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Photo: Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I embrace.

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http://actualidadereligiosa.blogspot.pt - This is a full transcript, in the original English, of my interview with His Beatitude Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III, of the Syriac Catholic Church.

What brings you to Portugal?
This is my first visit to Portugal. I have wanted to make such a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Fátima for several years. We organised this trip for prayer, to pray to her for peace in the Middle East. I did the same thing three years ago when I organised another pilgrimage to Lourdes, in France. So it is a trip of hope, of renewed veneration to the Mother of the Lord, the Virgin Mary, whom we venerate very much in the East.
 
Is devotion to Our Lady of Fátima widespread among the faithful in your church?
Not really, not as much as to Our Lady of Lourdes, but we will work on it. We are finishing the first church dedicated to Our Lady of Fátima in Lebanon. Actually we, the Syriac Catholic Church, have also the first church dedicated to Our Lady of Fátima in Syria, which is in Damascus. It was dedicated four years ago. So we try surely to spread the devotion to Our Lady of Fátima since hers was especially a message of peace, hope, penance and return to the Lord, which we very much appreciate in these times of darkness which surrounds all aspects of life in the Middle East, in particular Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
 
Five years after the beginning of the war in Syria, how do you assess the current situation?
We are all devastated, especially by this hypocritical agenda of the Western politicians. They don't care for anything besides their own interests. I just read about the visit of the second ranking person in Saudi Arabia, the son of the present King, to France. He was welcomed with tremendous respect by the French President and everybody knows that these kind of relations are based on – it’s very sad to say – a Machiavellian agenda, for the interests of both countries, without thinking about the many infractions and retrograde regime which is not even accepted by the family of civilised nations because of the lack of respect for Human Rights.
 

We are so sad to see that we have been forgotten. Christian minorities have been living in the region for Millennia and we have been forgotten by the so called civilised Western nations. The same ones which pretend to protect the charter of human rights and democracy, equality and religious and civil liberties.

Chick here to read the interview (link will open in a new window).

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www.kofc.org - Over the past two years, Father Douglas Bazi, pastor of Mar Elia Chaldean Catholic Church in Erbil, Iraq, has sheltered hundreds of families displaced after fleeing attacks by militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh.

Born in Baghdad in 1972, Father Bazi is no stranger to religious persecution. In 2005, he survived two bomb attacks and was shot in the leg with an AK-47. The next year, he was kidnapped and tortured for nine days by Islamic extremists before the Chaldean Catholic community raised $80,000 as a ransom for his release. Because of the overwhelming danger, Father Bazi was reassigned to Kurdish-controlled Erbil in 2013.

In recent months, Father Bazi partnered with the Knights of Columbus to press Western nations, especially the United States, to recognize ISIS’ actions as genocide. On March 10, he spoke at the public release of the Knights’ extensive genocide report in Washington, D.C., and he also addressed the topic at a congress held at the United Nations in New York on April 28. In May, Father Bazi went on a month-long speaking tour throughout the country to raise awareness of the genocide.

Columbia recently spoke with Father Bazi about his ordeal as a captive, the suffering of his people and the future of religious freedom in his country.

Read the interview at: https://www.kofc.org/en/columbia/detail/save-my-people.html

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CWN - During a recent talk at a Cincinnati parish,

During a recent talk at a Cincinnati parish, Maronite Catholic Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rahi reflected on the present situation and future prospects of Christians in the Middle East.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the origin of the Middle Eastern problems,” said Patriarch al-Rahi, 76, who has led the Lebanon-based Eastern Catholic church since 2011. “The separation between religion and state for both Judaism and Islam is one of the basic conditions for a permanent political solution in the region. ”

Stating that Lebanon, a nation of four million, now hosts 1.5 million Syrian and 500,000 Palestinian refugees, the cardinal patriarch called upon Muslim nations and religious leaders to denounce the Islamic State and the international community to end arms sales to terrorist groups.

“Instead of encouraging Christians to leave the Middle East, they should be helped to remain in their countries,” he said at the conclusion of his July 1 talk.

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Boutros al-Rahi reflected on the present situation and future prospects of Christians in the Middle East.

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the origin of the Middle Eastern problems,” said Patriarch al-Rahi, 76, who has led the Lebanon-based Eastern Catholic church since 2011. “The separation between religion and state for both Judaism and Islam is one of the basic conditions for a permanent political solution in the region. ”

Stating that Lebanon, a nation of four million, now hosts 1.5 million Syrian and 500,000 Palestinian refugees, the cardinal patriarch called upon Muslim nations and religious leaders to denounce the Islamic State and the international community to end arms sales to terrorist groups.

“Instead of encouraging Christians to leave the Middle East, they should be helped to remain in their countries,” he said at the conclusion of his July 1 talk.

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CWN - A Coptic Orthodox nun was killed by a stray bullet on July 5 in Egypt, the Fides news service reports.

Sister Athanasia was riding in a car from Cairo to Alexandria, accompanied by a driver and her sisters, when she was struck by bullets. After early reports that the car may have been the target of a terrorist attack, police reported that in fact the shooting appeared to involve a feud between two hostile families.

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CWN - For the first time in 85 years, a Muslim call to prayer has taken place inside Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Completed in 537, Hagia Sophia served as the basilica of the Patriarch of Constantinople until the Byzantine Empire’s fall to Ottoman Turks in 1453. Hagia Sophia was then used as a mosque until 1931 and reopened in 1935 as a museum under the secularizing Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

For the past four years, the Turkish government has permitted calls for prayer from Hagia Sophia’s minarets. The call to worship from inside Hagia Sophia on July 1 was broadcast on television the following day, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

A Greek government spokesman expressed “intense concern and discomfort at yet another step that undermines the nature of Hagia Sophia as a monument of global cultural heritage and that obviously is not compatible with the principles that should govern a modern, secular state.”

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1 Shawwal 1437 AH / 6 July 2016 AD

Damascus

Eid ul-Fitr concludes the fasting month of Ramadan, during which we have been witnessing a tragic situation. Nevertheless we send our Muslim fellow-citizens and companions in history and destiny sincere congratulations on Eid al-Fitr, together with prayers for safety and security, reconciliation, love and peace in our Arab countries, especially in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Today, more than ever before, all we Christians and Muslims need a new spirituality to bring us from exclusion to inclusion, rejection to acceptance, stereotyping to understanding and from distortion to respect; from condemnation to compassion, hostility to friendship, competition to integration, and from hatred to love and the broad bosom of God, because God is love.

This spirituality will help us rebuild our homes that are currently threatened with physical and spiritual destruction, and enable us together to rebuild what has been broken down spiritually in our society, and reconstruct its material and human social fabric.

I invited everyone to this in my most recent letter entitled, "Message of an Arab Christian Patriarch to his Muslim brethren." I hope this letter has reached its designated readership.

I close my greetings with a passage from the above-mentioned letter:

“The task entrusted to us in the Middle East is to challenge the West and the whole Muslim world by our Eastern Christian-Muslim unity, based on a new type of civilization: the civilization of love.”

Happy Feast!

With love and prayer
+ Gregorios III

Patriarch of Antioch and All the East
Of Alexandria and of Jerusalem
For the Melkite Greek Catholic Church

  1. Pan-Orthodox council pulled back from blessing marriages of Orthodox, non-Orthodox Christians
  2. Catholics, Orthodox gather in Antioch to recall St. Peter
  3. Coptic priest killed in Egypt; Islamic State suspected
  4. Long-term goal must be repatriation for refugees, Maronite Patriarch says

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