The Pope’s most senior adviser on refugees has compared attacks on Christians in Iraq to the Holocaust, write Hannah Roberts and Jonathan Luxmoore.
Cardinal Antonio Maria Vegliò, the president of the Pontifical Council for Migrants, has urged the international community to take action to protect minorities in Iraq, warning there would be no excuses if nothing was done.
“It would be the same thing as when Hitler killed the Jews, and many said ‘we did not know anything.’ It is total hypocrisy,” he said.
The so-called Islamic State (IS) which controls large areas of both Syria and Iraq, has forced more than a million religious minorities, including Christians, to flee their homes, slaughtering thousands.
Cardinal Vegliò told Vatican Radio that the Church must lead efforts to defend the vulnerable.
Pope Francis has telephoned a priest who wrote to him saying that he did not know if he could keep his flock alive. Fr Behnam Benoka, running a makeshift clinic near Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, wrote: “Here we are in a valley of darkness in the middle of a great pack of ferocious wolves.”
The head of the World Jewish Congress attacked the “shameless failure” of Western leaders and personalities to speak out against the IS’s “medieval murder orgies”.
“Historians will look back at this time and ask whether people had again lost their sense of direction,” Ronald Lauder said in an article in Austria’s Die Presse daily. “There are no flotillas to Syria or Iraq, and the social radars of all the beautiful celebrities and ageing rock stars don’t apparently extend to slaughter of Christians.”
The Vatican’s Permanent Observer at the UN, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, condemned the “global silence” on the crisis. The Prince of Wales wrote to the Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako on 22 August expressing his “heartbreak” over the suffering of Christians in Iraq in the face of “barbaric persecution”, and offering a donation through the charity Aid to the Church in Need.
In an article in this week’s Tablet headlined “Papal adviser likens attacks of Iraqi Christians to the start of the Holocaust” we stated that ACN released the letter from The Prince of Wales, but that is not the case and the letters came into the public domain by other means.
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