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Recent events in Mosul and the threat of annihilation of the Iraqi Christians by ISIS can only be described as horrific and the likes of which has not been seen since the 7th century AD. An 1800 year-old Syriac Catholic Church is desecrated and burnt to the ground. There has been sadly scare media coverage of this tragedy in the Western media.

Neville Kyrke-Smith, National Director of Aid to the Church in Need, issued an appeal for people to join UK Iraqi Christians in an act of solidarity outside the Houses of Parliament on Saturday (26 July) at 12 noon.

The event, organised by Eastern-rite Church leaders in London, follows reports that over the past few days more than 1,500 people have fled Mosul city, northern Iraq.

Mr Kyrke-Smith asked that supporters unable to come to Saturday's demonstration "join us in prayer" at 12 noon by saying the Angelus prayer to the Virgin Mary for all people suffering in the Middle East.

Therefore in solidarity with our suffering brothers and sisters of Mosul, the Eastern Iraqi churches led by the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop Toma Dawood, Syrian Catholic Monsignor Nizar Semaan, Chaldean Catholic Father Nadheer, Ancient Church of the East Corepiscopos (Khoury) Fr Dr Khoshaba, Eastern Assyrian Father Tony and others are joining forces together with their communities and supporters from all parts of Britain in a demonstration in London on Saturday 26th July. Please attend if you possibly can and encourage your friends and family to do same.

The assembly will start at 11:30 near Parliament Square.
Then the demonstrators will move from the assembly point to stand in solidarity outside the Parliament building for a period of time followed by a march towards 10 Downing Street.

We look forward to your participation to illustrate your solidarity with the displaced and suffering Christians of Mosul and Iraq.

The event will be covered by the media.

Please show your support, join us either in person or in prayer and please share this event with all of your friends, so that many can stand in solidarity with our persecuted brethren against this travesty.

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I would travel to London to attend such - but I'm now afraid of getting into an airplane . . .

Alex

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Where are the Catholics and Orthodox (not to mention Protestant, but sadly, I don't expect much sympathy from them due to cultural differences) in the USA to gather in the thousands about this outrageous genocide??

A few hundred (only) Iraqi Christians and some kind Muslims protested outside the White House with signs asking "Obama, where are you?"

I won't answer that.

And we dare to affect a higher moral ground than other nations and leaders?

I would gladly attend such an organized event in my city if there was one.




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Rev. Mr. Michael Rogers, S.J. Become a fan
Jesuit Priest
Losing Our Religion: The Death of Christian Mosul
Posted: 07/24/2014 12:43 pm EDT Updated: 07/24/2014 12:59 pm EDT

Despite a modest Internet uptick due to social media, no one in the mainstream media is adequately covering this story. The stakes are high, dire, and apply to all of humanity. This is a news story which far supersedes the 75th anniversary of Batman, the advent of the iPhone 6, or anything that Kim and Kanye are up to, and yet no one is hearing enough about it. The advance of ISIS in Syria and Iraq has all but wiped out some of the most ancient Christian communities. Some of the most important early Christian manuscripts which resided in monasteries there have been burned. There are pictures of people being crucified. Priests who have been encouraging dialogue and peace for years in the region have been dragged from their homes, shot, and killed. There is more than one account of nuns being raped. Now the arabic letter "nuun," which in this case stands for Nazarene, is scribbled across the doors of the Christian minority who are then driven from their homes.

After the 1930s, after the Jewish populations of Europe were driven from their homes into the ghettos, after they were forced to wear the symbol of the Star of David to identify themselves, and after what they held most dear was destroyed on the Kristallnacht, we did nothing. We are doing nothing again. After we realized during the liberation of Germany and Poland in the second World War that six million Jewish people had been systematically exterminated we collectively as humanity said "never again!" Words don't express how right we were right to do so.

Almost 70 years have passed, however, and we have collectively allowed it to continue. In Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia and Sudan, we have stood by while people were killed for their religion, their economic status, or simply the lighter or darker color of their skin. Our "never again," was never strong enough, never intentional enough, and the horrors that we witnessed at Auschwitz have played themselves out over and over again. Martin Niemöller is said to have once said that at the end of everyone else being persecuted, that at last they would come for him. The prophecy has been fulfilled for Christians. We did not speak out enough, and at last the extremists have come for us. Our complacency as Christians has come home to roost and there is, once again, a martyr Church. People are crucified, churches destroyed and, as with every other genocide since 1945, the world seems to continue along on the myth that the Shoah was the definitive genocide to end all genocides, that it could never happen again, and we are losing an important part of the soul of western civilization as a result.

