Dear Friends,

You may have read in the news about the death of the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Raho. He was kidnapped in Mosul a few weeks ago by an insurgent group who demanded that the Chaldean church pay a hefty ransom. A few days ago we heard the news that Bishop Faraj passed away. There was a huge ceremony for his burial yesterday in the Christian town of Karamles, about halfway between Erbil and Mosul. I went with the fathers and all the students from the seminary to attend the event. I’ll try to describe a little bit about the meaning and the context of this tragedy as it looks from here.

When the earliest “Christians” first began preaching the message of Jesus of Nazareth, some of his followers traveled east to the land of the Assyrians in what is now Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey. The Assyrian church that grew there over the centuries followed an Eastern orthodox tradition at the same time that Christianity was making its way across Europe. The ancient city of Ninevah (which is now Mosul) was an important center for Eastern Christians. In the 7th century tribes of new “Muslims” marched out of the Arabian peninsula and established the capital of the new Islamic empire first in Damascus and later in Baghdad. Arab language and culture was new to the Aramaic-speaking Christians in the region, who became concentrated in what is now northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. The Chaldean church grew out of the larger Assyrian church in the 16th century when the Roman Catholic Pope named one of the Assyrian bishops the new Patriarch of the Chaldean church. Because of this early connection to Rome, even though the Chaldean church is an independent Eastern tradition, since its inception it has always been affiliated with the Catholic church. Today it’s called the Chaldean Catholic Church.

St. Peter’s seminary in Ankawa (where I live) is an important hub and symbol for the Chaldean church in Iraq as the place where its future leaders are nurtured and educated. It used to be in Baghdad, along with Babel Pontifical College where I teach. When U.S. troops arrived in 2003, priests recall that is was not controversial for church leaders to be in contact with U.S. military personnel. Sometimes they celebrated mass for the soldiers or worked with the military on small reconstruction projects. But as the months rolled on and the new, secure, democratic system that U.S. architects of the war assumed would take hold in Iraq never did, latent tensions between religious communities in Baghdad sprouted into open conflict. Priests and bishops became targets of threats and violence along with their parishioners, especially in the Christian neighborhood of Dora. Armed militias opposing the U.S. occupation and whatever status quo came with it began kidnapping church leaders both to drive Christians away and as a source of revenue. Some of the priests who survived these ordeals say that the kidnapper’s hostility is first directed at the church’s affiliation with the American occupiers, but later it just becomes a game of winning ransom money. In 2006, under the pressure of increasing attacks, St. Peter’s seminary and Babel College finally left Baghdad and relocated to the northern Kurdish region.

For now the seminary is located on the same grounds as Kineesa Mar Yusuf (St. Joseph Church) in Ankawa, pictured here.

Here in northern Iraq St. Peter’s is nearby to all of the Christian communities in the Kurdistan region that have been here for hundreds of years. There are ancient Christian villages scattered along the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, and there are also communities of Christians that live with Kurds and Arabs in larger mixed cities like Duhok and Mosul. Because of its location and its importance to the Chaldean church in Iraq, priests and bishops from all over the region are stopping by all the time. It’s common for me to crowd into our aluminum bungalow/dining hall with all of the seminary students and sit down at the dinner table with priests or bishops from all over the north.

Bishop Faraj was from Mosul. In Arabic, people refer to priests with the word abuna, which means “father.” It has a first-person plural ending (“we”), which conveys a collective sense that abuna is “our” father. Likewise, bishops are referred to as sayyidna, which means “lord” or “revered father,” also in a collective sense. In my short time since November I had dinner with sayyidna Faraj at the seminary on several occasions. As we gathered around the table he would always stop to give me a smile and a handshake. He would grab my hand with one of his thick and soft grandfatherly hands, then give it a gentle pat with the other. “Shlonak azizi” (how are you my dear) he would say.

Sayyidna Paulos Faraj Raho

We received word about three weeks ago that sayyidna Faraj had been kidnapped in Mosul, the three human beings he was driving with shot and killed on the spot. Apparently the attackers had contacted him days earlier, demanding that the church leadership pay them to support their militia. He refused.

