Can Pope Francis save Iraq's Christian heritage?

I have a photograph on my desk that keeps me going during difficult moments. It is from a time when I climbed Mount Maqlub in northern Iraq to reach the Monastery of Mar Mattai shortly after the fall of ISIS.

Mar Mattai is a Syriac Orthodox monastery, a holy site for Iraqi Christians, founded by a hermit escaping Roman persecution in the year 363. My photo is of a lone crucifix looming high over the dusty Nineveh plain, symbolising strength and unity.

For reasons few understand, when ISIS cleared villages and left a trail of destruction in Nineveh in 2014, it never made it up the road to the monastery. The believers I met in Mar Mattai told me that it was an act of God. “We need to be protected,” one told me. “And we were protected.”

This is why Pope Francis's determination to visit Iraq "as an act of love", to give moral support to vulnerable Iraqi minorities, is so crucial.

The 84-year-old pontiff, who has been vaccinated, has arrived at a perilous time: amid a resurgence of Covid-19 and multiple rocket attacks on Iraqi bases and institutions. It is the Pope's first trip abroad since the pandemic began. The fact he chose Iraq, and to focus on the Christians, is not inconsequential. They are in grave danger.

Iraqi Christians are considered the oldest continuous Christian community on Earth with roots going back 2,000 years. Yet this millennia-old connection is looking increasingly tenuous. Christians are an integral part of the mosaic that is Iraq, but their numbers are dwindling.

Before the US-led invasion in 2003, when I was living in Baghdad, there were nearly 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, mainly Catholic Chaldeans. Today, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 left, according to Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, the Washington-based think tank. But no one really knows the correct figure.

“In five years, we will be no more,” one priest told me gloomily in 2003. Eighteen years later, I reflect on his words. He was not entirely correct – Christians still exist – but their position is precarious.

Back in the Saddam Hussein days, I would worship on most Sundays at the white-stoned St Mary’s Chaldean Church in Shorja district. Sitting with people meditating and singing quietly in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, was a respite for me.

A few days before Christmas in 2002, I knelt with terrified Christians celebrating mass in Mosul. The entire congregation was praying, mindful of impending war. A few months later, on Ash Wednesday, I sat with some Chaldeans – descendants of some of the oldest Christians in the world – at St Mary’s Church on Palestine Street in Baghdad. In 2009, St Mary’s would be blown up by a bomb as worshippers were leaving.

After the US-led invasion, insurgency groups launched a series of bombings targeting churches in Iraq. On October 31, 2010, six ISIS members wearing suicide vests entered the Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad during the evening mass. They killed 58 people, including priests, worshippers and police officers. Some were murdered by sprays of gunfire, others by grenades or explosions. The brutal attack was an act of retaliation against a Florida-based evangelical minister who had threatened to burn the Quran. In a later message, ISIS called the church “the dirty den of idolatry".

“We’re worried,” an Iraqi Christian told me in 2018. “Even with ISIS gone, there’s another big threat: there is no work for us. Our enemy is emigration. People are leaving every day.”

This is the tipping point. We are seeing the gradual decline of Christianity in the region and, perhaps, the end of its existence by the next century. Thousands are fleeing the birthplace of Christianity ⁠– the lands where the prophets wandered, where Christ walked and preached – not only because of religious persecution, but also because of a bleak economic future. Climate change and the rise of other radical groups also threaten their existence.

For the youth, there is little future, little work, little incentive. This is why a leader with the charisma and courage of Pope Francis can bring a restorative hope to people whose lives have been crushed.

As a Catholic, I admire Pope Francis for many reasons, including his humanity and simplicity. His fortitude – going to Iraq at a time when it is so weakened – has made me an even bigger admirer. In a time when people fear contact with others, he is moving amongst a crowd. He is not preaching from a pulpit. Like during his early days, when he roamed the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and engaged with the poor, he is doing field work.

“Jesus teaches us another way,” he once said. “Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers. Become the word in body as well as spirit.”

It is easy to be cynical about one's motives, especially when they pertain to religion. After all, they can often be used to distort narratives. But I see the Pope’s decision to go to Iraq as something pure and hopeful – in a time when we have been deprived of hope.

Janine di Giovanni is a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute. Her next book, The Vanishing, about Christians in the Middle East, is out in the autumn of 2021