What is the Chaldean Church? - Part 3

Between Iraq and a Hard Place

Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Episode 53

Here's a rough transcript!

Hannah: Welcome to "Between Iraq and a Hard Place". I'm Hannah!

Colleen: And I'm Colleen.

Hannah: And we're going to tell you about our life in Iraq.

Colleen: It's going to be fun.

Hannah: I hope so.

Hannah: All right, part three. Modern Chaldean Church history,

Colleen: Which you said was like let's go talk about persecution?

Hannah: I mean. What a lot of the modern Chaldean Church history is because they stopped all fighting with each other. You know they got conglomerated into one pretty solid group.

Colleen: And now they're a threat.

Hannah: Now they were a threat. Apparently. So we're going to skip. We. We ended in like the 18 well… the early 1900's. We're going to skip ahead to the two thousands.

Colleen: That's like actual modern history.

Hannah: Actual modern in the last 20-ish years.

Colleen: Wow!

Hannah: Again, which is not to say that there wasn't persecution in the between times of that.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: There was a lot of upheaval in the Middle East in general. Not great times to be living in the Middle East.

Colleen: But that's when both of us lived there.

Hannah: Well, post 2000…

Colleen: Yes…

Hannah: Yes, the before 2000 times also not a great time to live there.

Colleen: Also, not great, okay,

Hannah: So we're going talking about the 2000s onward, because there are two big exoduses of Chaldeans during this time.

Colleen: All right,

Hannah: There were some before, but for the most part, the Chaldeans stayed where they were. They were going to tough it out. But the first one happened in 2003. Can you think of anything that may be happened previous to 2003, that would make them want to skidaddle?

Colleen: I mean persecution from Saddam?

Hannah: You got Saddam. There was kind of a big thing that happened in Iraq in like 2001 and 2002.

Colleen: The Second Gulf War, or whatever title you want to give it?

Hannah: Right, the Iraq War.

Colleen: The Iraq War.

Hannah: Post 9/11 happens in 2001 and 2002.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: As that conflict kind of starts to come to, not a close, because it's kind of still going on, but to a settled level of, you know, Americans aren't constantly bombing Iraq, a government is being set up kind of place. About 60,000 Chaldean Christians said we're out of here, we want to leave, we don't want to be here anymore.

Colleen: Was that because of the new government, because of the war that had been happening in the past?

Hannah: A little bit because of the wars that have been happening in the past, so the government that the US started to set up was supposed to represent each religious people group.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: So, really, the Christians were getting a voice in the government in a way that they hadn't before, but I think a lot of them were like, we're tired of being at war all the time. Christians in the West are now aware that we exist and would be more likely to give us refuge.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: Because the dislike of Muslims is high, and so they're going to give us refugee status, because we are Christians living under persecution in the Middle East. It is a chance for us to get our families out of here and into countries where they can have a future. We see no future in Iraq.

Colleen: Even though they'd had hundreds of years of history there?

Hannah: Yes. But then hundreds of years of war, as well.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: So they kind of go. "This is our chance to get out and start a new life." And they start immigrating, finding refugee status in the US, Australia and Canada. Those are the three big places, so not a lot in Europe, but a little farther out. And it seems like they probably made a right, a good choice, because in 2007 there is the murder of Father Ragheed, Ragheed Aziz Ganni and three other church leaders which happens in Mosul.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: So Mosul at this point is Christian, Arab Muslim and Kurdish Muslims kind of forced to be mixed together? Where it has historically been Christian with Muslim minority. So this is kind of a big statement by the Muslim population of we don't have any respect for your church leaders so we're going to kill them.

Colleen: I bet that shook things up.

Hannah: It shook things up a lot. And the Catholic Church looked at it and were like well, this is real bad. This guy was doing a lot of good. We're going to give him the status of "servant of God." This murdered priest Ganni is his last name, and that's kind of significant. Because servant of God is the first step on the way to Catholic sainthood.

Colleen: Oh!

