Category: Faith

ARTICLE: No Church Bells Rang: Ancient Communities Under Attack

sister-diana-momeka
Sister Diana Momeka

(This article originally appeared in The Philos Project)

For the first time since the seventh century, there are no church bells ringing across the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq. The region has been emptied of Christians and other religious minorities, forced to flee from the ravages of Islamic State loyalists who overran cities and villages last summer.

This week, Sister Diana Momeka of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena in Mosul, Iraq – herself a victim of ISIS – traveled to the United States to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and bear witness to the atrocities of ISIS. She spoke softly, but her words resonated with power and truth. She has given a voice to the persecuted church.

Momeka described the impossible choices ISIS demanded of the Christians of Mosul, Qaraqosh and the surrounding towns: either convert to Islam, pay a tax (jizya) to ISIS or leave their ancestral homeland with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. By Momeka’s estimates, more than 120,000 Christians escaped to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where they languish even now in small, prefabricated containers and makeshift shelters. “This uprooting – this theft of everything that the Christians owned – displaced them body and soul, stripping away their humanity and dignity,” she said.

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ARTICLE: A Mother’s Heart: Remembering Iraq’s Persecuted on Mother’s Day

(This article originally appeared at The Philos Project)

Sunday is Mother’s Day in the United States and many other countries around the world. It is a happy time to celebrate motherhood and the nurturing role that mothers play in shaping our families and our culture.

When my girls were small, they delighted in showering me with gifts: breakfast in bed, flower bouquets plucked from our garden, handcrafted trinkets fashioned from Popsicle sticks, string and glitter. Of course, the greatest gift was the joy these precious children infused into my life: their giggles, their hugs and their endless questions. My dearest desire and most fervent prayers have been for their health and safety and for the fulfillment of their dreams.

It is as a mother, therefore, that my heart breaks for my counterparts in the Middle East who are overwhelmed by unprecedented persecution simply because of their Christian beliefs. What of their dreams? What of their prayers? Here in the West, we worry whether our children are doing well in school, whether they have friends and if they are being treated fairly on the soccer field. The worries of mothers who have escaped places like Mosul, Qaraqosh and the villages near Sinjar Mountain are of the existential variety: Can I feed my babies today? Will they have a place to sleep? Will my children be kidnapped in the dark of night?

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