By Catholic Herald
John Pontifex
One morning last March, Mgr Nizar Semaan got a phone call that in an instant would change his life forever. “Congratulations,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “You have been chosen to be Archbishop of Mosul.”
John Pontifex
One morning last March, Mgr Nizar Semaan got a phone call that in an instant would change his life forever. “Congratulations,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “You have been chosen to be Archbishop of Mosul.”
For Mgr Nizar, these words, uttered by Ignatius Joseph III Younan,
Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Syriac Catholic Church,
came as little less than a bombshell.
Syriac Catholics form part of Iraq’s mosaic of ancient Oriental Rite
Christians decimated in mid-2014 after ISIS seized Mosul and forced the
expulsion of minorities under threat of execution. The church bells fell
silent for the first time in 1,800 years.
Two years on from the defeat of ISIS, the recovery of the Christian
presence in Mosul remains a distant prospect. Christians who might
consider returning are still shunned by their former Muslim neighbours, a
problem compounded by the massive task of rebuilding churches and
homes.
But the challenges for Mgr Nizar do not end there.
Although nearly half of Christian families have returned to the
nearby Nineveh Plains following their expulsion by ISIS, the task of
rebuilding towns and villages has been fraught with setbacks, including
the influx of hostile militia and the government in Baghdad’s reported
refusal to finance infrastructure redevelopment.
The impact of these years of ongoing suffering on the people is very
real for Mgr Nizar, despite the fact that he left Iraq more than 23
years ago.
Explaining that he himself is from Qaraqosh, the largest of the
Christian towns in Nineveh, he said: “When Daesh [ISIS] invaded I lost
my own family home which I knew from when I was a child. It was burnt
inside and partially destroyed.”
His family joined the 120,000 Christians who fled Nineveh on the
night of August 6, 2014, escaping invading ISIS forces and finding
sanctuary in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous region
of northern Iraq.
Many of them lived in Erbil, reliant on Aid to the Church in Need and
other organisations for food, shelter and medicine. After three years,
the Semaan family joined thousands of others who returned home after the
military defeat of ISIS.
But disaster struck when Mgr Nizar’s older brother, Talal, grew sick
and died aged 62. Grief-stricken, his father died just over a month
later.
All this happened about the time Mgr Nizar learned of his new
appointment as archbishop, and it goes some way to explain why he
hesitated before agreeing to take on the role.
“If I thought of my own personal interest, I would have said no,” he
said, highlighting his 14 happy years based at Holy Trinity Church,
Brook Green, in west London. “But I thought God has called me for this
service – no more, no less – and so I must say yes’”
What, then, is his pastoral priority?
“The biggest challenge is to rebuild the human person,” he said. “The
human person is destroyed psychologically when he loses everything he
has worked all his life
to achieve.”
to achieve.”
Mgr Nizar said that recovery depends first of all on the building of
homes. “To rebuild psychologically, you have to rebuild physically,” he
said.
He paid tribute to Aid to the Church in Need, one of the main
organisations behind the reconstruction of more than 6,300 homes rebuilt
since ISIS were ousted from Nineveh in autumn 2016. However, with many
homes still uninhabitable and the house repair scheme less than halfway
to completion, Mgr Nizar stressed the need to continue with the task in
hand.
Another key objective is employment. “Focus on job creation is key,”
he said. “The people cannot manage their expenses if they don’t have a
job.”
Progress on homes and employment can only succeed, according to Mgr
Nizar, if the Iraqi government does more to protect the rights of
Christians and other minorities. And for this to happen, the West needs
to apply pressure.
An appeal of this kind echoes the call of Chaldean Catholic
Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, who met Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt
in London last month and renewed his request for Government aid for
Christians and other minorities in Iraq.
But, while quietly optimistic, Mgr Nizar is a realist. Christians in
Iraq are reported to have declined from 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer
than 130,000 today, and against a background of uncertainty some are
still leaving.
For the archbishop, part of the problem is perception. “There is a
presumption in the West that there are only Muslims in Iraq,” he said.
“But in fact, Iraq is like a big garden with different flowers –
different colours and different fragrances. The West needs to understand
that it is this diversity which makes Iraq such a wonderful country.”
Mgr Nizar highlighted the place of Christians, saying: “Christians in
Iraq are known as being honest people, a people who work hard for the
future, who encourage education and who build up civilisation.
“And so Christianity is like a candle in a dark room. No matter how
small the flame, the Church still sheds light. If that light is taken
away, we will have darkness in the Middle East.”
As Mgr Nizar takes up his crozier and puts on his mitre, he will need
all the light he can find if he is to lead Christians in Iraq towards a
brighter future.
John Pontifex is head of press and information at Aid to the Church in Need (UK). For more information, visit acnuk.org