Hannah: So he would be, should he become a saint, he would become one of the first Chaldean Catholic saints in the Roman Catholic Church, especially in modern times.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: I don't know how that's going, I mean it's been a while since then.

Colleen: But it usually takes a significant amount of time.

Hannah: It takes a significant amount of time. Mother Teresa hasn't gotten sainthood yet and I feel like she might be a priority a little bit. People recognize her more, so the Catholic Church might want to push that a little faster, so it's not really surprise he hasn't become a saint yet, but it seems like he might be eventually.

Colleen: Interesting.

Hannah: And then in 2008 there's another murder in Mosul. Also a church leader and three companions like the other one, but this is an archbishop.

Colleen: So he's a little higher ranked.

Hannah: Little higher ranked, which means that it's definitely dangerous for Christians to be in Mosul at this point.

Colleen: Okay.

Hannah: Safety is not guaranteed also in 2008, 1000 Assyrian families from the Assyrian Church of the East. Who had been split off for a while. They split-off in 1672. They come to the Chaldean Catholic Church and ask if they can be in communion with the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Colleen: More unification.

Hannah: More unification.

Colleen: Also feeling threatened by the persecution, perhaps?

Hannah: Probably. Probably feeling a little threatened, probably also watching their numbers dwindled due to violence and so wanting some solidarity of church leadership.

Colleen: Community.

Hannah: Yeah, and this is not all the Assyrian church of the, it's about a 1000 families, not everybody, but a significant number. So that's the first big exodus in 2003. Then we get the second one in 2012, which is after Saddam has fallen. After all of that is over. This is the point where they say we need to get out of here, because the Muslims are all fighting with each other and we're going to get caught in the middle.

Colleen: This is not necessarily based on like themselves being persecuted. It's that there's enough violence here, and we don't want to pick sides and we don't really want to be part of it.

Hannah: Right, we don't want to be part of this any more. The power structure has been destroyed, so there is no stability and all of these Muslims are going to start fighting each other and then they're going to turn and look at us and we're in trouble,

Colleen: Which, I mean, considering what happened in the next few years seems a little prescient?

Hannah: Yes, little, they learned their history; let's put it that way. So this isn't just 60,000, this is hundreds of thousands, the numbers are hard to quantify. It's hard to know because not everybody left as a refugee, some left as immigrants, some just left.

Colleen: Did family reunification, started businesses in places…

Hannah: So it's hard, it's harder to track the numbers exactly, but again still going to the US, Canada and Australia. In 2013, it was the first year that the current patriarch was appointed. His name is Louis Raphael I Sako. And I wanted to talk about him because he's still the patriarch there, but he was born in Zakho.

Colleen: It's righ on the Turkish border between, like near Dohuk.

Hannah: Which is also historically a Christian town, which I didn't know.

Colleen: I don't think I knew that either!

Hannah: Until I started reading about Sako from Zakho, I also liked that combination. And he tried to reunite the ancient Church of the East, the Assyrian Church of the East and Chaldean Catholicism all back together again.

Colleen: Yeah!

Hannah: He talked to the leaders of the other churches and was like: Hey, why don't you just come come back, come back together with us, and they were kind of like, no thanks. They didn't really put any effort into it.

Colleen: I mean it's also understandable, like there's enough other upheaval in life. Why do we need more?

Hannah: Right, they're like, well, just let things be what they are. And then Sako was made a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 2018, so he's both the Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, and now he is a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which means he has a lot of power and influence, which I suspect is why things that happened more recently, happened. I will get there.

Colleen: That's a little ominous, but also a little intriguing.

Hannah: It's not ominous. So then, in 2014, we have the rise of ISIS.

Colleen: Right. Lots of problems.

Hannah: Lots and lots of problems. So up to this time, Mosul and Alqosh really have been the centers of Chaldean Catholicism in Northern Iraq. ISIS pushes up from the south into Mosul and just destroys everything. They tear down churches, they tear down mosques of Muslims, they don't believe what they believe. They kill a bunch of Yezidis. They push almost the entire Christian population of Mosul who have lived there since 431 or before. They push them out of Mosul.

