From the AP via the International Herald Tribune: Iraq’s Christian minority flees from violence
BAGHDAD: Despite the chaos and sectarian violence raging across Baghdad, Farouq Mansour felt relatively safe as a Christian living in a multiethnic neighborhood in the capital.
Then, two months ago, al-Qaida gunmen kidnapped him and demanded his family convert to Islam or pay a US$30,000 ransom. Two weeks later, he paid up, was released and immediately fled to Syria, joining a mass exodus of Iraq’s increasingly threatened Christian minority.
“There is no future for us in Iraq,” Mansour said.
Though Islamic extremists have targeted Iraqi Christians before, bombing churches and threatening religious leaders, the latest attacks have taken on a far more personal tone, with many Christians being expelled from their homes and forced to leave their possessions behind, police, human rights groups and residents said.
The Christian community here, about 3 percent of the country’s 26 million people, is particularly vulnerable. It has little political or military clout to defend itself, and some Islamic insurgents view it as a fifth column —” calling Christians “Crusaders” —” whose real loyalty lies with the U.S. troops they are fighting.
Many churches are now nearly empty during religious services, with much of their flock either gone or too scared to attend. Only about 30 people sat scattered among the pews at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the relatively safe Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah during this week’s Sunday Mass. About two dozen worshippers took communion in the barren St. Mary’s Church in the northern city of Kirkuk on Sunday…
After I had read that article, I came across an article on church closings at the Buffalo News. In Under canon law, Catholic parishes rarely ‘close’ I found the following:
Closing a parish is a rare and rather involved legal process that extends all the way to the Vatican.
…
—No parish is really ever closed unless there are no Catholics left there,— said Litwin. —In reality, what seem to be closings are not really closings. You’re closing buildings perhaps, but you’re merging parish boundaries.—
The Vatican clarified the issue last summer in a letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in which Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, a high-ranking prelate, wrote: —Only with great difficulty can one say that a parish becomes extinct.—
—A parish is extinguished by the law itself only if no Catholic community any longer exists in its territory, or if no pastoral activity has taken place for a hundred years,— Hoyos wrote, according to the Catholic News Service…
President Bush has done quite the job in ridding Iraq of Christians. By 2108 the Canons regarding church closings will become operative. No Christians, no pastoral activity, no churches in Iraq.
Mr. Bush is the real problem, not the jihadists pushing dhimmitude, who in reality have been given license to run rampant under the ‘government, we don’t need no stinkin’ government’ situation in Iraq.
I would say, beyond much doubt, that President Bush considers the Christians of the Middle East anything but Christians, maybe dogs, but certainly not Christians.
You see, our President is firmly aligned with the Evangelicals whose rhetoric, practice, and belief, denies the fact that anyone of the ‘catholic’ persuasion is a Christian at all.
- Christians in Lebanon – nope.
- Christians in Iraq – nope
- The Orthodox, Romans, Orientals – who dat.
- Christians in Israel – just those awaiting the rapture
Mr. Bush, pay attention to scripture. A house divided and all…
You are working against these ancient communities of faith, and the responsibility for their fall lies at your feet. You’ve just about accomplished what the Roman Emperors, the Hun, the Horde, the Sultans, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-il, all combined couldn’t accomplish. You’ve just about rid a huge chunk of the earth of Christianity.
