• Pope Francis in Iraq, a journey in the name of brotherhood

  • The Pope's trip to Iraq, video message to the Iraqi people: "I wish to meet you"

  • The Pope ready for the pilgrimage to Iraq: "You cannot disappoint a people for the second time"

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March 04, 2021A difficult, unprecedented journey: it is the first time in history that a Pope will set foot in Iraq and Francis will do so in the midst of the pandemic and with the echo of rockets and attacks, even in recent weeks.

It will be a trip without crowds and hugs, due to the health emergency.

Very armored from the point of view of security, with a Pontiff who, having reached his 33rd international trip (the 52nd country visited), will probably get into an armored car as he had never previously accepted. 



The Pope will arrive in Baghdad on 

Friday 5 March

, where meetings with civil and religious authorities of the country are scheduled, and a meeting with the bishops, priests and religious in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation, where on October 31, 2010 58 people were killed during a Mass in an attack by the Islamic terrorists.



On Saturday 6 March he

 will fly to the South, in the Nassiriya area.

Here in Najaf, the holy city of the Shiites, there will be the historic meeting with the Great Ayatollah Sayyd Ali Al-Sistani, an appointment in the wake of his encyclical 'Fratelli Tutti'.

Then the interreligious meeting in Ur of the Chaldeans, the house of Abraham, the father of the three monotheistic religions.

Passages from the Bible but also from the Koran will be read and the Yazidis will be present, a minority persecuted for centuries and particularly targeted by Isis, together with Christians.

Upon returning to Baghdad, the Pope will celebrate Mass in the Cathedral of St. Joseph and for the first time will preside over a celebration in the Chaldean rite.



On Sunday 7

March the Pope will be in the North, in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, from where he will stop first in Mosul, for a prayer for the victims of the war, and then in Qaraqosh, the village that saw the violence of the Caliphate with the expulsion, to August 2014, of the Christians who lived here.

Then the last appointment: Mass at the Erbil stadium with 10 thousand faithful out of thirty thousand seats, contingent attendance due to Covid.



A journey full of meanings, from interreligious encounters to the embrace with the Christian communities exterminated by thirty years of wars.

Iraqi Christians are considered to be one of the oldest communities of believers in Christ continuously present in a country in the world.

The overwhelming majority are part of the oriental Aramaic-speaking peoples, descendants of the ancient Assyrian ethnic communities of Mesopotamia;

there is also a small community of Armenians and a small number of Christian Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen.



In Iraq, Christians were about 1,500,000 in 2003, just over 6% of the country's population, down from 12% in 1947. Over 1.4 million Christians were counted in 1987, or 8% of the population.

After the wars in Iraq from 1991 to 2002 and the clashes between militias, the regular army and the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the number of Christians has been estimated to have dropped to 450,000 in 2013. Attacks and occupations of ISIS in 2014 did the rest, massacring thousands of people and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee.

Even today, on the migrant route that passes through the Balkans, groups of Iraqis are encountered trying to reach relatives who have emigrated to Europe.

There are fewer than 400,000 Christians left in Iraq.

Most Assyrians, gathered in the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Alongside them are groups of Syro-Catholics, Greek-Catholics and communities of the Latin rite.



(Sources: Vatican News, Asia News, Ansa, Aid to the Church in Need).