Mosul is currently embroiled in active combat operations between the U.S. military, the Iraqi army, and various Muslim militant groups. Since last fall there have been sporadic speculations in the international press that the “surge” of multi-national forces in Baghdad had pushed insurgent activity into new centers of concentration, one of which being Mosul. Rather than controlling or eliminating the decentralized insurgency, some say the surge was more like pressing one’s thumb down onto a water balloon—the wide variety of clandestine militias have been displaced for the moment but will return whenever the pressure lets off. For now there has been an increase in insurgent violence and counterinsurgent violence in Mosul. It is a dangerous place for Muslims and Christians alike.

Mosul sits just outside the de-facto border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. Whereas numerous peshmerga (Kurdish army) checkpoints keep Erbil and the Christian neighborhood of Ankawa out of the war zones seen on TV in the rest of Iraq, right now Mosul is suffering through active, open combat.

For the last three weeks sayyidna Faraj has been on our hearts and in our prayers here at the seminary. The kidnappers never let sayyidna speak to anyone on the phone, and many speculated that it was because they knew if he did he would simply tell church officials not to pay any money. What an incredible moral dilemma. Christianity is both a religion and an ethnicity in Iraq, and the Christian community is sewn together through a distinct language and culture that dates back more than a dozen centuries. Sayyidna Faraj was more than just a kind man and a revered pastor. He and the rest of the Chaldean clergy represent the life and blood of the community itself. If the church didn’t pay, they risked losing an important part of themselves. At the same time, how many more guns and bombs would the kidnappers buy with the million dollars they were asking? How many more tragic deaths would that money buy?

On Thursday I was getting ready to take a trip with a local youth group to Sheklawa, one of the Christian villages here in Kurdistan, when all of a sudden everyone seemed to receive word at the same time that sayyidna was dead. The news was that the kidnappers called and told church officials where they could go to find his body, buried along the perimeter of Mosul, which they did. Apparently the only gunshot wound was in his lower leg. Sayyidna Faraj had a serious heart condition, and without his medication in captivity people think his condition may have worsened and eventually led to his death. It was clear that he had passed away several days before the kidnappers let on.

We never went to Sheklawa. Instead the youth group at Mar Qardakh church in Erbil immediately dispersed into action, preparing for a special ceremony to take place at their church later that evening. The days had been getting hot with the onset of spring, but on Thursday it was cold and pouring rain. Not even an hour had passed since we received the sad news of sayyidna’s death, and the group was placing glossy blow-up photos of sayyidna Faraj into picture frames and wrapping them with black ribbon. Hundreds of candles appeared out of nowhere and the younger students stuck them through the middle of folded pieces of paper so the wax wouldn’t drip on people’s hands at the ceremony. The Christian news channel Ishtar showed photo montages of sayyidna set to mournful singing in Sureth, the derivative of Aramaic spoken by Christians in the north. It was as if everyone was prepared ahead of time. “Maybe you’re wondering why we don’t seem more upset,” one of the young people told me. “We’re used to this,” he said. “This is our life in Iraq.”

Two young men at Kineesa Mar Qardakh (St. Qardakh Church) hold up newly-framed pictures of sayyidna Faraj as they prepare for a candlelight memorial service

A candlelight memorial mass took place at Mar Qardakh Church in Erbil the day church officials learned that Bishop Faraj had been killed.

The next day—Friday—under black clouds that looked like they would burst into downpour at any moment and with a freezing wind that made everyone feel underdressed, the seminary students and fathers and I piled into trucks and drove east across the greening fields to an ancient Christian town half way between Erbil and Mosul called Karamles. I knew it was not a normal day when we turned off the highway onto the 3-mile stretch of road leading into town. Cars were stopped at the turn off, being inspected by militiamen from Karamles who were making sure no security threats made it through to their town. When they saw all the black suits and white collars in our truck they waved us up to the front of the line, saying “bshena (a greeting in Sureth) abuna, tfuddal” (“Hello father, welcome” in a mix of Sureth and Arabic). All along the road from the highway into the town there were pairs of young and old men from town every 50 meters or so, one on each side of the road. They wore the plain clothes of small town folks, with warm jackets, and many with the strong red and white scarves common in the Middle East wrapped around their necks up to their ears. Each carried an automatic rifle. Armored vehicles of the Iraqi army, each with spray-painted camouflage and a green helmet poking out of the gun turret, passed us along the road into town. Entering the town itself we stopped to be inspected by local men literally every 15 meters, each of them giving us a good look and then a word of welcome. The border between the Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq is not a fence or barrier but a series of checkpoints by the Kurdish army. Karamles is somewhere in the middle, but it is still relatively safe. On any other day we would have been greeted by just one locally-run checkpoint at the entrance to town. But Karamles is close enough to Mosul that extensive security measures were taken for this unusual event, where most of the Chaldean clergy and even Patriarch Immanuel Delly III from Baghdad were gathering in one place.