Colleen: Right.

Hannah: Almost all of them,

Colleen: And out of a lot of the Christian villages surrounding the Mosul area, if you're a Christian, you're allowed to leave with little to nothing. But you have to leave or be killed right.

Hannah: You could stay if you pay extraordinarily high taxes, and are all right with living with the idea that you could be killed at any moment and you're not allowed to go to church. So basically get out. That's the first time in church history that the church has been pushed out of Mosul. They destroy the majority of the churches. They tear down all the crosses, they get rid of all the iconography. They burn as many Bibles and christian books as they can get a hold of, along with a lot of other historical records of Mosul.

Colleen: Yeah, I remember hearing stories of church leaders early on in those days, like filling up their cars with like manuscripts and documents from over 1500 years ago and trying to get them out and save them.

Hannah: Right, and there's the monastery in Alqosh that has been around since the 400s. That holds a lot of those historical records and there was a lot of concern for Alqosh. ISIS never got to Alqosh. Alqosh was protected in part by the Kurds.

Colleen: Yeah!

Hannah: And a lot of the Christians in Mosul fled to Alqosh because it is now the seat of the patriarchate, in some ways. The Catholic Church previous to this actually made the seat of the patriarchy in Baghdad. To kind of centralized the church a little bit better, but historically Alqosh has kind of been the home, as it were.

Colleen: That was where the school was for the monks and the priests, and there's a lot of educational flavor there even still. I remember meeting one of the monks there who did not look in any way the way I thought a monk would look. He had like buzz cut and sunglasses and a leather, black leather jacket, and I remember him talking about how he spent a lot of his time with the youth and also working on translating manuscripts from like 500 into modern languages and putting them on the internet so that the youth would have access to the ancient teachings and the ancient books. He was a fascinating, fascinating person.

Hannah: Yeah, yeah, they also run a boys home out of the monastery, which I remember when we went going and being like all these teenage boys, like, running around what is going on? Because I didn't know. And one of the monks, or maybe one of the priests, came out and, like explained to us who they were. And what they were doing. And to let him know if they were bothering us, and yeah, so it's pretty cool pretty vibrant place and I was in the US when all of this was happening and I remember watching some of the videos of the destruction of Mosul and I was like: they're coming..

Colleen: What about my friends in Alqosh!

Hannah: Right, they're coming for Alqosh next.

Colleen: I remember feeling that, too.

Hannah: What are we going to do and also being really annoyed that they destroyed the tomb of Jonah? Because, like some day I wanted to go there.

Colleen: It had never been safe enough theoretically, you know, for me to go to see it, but I wanted to.

Hannah: Yeah, so some of the Christians fled to Alqosh. A lot of them also fled up into Kurdistan, because the Kurdish government said we will keep you safe. If you come up here you are welcome and Dohuk and Erbil both have fairly large. Christian populations. Again Zakho is not far from Dohuk and is a Christian town. A lot of those people also live in the Dohuk area. There are a couple other smaller cities between Alqosh and Dohuk and then there's an entire suburb of Erbil that's just a Christian suburb and we'll talk about them in a minute.

Colleen: Just to interrupt, if you really want to help us out, give us a review on Apple podcasts. Even if you don't use Apple podcasts, the reviews there really help us get found by other people. So if you could do that for us, that would be great, thanks!

Hannah: It seems highly unlikely that any of those Christians that fled Mosul will go back to Mosul. There has been some expectation that they will go back. Most of them at this point say it was our neighbours who betrayed us. Why would we go back to live amongst them? Like, part of the reason that they lived there for so long was they had what they thought were good relationships with their Muslim neighbors, and now they don't feel like that's true anymore. Before I left for the summer in 2014 I had arranged to rent an apartment from Christian friend in Dohuk. That was above his family home and he emailed me when I was supposed to come back and was like so, you can't live with us in that apartment any more, because we have rented it to, we've given it to Christians from Mosul who didn't have anywhere else to live. We've given them both the upstairs apartments, so you can't live there. Most of the Christian families that I knew had taken in Christians from Mosul. The church in Erbil set up basically a little refugee camp in and around the church grounds for people to live.

