Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, the Patriarch of Babylon, has urged all Iraqis to “be patient and do not give up hope” in a statement condemning corruption in his country.
The statement published on the patriarchate’s website last week said: “Chaos cannot continue forever in defiance of human integrity and moral, religious and national values.”
Sako said that crimes against the Iraqi people would be punished in time, insisting that “the corrupt and hypocrites have no future”.
He was writing from Erbil in Kurdistan, where he temporarily moved his patriarchal seat in July after President Abdul Latif Rashid revoked a 2013 decree which gave “institutional recognition” to Sako’s office as head of the Chaldean Church – the Eastern Catholic denomination to which most of Iraq’s Christian minority belongs.
The patriarch included the revocation in a list of recent affronts to Christians, alongside attacks by Islamic State. He suggested that it was “in response to improper information from certain militia members”, a reference to Rayan al-Kaldani, the leader of the pro-Iranian Babylon Brigades which Sako has accused of hijacking Christian rights and property in the Nineveh Plain.
Sako has called the revocation a “moral assassination” and rejected government attempts to placate him, saying that it defied the law and left his Church’s property vulnerable to seizure.
His statement demanded action against corruption to promote a “culture of true fraternity, values of citizenship, and preserve public fortune and properties, so as to achieve a safe, free and dignified life for the nation”.
Saad Saloum, the president of the Baghdad-based Masarat Foundation which promotes minority rights, told Asia News that this was “a crisis in the representation of Christians themselves” because the patriarch was “the voice of Christians in Iraq”.
Bishops from across the world have written to express their solidarity with the patriarch, including the Bishop of Clifton Declan Lang, on behalf of the bishops of England and Wales, and Cardinal Michael Fitzgerald M.Afr, the patron of Fellowship and Aid to the Christians of the East (FACE) which arranged Sako’s recent visit to the UK.
Cardinal Fitzgerald said he hoped “that the patriarchate will still remain in Baghdad, and that you will be recognised as the legal representative of the patriarchate”.
The Archbishop of Birmingham Bernard Longley also wrote to voice his support, remembering the patriarch’s visit and “the opportunity that you gave us to grow in appreciation of the Chaldean Church”.
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