Ed West
When our son was born he did not breathe. It is quite common for
newborns to need encouragement to respire by the nurses rubbing them
manually, or via the warning equipment in the birthing room, which is
what happened with our second child. This time was different, and our
boy didn’t respond to anything when the midwife took him out of my
wife’s arms. Then someone in the room pressed the emergency button and
within seconds about a dozen medical professionals rushed in. But he was
not responding. Then I thought I heard someone say: “He’s gone into
cardiac arrest.”
It was then that everything turned hyper-real, as they do during
moments of intense stress and panic. One cannot believe something so
awful is actually happening for real. It was at that point that I got
down on my knees by the bed, and for some reason the man I prayed to was
Fr Ragheed Ganni, an Iraqi priest who was killed in Mosul in June 2007.
Later the medical staff told us that our son James had taken two
minutes before screaming at the top of his lungs, a sound that brought
such overwhelming relief and fearless joy that I could not contain my
tears and (my uncharacteristically un-English) hugs for the doctors. You
can imagine how long those two minutes had felt.
James’s first breaths, and the life they signified, were not a
miracle by any means; because his water birth had occurred with such
speed his lungs were filled with liquid, and he survived because of
perfectly explicable medical technology, and the very competent and
compassionate staff at the Whittington Birth Centre (it was their third
such emergency that morning). But I thank Fr Ragheed anyway, and still
think of his life of sacrifice, during a period of intense persecution
for Christians, as a model to follow.
Fr Ragheed was one of 1,000 Iraqi Christians murdered during the
pogrom that began after the Coalition invasion of 2003. The persecution
culminated in October 31 2010, with the massacre of 52 worshippers at a
Catholic church in Baghdad. In the words of one Chaldean bishop, this is
a “Calvary” that has largely been ignored in the western media, outside
of the Christian press. More recently, with increasing anti-Christian
violence in Egypt and within the appalling civil war in Syria, the
subject of Christian persecution has become more widely discussed. The
topic has been raised in Parliament and addressed publicly by a
(Muslim) Government minister.
It has been a shocking and horrific ordeal for one of the world’s
oldest Christian communities, which has been all but driven out of its
homeland. A pre-war population of a million is now somewhere in the
region of 150,000, many of them elderly, and more than 60 churches have
been bombed. Despite this, Fr Ragheed’s story is inspiring. It is marked
by perfect sacrifice and devotion, forgiveness and friendship.
Fr Ragheed came from Mosul, in the north of Iraq, which for centuries
was the heart of Syriac Christianity, a bustling cosmopolitan city of
Assyrians, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Jews and Persians as well as smaller
groups, such as the Sabaeans, Shabeks, Mandaeans and Yezidi. Close to
the Aramaic-speaking villages of the Nineveh Plains, Mosul was also home
to a large Chaldean Catholic community, although numbers had been in
decline throughout the 20th century because of persecution,
discrimination and emigration.
Ragheed was born in the city in 1972 and graduated with an
engineering degree in 1993. Three years later he went to study theology
in Rome at the Angelicum, specialising in ecumenical theology, and was
fluent in Arabic, Italian, French and English.
He was at seminary when the September 11 attacks took place in New
York and the subsequent build-up to war in his home country began.
Lodging at the Irish College, he was known as “Paddy the Iraqi”, and
would spend summers by Loch Derg in County Donegal. Fr Don Kettle, now a
priest in Western Australia, recalled that while staying with him at St
Malachy’s Seminary in Belfast around the time of the marching season,
with riots taking place outside, Fr Ragheed explained about the
persecution of his people, who since Iraq’s independence in 1932 had
suffered various attacks and indignities, first under the kings and then
the Ba’athists. Nothing, though, could have prepared them for what
followed Saddam Hussein’s downfall.
Fr Ragheed had been devastated by the outbreak of war, having been
separated from his family for seven years, and now unsure of their
safety. He said he had to return to Iraq to serve as a priest, despite
the risks, because “that is where I belong, that is my place”. But he
had written optimistically of rebuilding a “free society” and said:
“Saddam has fallen, we have elected a government, we have voted for a
constitution!” He organised theology courses for people in Mosul, he
worked with the young and ministered to the poor and the sick, including
a small child who had to undergo eye surgery in Rome.
The violence against Iraq’s Christians escalated in January 2006 with
a number of bomb attacks on churches in Baghdad and Mosul. Both Sunni
and Shia militia began to target Christians in “revenge” for the
American invasion, some even blaming the pope for starting the war,
despite Blessed John Paul II’s desperate attempts to prevent it.
The atmosphere in Ragheed’s home town had become terrifying. On
August 4 2006, when 80 children of his parish of the Holy Spirit
received their first Holy Communion, battles broke out in the street
outside, and the children cowered from the sounds of guns and rockets.
The good shepherd helped them through. He told AsiaNews: “Although
people are used to it and remained reasonably calm, they started to
wonder whether they were going to make it back to their homes or not. I
was aware of the immense joy of the 80 children receiving their first
Communion so I turned the subject into a joke and said to them: ‘Do not
panic, these are fireworks. The city is celebrating with us.’ And at the
same time I gave them instructions to leave the church quietly and
quickly.”
The following month Benedict XVI’s Regensberg lecture was used as an
excuse to attack Christians, including one Mosul priest who was
beheaded. In October Fr Ragheed wrote to a friend, saying: “Ramadan was a
disaster for us in Mosul. Hundreds of Christian families fled outside
the city, including my family and uncles. About 30 people left all their
properties and fled, having been threatened. It is not easy, but the
grace of the Lord gives support and strength. We face death every day
here.”