Colleen: I visited one on one of my visits, I think in 2015 or 2016 in a church in Suly, and basically the entire church building had been strung up with like fabric, canvas, you know dividers and you know they turned a whole section of the outside into bathrooms and washing machines and a communal living kitchens, and that it was essentially now a village on in and on a church.

Hannah: Right, and that kept a lot of the Christians out of the UNHCR refugee camps, which were full of Yezidis, and some Muslims as well, which is kind of a testament to the church taking care of itself. Which was very cool to see. A lot those Christians didn't want to establish lives for themselves in Kurdistan. Even though Kurdistan said, Live here, we'll help you as much as we can. A lot of those people were like: we don't we don't want to be in Iraq anymore, we dont want to live here anymore, we want out. We want to live in Christian countries like America, Canada and Australia. A lot of my Christian friends who lived in Kurdistan, not fleeing from Mosul, also took that opportunity to apply for refugee status because they had the same feeling of it's just going to get worse. Like they've kicked us out of Mosul, there's no point in us staying any more. The church is being established in other places. We'll we'll just leave. We'll just go and a lot of western countries opened their doors to fleeing persecuted Christians. The church in the West did a good job of pushing for their countries to take in Christian refugees. So in the US, most Chaldean Christians live in Michigan, California or Arizona, very different places.

Colleen: And very spread out across the US.

Hannah: Very spread out across the US. In 1982, the Chaldean Catholic Church established the Diocese of Saint Thomas the Apostle of Detroit, and from 1982 to 2002 that was the only Chaldean diocese in the US.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: So it covered all of the US. Any Chaldean Christian living in the US was within that diocese. And Detroit has the largest population of Chaldean Christians outside of Iraq. There are about a 150,000 of them living in the Detroit area as of 2016.

Colleen: All right.

Hannah: So that's five years ago? There's almost definitely more now. At this point that diocese covers all of the eastern US.

Colleen: Okay, so there's a new one, then, for the western US?

Hannah: There is. In 2002, the Diocese of Saint Peter the Apostle of San Diego was established and it covers all of the West.

Colleen: Okay.

Hannah: There obviously was a big enough Chaldean community in the San Diego that they were like we need our own administration here. A lot of my friends that have moved to the US have moved either to Detroit or San Diego. I don't know of a lot that have moved to Arizona.

Colleen: Yeah, I don't know.

Hannah: It seems… I mean it makes sense. It's deserty there, it seems… I personally don't have any experience with that. So that's kind of where people are in the US. There also is a diocese that was established in Canada. I don't know about Australia. I don't know if there are enough there that they have their own diocese or if they're under something else. I don't I didn't really look into that. Australia is a long way away. So that's kind of the status of the diaspora of the Chaldean Church.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: In Iraq the Chaldean church definitely still exists. Most recently, in March, they were visited by the pope.

Colleen: Oh yeah, I read all about that. Everyone was so excited it was going to be the pope's first international trip since the beginning of the pandemic and there was a lot of debate over whether or not he should come or not and what that would do with gatherings of people, and but at the same time I feel like the Christians there were starting to feel more forgotten, and so I know that it was a really big deal for him to come and visit and travel through northern Iraq.

Hannah: And he is the first pope to have been there ever?… in recent history, at least.

Colleen: A long long time.

Hannah: It's been a long time, so it is a very big deal. Very, very celebratory. It is a little bit of what started me down the Chaldean Church rabbit trail, because I was like, but they're Chaldean not Catholic. So why are they excited about the Pope? But now I understand. They are Catholic, they're just Chaldean Catholic under Rome. So the pope is their leader and they would be excited to see him and I get it now.

Colleen: It all makes sense.

