Jul. 25, 2015 Cardinal Filoni: “Pope is concerned for the heroic Church in Iraq”

Jul. 25, 2015

اقتباس :: Cardinal Filoni: “Pope is concerned for the heroic Church in Iraq”

Fernando Filoni

The Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples speaks to Vatican Radio just as he publishes a book on the subject

Vatican insider staff Rome

اقتباس :: The Pope is “deeply” concerned for Iraq’s Christians. The Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Fernando Filoni, said this in a statement to Vatican Radio. He has just published a book titled “La Chiesa in Irak” (The Church in Iraq), which retraces the history, development and mission of the Iraqi Church, from its origins to today. “A heroic Church”, as Benedict XVI and Pope Francis defined it, that is bearing witness to the faith right now as a result of the persecution carried out by the jihadists of the Islamic State. Cardinal Filoni was Apostolic Nuncio to Iraq for five years during the Gulf War and Pope Francis has sent him on missions to be among Iraqi refugees on two occasions.
The Pope “is deeply concerned for a number of reasons,” Filoni said. “First of all because at the moment, Christians along with other small minorities are the poor ones in the situation because they have had to leave everything behind, not just their homes but everything they owned, remaining with nothing but the shirt they had on their backs.”
Cardinal Filoni added that “the Pope has played an important role – and everyone recognises this – in focusing international attention on the war and on our Christians who were chased away. So a great deal of attention, because today they are the poor in this situation, along with other minorities and also because war is always an injustice: populations endure it.”
“And what we see here is that all peoples, not just Christians but also Muslims and other minorities, endure the consequences of destruction, death, divided families. So a great attention for a political situation which unfortunately is weighing on the population more and more and on the most fragile.”