The community being killed is the community that still speaks Aramaic, the common everyday language of Jesus. As a person who describes themselves as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, a general theist, Atheist, "spiritual but not religious," or as someone who has given no thought to religion at all, this should trouble you profoundly. If we lose this language we lose the language of a man whom everyone must acknowledge, believer or not, that has profoundly influenced and shaped western culture, and therefore our global culture as well. We need this language to survive, we need to keep studying it, understanding it, and learning from it if we ever wish to understand so much of what our emerging global reality is based in, regardless of any distaste that we might have for western hegemony.

The community being destroyed holds ancient texts the depths of which we are just beginning to understand, many of which are or have been destroyed. I have good friends who are scholars of the early Christian Church who recount to me, with horror, the incredible documents which have been destroyed. Whether you are a liberal Catholic charging the gates of Fort Benning every November, or a member of the Southern Baptist Convention lining the pockets of Ted Cruz for the next election, this should cry to heaven for redress in your mind. We Christians are losing core documents of our early faith and documents that are in some cases very close to scripture. We are losing some documents that we have yet to fully understand. We are losing a connection to the early Church community. We are losing a connection to the earthly life of Christ himself. For a Christian, of any denomination, acting on behalf of the poor and suffering of Syria and Iraq is not only a part of the obvious obligation for the love of the least, poorest, and most vulnerable that we find in Matthew 25, its a obvious obligation for the love of Christ himself.

The community being destroyed is a community of human beings. This is what is most important. To say more than this is honestly to say too much. No one should ever have to write more than the first sentence of this paragraph to raise the outrage of all of humanity against genocide. When genocide occurs, wherever, whenever, to whomever, we should all stop it. Period. It doesn't matter what one believes. These are people with the same hopes and dreams that each of us have. These are people who laugh and who cry. They could be us, and that is is not us is a mere accident of circumstance. We need to once again, finally and fully, cry out "never again!" We need to demand action from our lawmakers. We need to demand that the press cover this story fully and fairly. We need to pray, we need to hope, and we need to find a way forward in love.

I won't pretend right now to know what that way is, but unless we finally and fully begin to talk about the horrific tragedy which seems to once again be playing itself out after we had said no to it so many years ago, history seems doomed to repeat itself.

Huffpost article [huffingtonpost.com]

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I have said before that if the current leadership of the Catholic Church and the U.S. had been in office during Lepanto, we would all be Turkish citizens - maybe second class citizens. I don't think we have any real leaders anymore who are strong enough to do anything. All they can do is talk.

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Dear Charles,

If we had the Catholic leadership in place from back then, you and I would be great devotees of the Rosary!! smile

Which I'm sure you are . . .

I visited the site of the Battle of Lepanto and also venerated the Crucifix of the Black Christ in Barcelona that was at that battle.

Alex

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Where are the Catholics and Orthodox (not to mention Protestant, but sadly, I don't expect much sympathy from them due to cultural differences) in the USA to gather in the thousands about this outrageous genocide??

Alice:

Christ is in our midst!!

I think that since the Enlightenment the West thinks it's beyond going to war for religion; that religion is to be something personal and kept to oneself. Look at the secularization of the West and how Christians here are under persecution, though not so overt. Our elites and media despise a Christianity that stands for anything and does not conform to the culture and the current fads in both belief and morals.

I also think that Christians of the West don't have a clue about the importance of this heritage largely because they are entirely ignorant of it. For people in the U.S. it's tough to get beyond such rudimentary catechesis of the Faith that anything like being aware of its long history is beyond the horizon of most. The Bible Christian could not care less; the Catholic doesn't care because they're not Latin.

Sadly we are entering an era where we are under persecution everywhere but large numbers of nominal Christians don't seem to be aware or care.

Bob

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If we had the Catholic leadership in place from back then, you and I would be great devotees of the Rosary!!

Unless we were living in the part of the east bordering Europe, we probably would have never heard of the rosary. A Latin devotion sometimes practiced by Latinized easterners, or so I hear. wink

I have nothing against the devotion, but much prefer the chotki to the rosary. All prayer is good, but not every prayer works for everyone.

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Alice, I just saw that France is offering asylum to Iraq Christians.

Iraq Christians [news.msn.com]


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