The town was packed with Iraqi Christians from cities and towns all around the area. Myself and my friend who lives across the hall at the seminary, a Jesuit priest from Boston named Dennis, were the only foreigners in sight. Of course I felt self-conscious—I usually do here—but I was dressed in a black suit just like my seminary students I walked with. The only difference was the white collar and perhaps my height. By now I have met a number of young people from the villages around Erbil, and I received greetings from many familiar faces in the crowd.

Chaldean seminary students from Ankawa walk through the crowd gathered in Karamles for Bishop Faraj's funeral

Karamles is a small cluster of crumbling stone houses and streets built into and onto the ruins of structures that are clearly hundreds of years old. Fresh rain created muddy puddles along the rocky paths that trickled off into unseen crevices. Collections of centuries-old stone shrines and tombs with crosses on them stood leaning and neglected in small courtyards overgrown with dried grass and plastic litter. It was grey, damp, and freezing.

In the dark space inside one tiny stone church was the casket of sayyidna Faraj, covered in plastic flowers and surrounded by candles. The incense used in Catholic churches made the small room smoky and fragrant. Sisters of different Chaldean Catholic orders stood and sat around the edges of the room and chanted prayers in Sureth as the people in town filed past sayyidna’s casket, touching it, kissing it, and sobbing. Local men in charge of security ushered people down into the small stone room and back out the other side.

Chaldean Catholic nuns sing mournful songs and chant ancient prayers around the casket of Bishop Faraj

Later in the day sayyidna’s funeral procession began. With only moderate in-roads into the mystifying code of Arabic, I’m quite used to not understanding what’s going on. But at such a chaotic event, even my seminary students didn’t really know what was happening until 20 minutes before hand. Somehow I ended up in the funeral procession along with my students and all the priests and bishops from the area. Winding our way from the small stone church to the big stone church about a quarter-mile away where sayyidna was to be buried, the crowds were lined up on either side of the procession. First we passed through a column of young women studying to become nuns, wearing black with white open-laced scarves draped over their heads, singing songs and prayers of mourning. When we reached the main road the procession really began to take shape, with seminarians holding up pictures of sayyidna in the front and his coffin covered in bright plastic flowers held overhead in the back. We walked two-by-two, everyone but me singing Chaldean songs that were printed in a small yellow bulletin.

Chaldean seminary students participate in the funeral procession

Hundreds of people gathered in Karamles to mourn the death of Bishop Faraj

The streets were lined with ranks of mothers and grandmothers, dressed in black, holding olive branches, and crying uncontrollably. This was where the impact of sayyidna’s death really hit me. Surely some of these women knew him and knew what a kind man he was. But most of the women who were sobbing and wailing as sayyidna Faraj’s coffin passed by had probably never met him. But I realized that it wasn’t about an individual connection and grieving process. It was a collective wound. The women were sobbing over the pain of a community that was kidnapped and murdered; the pain of a community that has suffered this way many times before, and the pain of a community that is slowly crumbling under the weight of war and emigration.

Women wearing black and holding olive branches break into tears and sobs as the funeral procession passes by

During the mass that followed the big stone church was absolutely packed, with people looking in from the small windows on the roof. A few Muslim Sheikhs sat in the front row to convey condolences from their communities. The seminary students sang hymns, priests and bishops offered eulogies, and the people sat, stood, prayed and sang along with the liturgy. At several points Patriarch Immanuel’s voice cracked to hold back tears as he talked about his old friend. I couldn’t see him from where I stood, but I could see the faces of the people as he spoke. Breaks in his voice were met with brows that wrinkled and sobs that echoed through the hall. At the end sayyidna’s coffin was carried to the four corners of the church and bumped three times against each wall before being taken into the room behind the alter and buried next to a young priest who was shot in Mosul last year.

People throw flowers and women raise long and sharp ceremonial shrieks as the casket of Bishop Faraj passes through crowds of parishioners one last time

I’m not sure I have any analysis or reflective thoughts to conclude this entry with. I think we are an amazing species, as miraculous for our love as we are blind for our violence. I pray for Christians in Iraq who are suffering, and I pray just as genuinely for Muslims and Yazidis and mystics and atheists and every other category we create.