It is the big day for the Catholics of Iraq.
Pope Francis flew from Rome this Friday morning for a historic trip under very high protection and despite the pandemic, to a martyred country where he intends to comfort one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, destroyed by conflicts and persecutions.
The 84-year-old sovereign pontiff, who has said he will make the first-ever papal visit to Iraq as a "pilgrim of peace," will also reach out to Shia Muslims by meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest authority for many Shiites from Iraq and the world.
During this four-day visit to several cities in the country, the Pope should often be alone on the roads - which have been redone for the occasion - due to total containment decreed in this country where the number of contaminations has beaten this week, a record since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic, with more than 5,000 new cases per day.
Travel without crowds
The leader of the 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, who said he was "caged" in recent months, in a Vatican idling because of the pandemic, will begin an armored car trip without crowds.
Its stages in the four corners of the country will bring together only a few hundred people, with the exception of a Sunday mass in a stadium in Erbil in Kurdistan, in the presence of several thousand faithful who have reserved their places in advance.
The rest of the time, the Iraqis will be able to follow the sovereign pontiff on television or by air, since the pope will fly over by plane or helicopter over several areas of the country, where jihadists from the Islamic State (IS) group are still sometimes hiding.
The papal program is ambitious.
Baghdad, Najaf, Ur, Erbil, Mosul, Qaraqosh: from Friday to Monday, it will travel 1,445 km in a country still struck Wednesday by deadly rocket fire, the latest episode of Iranian-American tensions still latent in Iraq.
READ ALSO>
Five minutes to understand the escalation between the United States and Iran
This first trip abroad in fifteen months will allow the Pope to meet a small community of the faithful on the “peripheries” of the planet, by far what he prefers.
For Saad al-Rassam, a Christian in Mosul, still in reconstruction after the anti-IS war, the trip is timely in this country which has seen its poverty rate double to 40% of the population in 2020. “We hope that the pope will explain to the government that he must help his people, ”he told AFP.
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
As always, François will begin Friday with a speech to the Iraqi leaders.
Beyond the security or economic difficulties that the 40 million Iraqis suffer head on, they will surely evoke the additional trauma of Christians.
When in 2014, ISIS took the Nineveh Plain, a Christian stronghold in the north, tens of thousands of residents fled and few now trust the police who then abandoned them, they say.
Tomorrow I will go to #Irak for a three day pilgrimage.
For a long time, I have wanted to meet these people who have suffered so much.
I ask you to accompany this journey with prayer, so that it unfolds in the best possible way and bears the hoped-for fruits.
- Pope Francis (@Pontifex_fr) March 4, 2021
“Some had a few minutes to decide whether they wanted to leave or be beheaded,” recalls Father Karam Qacha.
"We had to leave everything, except our faith", sums up this Chaldean priest in Nineveh, denouncing the little help from the government to Christians to recover their houses or their land, often monopolized by militiamen - sometimes Christians themselves - or relatives of politicians.
Return of Christians to Iraq
According to Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, who heads the “Congregation for Oriental Churches” in the Vatican and accompanies the Pope on his journey, Francis should ask Iraqi Catholics to stay or return to the country, where they are no longer. than 400,000, compared to 1.5 million twenty years ago.
A call for a “compulsory” but “difficult” return, agrees Cardinal Sandri, as Iraq has been in a political or economic crisis for 40 years.
According to the “Aid to the Church in Need” foundation, only 36,000 of the 102,000 Christians who left Nineveh have returned.
And among them, a third say they plan to leave the country by 2024 for fear of militias and because of unemployment, corruption and discrimination.
On Saturday and for the first time in history, the Pope will be received in the holy city of Najaf (south) by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani himself, a frail 90-year-old man who has never appeared in public.
The Pope will also participate in a prayer in Ur, birthplace of Abraham in the tribal and rural South, with Shiite, Sunni, Yazidi and Sabaean dignitaries.
