By Catholic News Service
Having witnessed or experienced persecution for their faith, Pope Francis told Christians of Iraq that they must be careful not to harbour revengeful thoughts.
After a full morning paying tribute to the victims of Islamic State violence, the Holy Father reached the last major event of his trip to Iraq: Mass on 7 March with some 10,000 people at Irbil’s Franso Hariri Stadium. Many ignored the social distancing measures, and few wore the masks they were required to have because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Irbil, capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region in northern Iraq, hosts Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands of displaced people, particularly Christians, from Mosul, Qaraqosh and other towns that had been under the thumb of Islamic State militants from 2014 to 2017.
After blessing the altar with incense, Pope Francis blessed Mary’s partially restored statue from a parish in Karmless. The Islamic State militants decapitated the figure and cut off its hands. The restoration re-attached the head but left the hands dangling.
“Here in Iraq, how many of your brothers and sisters, friends and fellow citizens bear the wounds of war and violence, wounds both visible and invisible,” the Vicar of Christ told the crowd.
“The temptation is to react to these and other painful experiences with human power, human wisdom,” but the path of Jesus was to serve, to heal, to love and to offer his life for others.
Pope Francis told Iraqi Christians that when they suffer discrimination, persecution or war, the Eight Beatitudes are addressed.
“Whatever the world takes from us is nothing compared to the tender and patient love with which the Lord fulfils his promises,” the pontiff told the congregation sitting inside and outside the Chaldean Catholic Cathedral of St Joseph on 6 March.
“Dear sister, dear brother, perhaps when you look at your hands, they seem empty, perhaps you feel disheartened and unsatisfied by life,” he said in his homily.
“If so, do not be afraid: The beatitudes are for you – for you who are afflicted, who hunger and thirst for justice, who are persecuted. The Lord promises you that your name is written on his heart, written in Heaven!”
According to the Vatican, the service marked the first time Pope Francis celebrated a eucharistic liturgy, “the Holy Qurbana,” in the rite of the Chaldean Church. While he recited the prayers in Italian, Cardinal Louis Sako, the Chaldean patriarch, and members of the congregation prayed in Chaldean, a modern Aramaic form. The Bible readings were in Arabic.
Iraqi President Barham Salih and Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein attended the liturgy, which included a prayer for government officials, asking God to help them be “examples of honesty for the common good” and “know how to collaborate for a renewed world in which liberty and harmony reign”.
One of the prayers of the faithful, recited in Arabic, echoed Pope Francis’ homily. “Benevolent Father, sustain your holy church with the strength of the Spirit so that it would courageously witness to Christ and would be for our country a sign of reconciliation and solidarity among all the children of Abraham, our father in faith.”
Travelling to Abraham’s birthplace, Pope Francis urged believers to prove their faith in the one God and father of all by accepting one another as brothers and sisters.
From a stage set on a dusty hill overlooking the archaeological dig at Ur, Abraham’s birthplace about 10 miles from modern-day Nasiriyah, the Holy Father called on representatives of the country’s religious communities to denounce all violence committed in God’s name and to work together to rebuild their country.
“From this place, where faith was born, from the land of our father Abraham, let us affirm that God is merciful and that the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters,” the 266th Pope told the representatives.
“Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion,” he insisted.
Pope Francis arrived in Ur after a 45-minute early morning meeting in Najaf with 90-year-old Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s most authoritative figures.
At the large interreligious meeting later, with the Ziggurat of Ur, a partially reconstructed Bronze-Age pagan temple, visible in the haze, Pope Francis insisted that when Jews, Christians and Muslims make a pilgrimage to Abraham’s birthplace, they are going home, back to the place that reminds them they are brothers and sisters.
In a low-key meeting followed closely in Iraq and beyond, Pope Francis and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the influential leader of Shiite Muslims in Iraq, spent 45 minutes speaking privately.
The 90-year-old Ayatollah, who turns down most meeting requests, issued a statement after his encounter in Najaf with Pope Francis on 6 March, saying that world religious leaders should work to hold “great powers” to account, calling upon them “to give priority to reason and wisdom, to reject the language of war, and not to expand concern for their self-interests over the rights of people to live in freedom and dignity”.
Pope Francis “underlined the importance of collaboration and friendship among religious communities so that, cultivating mutual respect and dialogue, they can contribute to the good of Iraq, the region and all humanity,” the Vatican said in a statement.
The meeting, the Vatican said, also gave the Holy Father a chance to thank the Ayatollah and the Iraqi Shiite community, which “raised their voices in defence of the weakest and the persecuted, affirming the sacredness of human life and the importance of the unity of the Iraqi people” when Islamic State militants were on a rampage from 2014 to 2017.
In Iraq – like in Iran, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan – more than 60 per cent of Muslims are Shiite. Worldwide, though, Shiites are a minority, making up less than 15 per cent of the Muslim community. Most Muslims are Sunni. The two communities, which share the fundamental beliefs of Islam, separated early in the religion’s history in a dispute over who should lead the community after Muhammad’s death.