Blogs For Victory

The sufferings of the Christians in Iraq continues:

Mosul, Mar. 13, 2008 (CWNews.com) – Archbishop Bishop Paulos Faraj Raho of Mosul, the Iraqi prelate who was kidnapped by gunmen on February 29, is dead.

The kidnappers of the Chaldean Catholic archbishop, who had been demanding a heavy ransom, told Church officials that the archbishop was dead, AsiaNews reports. The kidnappers reportedly gave instructions on how Church officials could recover the archbishop’s body.

Archbishop Raho was seized outside the Holy Spirit cathedral in Mosul after conducting a Stations of the Cross service on Friday, February 29. His driver and two bodyguards were killed by the gunmen who abducted the archbishop.

In the days since the kidnapping, Church leaders had pleaded in vain for some clear evidence that Archbishop Raho was alive and well. The archbishop, who was 69, suffered from a serious heart condition and needed daily medication. It remains unclear whether Archbishop Raho died of that heart ailment or was killed by his abductors.

Informed of the prelate’s death, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement condemning “an act of inhuman violence that offends the dignity of the human being.”

The critics are as-usual on this – because evil men killed a good man, our effort in Iraq is a failure. The critics, however, are easily and best ignored these days; so invested in defeat are they that they no longer even approach rationality.

But it cannot be denied that the situation of Iraqi Christians is desperate – in spite of many efforts on the part of Iraqi Moslems to do the right thing, the small Iraqi Christian community is all too easy as a scapegoat for any radical and/or criminal group which wants to make a point, or even just make a buck. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that the Christians of Iraq need the protection – as the Kurds have – provided by having an autonomous region of their own. There was a move a few years ago to make the Assyrian area of northern Iraq a self-governing region, and we should look into that (while Christians are scattered around Iraq, most Iraqi Christians live in Assyria).

While this horrible tragedy has brought real sadness to me, I refuse to be stampeded into folly – Iraq must remain a united nation, lest Iran and Syria gain by a carve up of the Iraqi body politic. Outside of such puresly strategic considerations, the fate of our effort in Iraq hinges upon the ability of a majority Moslem nation to engage in a pluralistic democracy which accords respect to ethnic and religious minorities. If we carved up Iraq along confessional and/or ethnic lines, we’d just be substituting a multitude of problems for a single problem. The Iraqis must move forward, together – Sunnis and Shia; Moslem and Christian; Arab and Kurd; only thus can Iraq take its rightful place amongst the nations of the world, and serve as an example for an exhausted and dispirited Arab/Moslem world, weighed down by centuries of oppression.