By Catholic Herald
Fr Benedict Kiely
Nuns and priests from the Middle East have been repeatedly refused visas
Archbishop Nicodemus, the red-haired Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, is a man who smiles and laughs easily. He also weeps: in the early days of the ISIS onslaught on the ancient Christian towns of the Nineveh Plain, he was captured more than once on YouTube crying at the horrors of what the Islamists had done to his people. He has been dubbed “the crying bishop.”
Fr Benedict Kiely
Nuns and priests from the Middle East have been repeatedly refused visas
Archbishop Nicodemus, the red-haired Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, is a man who smiles and laughs easily. He also weeps: in the early days of the ISIS onslaught on the ancient Christian towns of the Nineveh Plain, he was captured more than once on YouTube crying at the horrors of what the Islamists had done to his people. He has been dubbed “the crying bishop.”
In four years of friendship with Archbishop Nicodemus, I have only
seen him angry once. That was when, sitting in his residence in Erbil
last March, I asked him why the British Home Office had denied him and
two other bishops, one from Iraq and another from Syria, visas to enter
Britain for the consecration of the first Syriac Orthodox Cathedral in
Britain in November 2016. The archbishop replied angrily: “They denied
me because I wasn’t ISIS.”
The denial of the visas to the three bishops was something of a
public relations disaster for the Home Office. But it does not seem to
be one they have learned from. In April of this year, another Iraqi
Christian, this time a Dominican nun, Sister Ban Madleen, applied for a
visa to visit her sick sister in Wales for a month. It should have been
routine: last time Sr Ban visited, in 2011, she was granted a visa and
complied with its terms. But this time her visa was denied because,
among other reasons, “she had not travelled” in the past seven years.
The Home Office should be able to guess at the reason. Since her last
visit, Sr Ban, along with more than 120,000 of her fellow Christians,
has been driven from her home by ISIS. Her convent in the ancient
Christian town of Qaraqosh was destroyed. She was forced to flee to
Kurdistan. In Erbil, she set up a kindergarten for refugee children.
I sat with Sr Ban in her convent last month in Erbil’s Christian
neighbourhood of Ankawa and urged her to apply again. After the
publicity generated by the last refusal, I assured her that this time it
would be successful. On June 12, she was refused again. The Home
Office, which I had believed to be staffed with humans rather than
robots, once again noted her lack of travel since 2011.
Last year also saw the closure of the Institute of St Anselm in
Margate, Kent, due, according to many reports, to continual problems
with visa applications from the students – mainly foreign priests and
religious leaders. Among other issues the Home Office had problems with
were priests “not being married” and nuns who failed to have personal
bank accounts.
These are issues which come up again and again in visa denials:
doubts over whether priests or nuns can fund their visit (even though
these are only temporary applications) and a disbelief that they would
return. That suggests a lack of religious literacy.
The former Canadian Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Dr Andrew
Bennett, told me that one important function of his office was to train
Canadian diplomats to have a sensitivity towards religion in the
countries where they would be assigned. As he said, many of these young
men and women had been educated in a very secular environment, not
unlike Britain, and they needed to understand the background and culture
of the people they would be working with. So, for example, it would not
be hard to train a diplomat to understand that members of religious
orders do not have personal bank accounts but that they would be
adequately supported during an overseas visit. Similarly, a basic
understanding of the Church would allow the official to understand that a
bishop of a diocese is unlikely to “refuse to return” – his people
might have something to say about that.
As for Archbishop Nicodemus: not long after his visa application was
rejected, Hungary – still the only country in the world with a
government ministry dedicated to helping persecuted Christians – gave
the archbishop and another Iraqi bishop* citizenship so they can travel
freely.
One denial of a visa to a persecuted Christian may be a mistake. Two
denials might be an unforeseen aberration. Numerous denials appear to be
a pattern. The most heart-rending experience when visiting these
survivors of persecution is listening to their complaint that the West
has abandoned them. It is always dangerous to allege bias, but, at least
in terms of the facts, the Home Office seems to be part of the problem.
*The other bishop is Mor
Timotheus Mousa A. Shamani, bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Monastery of Mat Mattai, 20 km
from Mosul.
Note by Baghdadhope
Note by Baghdadhope
