Archbishop of Erbil says Christians in Iraq have become 'convinced this country is not theirs'

Cardinal Vincent Nichols welcomed the Archbishop of Erbil, Bashar Warda, to Westminster Cathedral on Wednesday 11 February 2015. 

After Mass, Archbishop Bashar gave an address at the Cathedral Hall about the situation of Iraqi Christians since the summer. He explained that "the population curve of Christians dropped in a dramatic and alarming way" and expressed his fears that Christians and "other ethnic communities will disappear altogether" from Iraq.

Sounding a sad note, he said: "Christians in Iraq have come to an absolute conviction that this country is not theirs, and that whatever they do they would still find no place among others."

Read the full address below: 

In the First Reading we have just heard, which is from the Book of Genesis, the word of God gave hope to the people of Israel during the time of captivity in Babylon. These words comforted the afflicted as they experienced exile from Jerusalem, the Promised Land. Theirs was a life without homes, without land, work and nowhere for their children to develop and grow. They had lost their kingdom, they had nowhere to express their culture in which the commemoration of past victories was always marked in splendour. Their past had been destroyed as well as their future. Theirs was a life in which they were unable to offer prayer in the Temple because of course it had been destroyed. We hear in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying: ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

Those dispossessed people of whom the Psalmist speaks put me in mind of 21,000 families – 125,000 Christians in total – who took refuge in Kurdish northern Iraq in schools, churches, parks, and indeed incomplete buildings – anywhere capable of providing shelter. Nearly two-thirds of them came to my diocese, which is based in Ankawa, a suburb of the Kurdish capital, Erbil. In fact, 3,000 of them found shelter outside my cathedral – St Joseph’s. They had escaped from their homes in Mosul and Nineveh when forces from Islamic State advanced last August. They may have escaped captivity but they have lost everything. Day and night, all they experience is emptiness. That is how they feel. Each of them can be forgiven if at times they feel that theirs is a life without the breath of God, the love of God. Days, weeks, months have passed without hope. This is the life of our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

We urgently need to hear the good news of God once again to comfort us; we must pray that sin may not have the final word and that God’s grace will come to cleanse them of their sins. We need to remember that we have been fashioned by the hand of God to carry out a mission. God has something special he wants each of us to do. In the Reading from Genesis we hear “…a flood was rising from the Earth and watering all the surface of the soil. The Lord God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and thus man became a living being.”

This is the Good News which we are invited to hear today. We need to be aware of the evil which has totally destroyed the lives of Christians in Iraq. Theirs is a situation of captivity in which some people feel hopeless and feel that God has abandoned his people.

We should –like the disciples in today’s Gospel – enter the house to be close to Jesus and ask him what we should do. We know that he will teach us to have faith in our mission and to breathe God’s spirit into the world, a spirit of love and hope and that we should take care of the Garden of Eden which he has planted within us. This, we know, is possible if we adhere to his loving words and always trust in his loving and guiding hand at work in our lives. God continues to give us new hope, helping us to breathe his spirit in the world around us. Let us all pray that he will empower us to be his disciples. We would like also to pray for all who have helped us by sharing with us our sufferings. And I would like here especially to thank the friends and benefactors of Aid to the Church in Need and Iraqi Christians in Need and so many other organisations. You have been for us God’s breath, a sign of solidarity. You have reminded us that we have not been forgotten, or abandoned. When we were tempted to think that God has gone and that the powers of darkness have overtaken us, you have been a sign of God’s constant presence and a light that points us the way to Jesus.