By Catholic Herald
David V. Barrett
April 2, 2018
David V. Barrett
April 2, 2018
An Iraqi nun who wants to visit her sick sister in the UK has been denied a visa by the Home Office.
Sister Ban Madleen was driven out of Qaraqosh, the biggest Christian
town in the Nineveh plains, by ISIS, who took over her Dominican
convent. She settled as a refugee in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi
Kurdestand, where she set up kindergartens. The refugees are returning
to their home towns now that ISIS have been driven out.
Sister Ban is not the first religious to have problems visiting
Britain, according to Fr Benedict Kiely, founder of Nasarean.org, which
helps the persecuted Christians of the Middle East. Another Dominican
nun with a PhD in Biblical Theology from Oxford has been refused a visa
twice.
The letter from UK Visas and Immigration, a division of the Home
Office, gives the reasons for refusing Sister Ban a visa: that she had
not provided evidence of her earnings as a kindergarten principal, and
that she had not provided confirmation that the Dominican Sisters of St
Catherine of Siena would fund her visit. For these reasons, the letter
says the clearance officer is not satisfied that she is genuinely
seeking entry for a permissible purpose.
Rather than allowing Sister Ban to provide the necessary evidence,
the letter, a copy of which the Catholic Herald has seen, ends: “In
relation to this decision there is no right of appeal or right to
administrative review.”
The letter acknowledges the importance of family visits, and accepts
that Sister Ban had previously travelled to the UK and complied with the
terms of her visa, but points out that she was issued that visa seven
years ago in 2011 and comments specifically on her absence of recent
travel to the UK. Fr Kiely said: “Do they not know what happened between
2014 and now?”
This is the latest case where foreign religious have been refused
entry to Britain. A year ago the Institute of St Anselm, a Catholic
institute training priests and nuns in Margate, Kent, was forced to
close because of problems with visa applications for foreign students.
Institute founder Fr Len Kofler said that a Catholic priest was refused a
visa to study at the Institute because he wasn’t married, and a nun was
denied entry to the UK because she did not have a personal bank account
because she belonged to a religious order.
In December 2016 three archbishops from Iraq and Syria were refused
entry into the UK despite being invited by the country’s Syriac Orthodox
Church for the consecration of the UK’s first Syriac Orthodox
Cathedral, attended by Prince Charles.