Hannah: It all makes sense, and while the Pope was there, he encouraged forgiveness, peace and unity. Forgiveness presumably towards the Muslim population, peace between Muslims and Christians and unity as a whole outside of the church as well as inside of the church. None of Chaldean Church leadership really pushed people to move back to Mosul. They're not saying this is what you have to do.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: This is what we're recommending that you do. They're kind of going. We would like for the church to return to Mosul, but we also understand why they don't want to. So choose, choose what is best for your family and again…

Colleen: And that's not even taking into account the sheer difficulty of rebuilding homes, businesses, infrastructure. There are a lot of villages that people don't want to go back to or can't figure out how to rebuild, for the very reason of the physical difficulties of doing that, let alone are you going to trust your neighbours? Are you going to be able to invest in your life?

Hannah: Physical and financial, like, when a town is destroyed, there also is no commerce in that town any more.

Colleen: Right, if the school doesn't exist any more, are you going to take your kids away from where they can get an education, to some place where they are not going to get an education until you've spent long enough there to rebuild your home, rebuild your business, and then rebuild the school?

Hannah: So at this point in Iraq there are still a lot of Christians in the Alqosh area because it did not fall and there are one or two smaller towns around there that also hold a lot of Christians. The next biggest enclave is in Ankawa, which is… well it used to be a suburb of Erbil, Erbil has kind of expanded into Ankawa. Now it's definitely like the Christian section of Erbil.

Colleen: It has a very different feel and culture.

Hannah: It does, and we used to go over there. I used to live like really close to Ankawa, so we go over there quite a bit. Lots of really cool churches, not ones that I would call ancient and historically beautiful. A lot of them have been modernized to some extent.

Colleen: Yeah.

Hannah: Which is fair. So Ankawa is one. And then there is also a pretty big community in Dohuk and they don't have a separate, like the Christian neighborhood. They're kind of scattered throughout Dohuk, but there are quite a few of them there as well. So that's kind of where they are in Iraq. But there are less than 200,000 remaining in Iraq total. There are not very many of them left and there are a lot of international groups that are offering aid to those who want to stay, who are saying we'll come back and help you rebuild your house and rebuild the church and will support you financially and will help establish schools if you want to stay.

Colleen: But still don't address the long term personal connections or lack of personal connection that exist.

Hannah: So it seems to me, I don't really want to predict, but it seems to me that the Chaldean Church, if it's going to continue to exist, will move into the US. Probably it seems to be. I mean, when there are a 150,000, just in Detroit and 200,000 in all of Iraq, it seems like that shift has already started, so I think I think that's going to continue. I hope that they can hold on to Alqosh.

Colleen: Yea and some of those…I don't know those traditions. The history of who brought your people their faith, like that's not something I have as an American Christian. And it's cool having some of that history. Even the idea that you know your bread over the years has come from a piece of bread that was brought by an apostle. You know, like there's a depth of history in connection to that that's really neat, that it would be sad for them to lose entirely, because I'm sure that's not the only example of that kind of story in history.

Hannah: There's hope. In sort of a sad way, the Christians will remain in Alqosh. I hope that they do for the sake of history, but I also understand why why they would want to leave. That's everything that I know.

Colleen: All of your brain!

Hannah: My brain is now recorded onto a podcast. You can upload it to the internet and I can cease to exist.

Colleen: No, not quite!

Hannah: Not quite.

Colleen: If you have any Chaldean friends or stories about how, maybe in your life, if you are a Chaldean Christian, or other stories of history and how it has been taught to you we would love to hear some of those stories!

Hannah: Yeah, and if you've been taking notes and I got something wrong, please let me know. I'm happy to issue a correction. I just covered centuries and centuries of church history, and I'm sure I got something wrong along the way. So let me know and I'll issue a correction.

Colleen: We'd love to hear from you. You can find us a Servant Group International on Facebook or Instagram, and you should check out our blog and complete transcripts over at servantgroup.org.

Hannah: It's really helpful for us if you share our podcast or leave a review on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on. It helps us know that people are listening and you can let us know what you want to hear next!

Both: Thanks for listening!