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Pope Francis in the Vatican on December 2, 2020. Photo by Reuters reuters_tickers
This content was published on Dec 07, 2020 – Jul 15:22,
By Philip Pullella
Vatican City (Reuters) – The Vatican said on Monday that Pope Francis will make the pope’s first visit to Iraq in March, a risky visit that his predecessors have failed to make.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni stated that the Pope, who will turn eighty-four next week, will visit the capital Baghdad and Ur, which is associated in the Old Testament with the prophet Ibrahim, Erbil, Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain. of Nineveh.
Bruni added that the visit, which comes at the invitation of the Iraqi government and the local Catholic Church, will last from March 5-8.
“The program of visits will be announced later and will take into account the advances in the health emergency situation around the world,” he said in a statement.
This trip abroad will be France’s first in more than a year, as all visits that were scheduled abroad this year were canceled due to the emerging corona virus pandemic.
A Vatican source said one of the goals of the visit is to reassure Christians who have been forced to flee Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries amid wars and conflicts.
Iraqi President Barham Salih wrote on Twitter that the visit “will be an eloquent message to support Iraqis of all walks of life and affirm the unity of humanity in the aspiration for peace, tolerance and confrontation extremism”.
Iraq is home to many different Eastern Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox.
The Christian minority in Iraq, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, in particular suffered hardship when the Islamic State took control of large swaths of the country between 2014 and 2017. Christians have largely regained freedom of worship, especially in the northern Iraq, since the militants were expelled from them.
But many of them fear further unrest in Iraq will seriously harm them as a minority, and they still hope to emigrate.
In June 2019, Pope Francis told members of charities that help Christians in the Middle East that whenever he reflected on the problems in the region, he would always think about visiting Iraq.
He was hoping to make that visit this year, but his plans were canceled first due to security concerns and then due to the pandemic.
And the late Pope John Paul II wanted to visit Ur in Iraq in 2000 as the first stop on a trip that includes Iraq, Egypt and Israel.
But negotiations with the government of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed and he was unable to go.
(Report by John Davison of Baghdad – Prepared by Salma Najm and Doaa Muhammad for the Arab Bulletin – Edited by Mustafa Saleh)
