His Beatitude Paul III, back in 2016, went by Amal Nona: He was the archbishop of Mosul, in Iraq. Nona had recently been reassigned to Australia, where many an Iraqi had fled the ISIS-perpetrated genocide. (Christians have been in Iraq since the time of Saint Thomas the Apostle.) It was in 2016 that I asked the archbishop: “Surely someone has wondered if he could pretend to renounce Jesus for the sake of self-preservation, to keep his family safe and remain in his hometown.”
Nona’s eyes welled up. He appeared at peace with the prospect of martyrdom for love of Christ, so I really didn’t expect him to cry in response to an American’s seeming cynicism. The houses of the Christians in Mosul had been marked with the Arabic equivalent of the letter “N,” for “Nazareans.” Their options in Iraq were to either reject their faith in Jesus Christ or be killed. And so they fled — some to the country’s relatively safer Kurdistan region, to the archdiocese of Erbil, where Archbishop Bashar Warda stepped up to the plate, welcoming exiles and building a future, including a new university, for Christians (and other religious minorities) there. Others fled to Australia and New Zealand.
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