Westminster Diocese says no to church for Chaldeans

CATHOLIC REFUGEES from Iraq want their own spiritual home in Britain where they can save their language and customs from dying out, the head of their mission said, writes Abigail Frymann Rouch.

Fr Nadheer Dako, who ministers to the 4,000 Chaldeans across Britain who have fled increasing hostility in Iraq, said that when the Archbishop of Erbil visited London, he had asked Cardinal Vincent Nichols for a church but had been refused.

Fr Nadheer said the Chaldeans were not just another ethnic chaplaincy and were “facing genocide”.

Two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.4 million Christians have left their homeland in the decade following the United States-led invasion of 2003, with thousands fleeing  after the fall of Mosul to Islamic State (IS) last summer.

Fr Nadheer, who survived two abduction attempts by al-Qaeda when a priest in Baghdad, said that since the rapid advances of IS “[in Britain] nobody’s thinking about going back. Our people are afraid of losing their culture and traditions.”