Friends later recalled that he had become increasingly weary and
broken by the demands of the priesthood amid such terror. After an
attack on his parish, on Palm Sunday 2007, he wrote: “We empathise with
Christ, who entered Jerusalem in full knowledge that the consequence of
His love for mankind was the cross. Thus while bullets smashed our
church windows, we offered up our suffering as a sign of love for
Christ.”
As 2006 turned to 2007 the bombings multiplied, the kidnappings in
Baghdad and Mosul became more frequent, and Sunni militia in the
northern city began to demand taxes from Christians, while water and
electricity grew scarce.
In one of his last emails Fr Ragheed wrote: “Each day we wait for the
decisive attack, but we will not stop celebrating Mass; we will do it
underground, where we are safer. I am encouraged in this decision by the
strength of my parishioners. This is war, real war, but we hope to
carry our cross to the very end with the help of Divine Grace.”
A bomb exploded in the Holy Spirit church in on May 27, the feast of
Pentecost, injuring two security guards, and the following day, in his
last ever email to AsiaNews, he wrote: “We are on the verge of collapse…
In a sectarian and confessional Iraq, will there be any space for
Christians? We have no support, no group who fights for our cause; we
are abandoned in the midst of this disaster. Iraq has already been
divided; it will never be the same. What is the future of our Church?”
A week later, on Sunday June 3 2007, after Mass had ended, Fr Ragheed
was leaving the Holy Spirit Church along with three sub-deacons, Basman
Yousef Daud, Gassan Isam Bidawed and Wahid Hanna Isho, when gunmen
approached. Bidawed’s wife was also in the car, but they separated her
from the men. She later recalled: “Then one of the killers screamed at
Ragheed: ‘I told you to close the church, why didn’t you do it? Why are
you still here?’ And he simply responded:, ‘How can I close the house of
God?’ They immediately pushed him to the ground, and Ragheed had only
enough time to gesture to me with his head that I should run away. Then
they opened fire and killed all four of them.”
The terrorists booby-trapped the bodies so that it took hours before
they could be collected. Despite the threat of violence, 2,000 people
attended the funerals of the four men, and the Mass was celebrated by Fr
Ragheed’s bishop, Mar Paulos Rahho, Archbishop of Mosul. Mar Rahho had
been critical of the incorporation of sharia into Iraq’s recent
constitution and in a final trip to Rome that year had mentioned threats
on his life. In March 2008 he was murdered. The kidnappers had demanded
$3 million for his return, but the bishop had told his impoverished
diocese not to pay the ransom, as they were struggling to support too
many families.
In October 2008, 13,000 people, more than half of Mosul’s remaining
Christians, fled after 13 people were murdered over two days, including a
father and son and a disabled man; most of them were shop owners,
suggesting that al-Qaeda in Iraq were seeking to destroy the economic
power of the community.
Despite the violence inflicted on the Christians, Fr Ragheed’s life
offers a great message of reconciliation and forgiveness. One of his
Muslim friends, Adnam Mokrani, professor of Islamic Studies at the
Pontifical Gregorian University, wrote the day after his death: “The
bullets that have gone through your pure and innocent body have also
gone through my heart and soul. I always picture you smiling, joyful and
full of zest for life. Ragheed is to me innocence personified; a wise
innocence that carries in its heart the sorrows of his unhappy people.”
As a Muslim, Prof Mokrani said prayers for Fr Ragheed’s soul, and asked:
“In the name of what god of death have they killed you? In the name of
which paganism have they crucified you? Did they truly know what they
were doing? Brother, your blood hasn’t been shed in vain, and your
church’s altar wasn’t a masquerade … You assumed your role with deep
seriousness until the end, with a smile that would never be extinguished
… ever.”
Prof Mokrani recalled that on the date of Fr Ganni’s ordination,
October 13, 2001, less than a month into the new age of conflict, he had
said: “Today, I have died to self.”
The suffering of Christians in the Middle East is on a scale that
makes it hard for us to see past statistics, but this one story, of a
man who chose the path of sacrifice, has always struck me as supremely
powerful. No one wants to die to self, and I can imagine how much he
must have wanted to do the easier thing, to leave Mosul, and yet he
chose the hard thing.
Friends recalled that as the war and violence intensified he would
appear more drained and tired, as if carrying a cross. But when he spoke
at an Italian Eucharistic congress in 2005, he said: “There are days
when I feel frail and full of fear. But when, holding the Eucharist, I
say ‘Behold the Lamb of God Behold, who takes away the sin of the
world’, I feel His strength in me. When I hold the Host in my hands, it
is really He who is holding me and all of us, challenging the terrorists
and keeping us united in His boundless love.”
“His boundless love”: I remember reading that and the phrase rather
stuck with me, which is why I suppose that when I felt at my most scared
I thought of Fr Ragheed and prayed to him.
A week or so after the birth, and with a healthy boy whose screams by
now were rather less welcome than that first magical outburst, I took a
bundle of documents and hospital notes to Islington Town Hall to
register the birth. We had decided on the name James, after my mother’s
brother, and had already chosen a couple of middle names. But I wanted
another, despite my wife’s protests.
“You know I have to do this,” I told her as I left. And so our son
bears the name Ragheed on his passport, possibly becoming the first
Englishman to do so. I just hope he won’t hold it against me, for it
will serve him as an example and guide on life’s journey.
The Amazon Singles ebook The Silence of Our Friends: The Extinction of Christianity in the Middle East, by Ed West, is available on Kindle
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