Orlando, Fla. — Recent American college graduates are teaching in Iraq. (I witnessed Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil make a pitch to a northern-Virginia mother of teenagers, saying that Iraq would be an ideal summer option for one of her children.) This comes out of an exchange between the Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil and the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. One young man even had his whole family go to Iraq and check it out for safety (and out of curiosity). Just the other day, a Nigerian seminarian was burned alive as his rectory was attacked. This kind of thing is a common occurrence in Nigeria. Christianity in Iraq, on the other hand, is in a different place, on the other side of the ISIS genocide that drove most of the Christians from Mosul to Erbil, near Kurdistan. When it comes to the persecuted Church, Iraq, though a work in progress, is a hopeful story — one that Americans surely have a duty to support.
“Here we are: ISIS is defeated, Christ is victorious,” Archbishop Warda tells me. “The Church is back again. Mass is back again. Christians are in their nine villages today with so many pastoral activities and catechism. This is real. This is real life. This is not something we read about hope.”
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