to Mgr Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Catholic leaders in Syria are grappling with a massive 25,000 refugees desperate to escape from Iraq. During a recent visit to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the prelate stressed that Syria had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Road to Damascus - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-road-to-damascus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Road to Damascus - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Syria on the Iraqi refugee situation: According to Mgr Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Catholic leaders in Syria are grappling with a massive 25,000 refugees desperate to escape from Iraq. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}