Christianity, the Middle East, and Martyrdom

Archbishop Chaput points out the historic, systemic, and ongoing persecution of the Christian population of the Middle East.  Excerpts:

Five years ago I received a letter from a former Special Forces officer and graduate of West Point—a career Army veteran—serving in Baghdad as a security adviser to Iraqi authorities.

A Catholic himself, he wrote to me about the harassment and violence Iraqi Christians face as part of their daily routine. He knew, as many Americans still don’t, that large Christian Arab communities once thrived across the Middle East. Over the centuries, under pressure from Islam, Christian populations have slowly declined. But the past 100 years have been especially brutal for Christians of the region.

He wrote that:

“I have come to know many of the surviving (Iraqi) Christians, both Eastern-rite Catholic and Orthodox, who work here in (Baghdad’s) International Zone. I had known as an academic item about the massacre of the (Christian) Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. What I had not known was that many of the areas currently occupied by Kurds—(southeast) Turkey, northern Iraq and northwest Iran—were originally… Christian. Not having enough manpower to kill all the Christians in their empire, the Ottomans ‘contracted out’ the destruction of the Christians to their subject peoples. More than 750,000 were directly killed, died of disease and exposure, or starved to death. What’s going on now (in Iraq) very much affects the remaining Christians here too.”

Discrimination, deprivation of rights and even bloodshed against Christians: All of these indignities have a long and troubling history in the Middle East that predates Western colonialism and American interventions by many years. The horrific attack and murders at Our Lady of Perpetual Help church (also translated as “Our Lady of Deliverance”), an Eastern-rite Catholic community in Baghdad last Oct. 31, were simply the most dramatic in a long line of brutal acts designed to obliterate—either by killing or driving out—the ancient Iraqi Christian community. Observers quite rightly describe the continuing anti-Christian violence in Iraq as a form of “religious cleansing...”

Go read the whole thing. Assistance can be sent through Aid to the Church in Need, among other fine organizations. For more on the subject, see The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude : Seventh-Twentieth Century, or The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.