Thought For The Day

The Iraqi Christian who told ISIS: ‘If you want to kill me for my faith I am prepared to die here now’

When Christian villagers from the Iraqi town of Caramles fled advancing IS forces, 80-year-old Victoria was among a dozen or so unable to leave. The widow, a Chaldean Catholic, knew nothing about the sudden evacuation that had suddenly emptied this ancient village she had known for so long. Next morning she went to church – St Addai’s – as she did every day. She found the place locked; the streets deserted. She knew IS had come.

We met Victoria on our first evening in Erbil at the start of a fact-finding and project assessment trip for Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. She wanted to tell us the story of how she and her friend and neighbour Gazella survived.

For four days, they locked themselves in their home, not daring to venture out. “Prayer sustained us,” said Victoria. But they needed food for the body as well as food for the soul and when supplies ran dangerously low they went in search of water and other basics.

Inevitably they ran into IS forces. Explaining their situation, they asked for help and to their surprise IS gave them water even after they refused a request to abandon their faith.

A few days later, IS found them in their homes and rounded them up at St Barbara’s shrine just on the edge of Caramles. There were about a dozen of them there, the last remaining Christian inhabitants of the village.

“You must convert,” IS forces told them. “Our faith can promise you paradise,” they added.

Victoria and Gazella responded: “We believe that if we show love and kindness, forgiveness and mercy we can bring about the kingdom of God on earth as well as in heaven. Paradise is about love. If you want to kill us for our faith then we are prepared to die here and now.”

IS forces had no answer. The dozen Christians, who included many elderly and infirm, were let go. One of them had a battered car. Other transport was also arranged and they made it to safety.

Victoria and Gazelle are still neighbours. But they no longer live in two homes side by side but two mattresses in a room they rent courtesy of the Church in Ainkawa, near Erbil, the capital of Kurdish northern Iraq.

There on the mattresses they told their story. Completing it, Victoria had tears in her eyes. “Ebony”, she said, reaching out her arms to me.

After we embraced, her bishop, Amel Nona of Mosul, himself a refugee too, told me that “Ebony” is Arabic for “my child”. I went away thinking that I was indeed a child sitting at the feet of women of great fortitude, faith and friendship.

Source: Catholic Herald

Iraqi Christian: ‘ISIS terrorist held a sword to my throat but I refused to convert’

Iraqi refugee Khiria Al-Kas Isaac (Pic by Sahar Mansour in Ankawa, Iraq)

An Iraqi Christian woman described this week how she defied ISIS terrorists who put a sword to her throat and told her to either convert to Islam or lose her head.

With the blade at her neck, she replied that she would rather die than give up her Christian faith. But instead of decapitating her, the Islamists – many of whom she described as foreigners with long beards – robbed her of all her possessions before eventually driving her from Qaraqosh.

The woman, Khiria Al-Kas Isaac, 54, is one of a rising number of Christian refugees to escape over the border to Kurdish-controlled territory with tales of how they narrowly escaped with their lives after they refused to convert to Islam.

Weeping as she recounted her ordeal, Khiria said she and husband, Mufeed Wadee’ Tobiya, awoke on the morning of August 7 to find that Qaraqosh had been over-run by ISIS fighters.

She was told repeatedly by the militants, “who spoke different languages”, from the first day that if she did not convert to Islam she would be decapitated. When she ref- used, she and 46 women, who had also rejected such demands, were separated from their families and whipped and beaten over a 10-day period in an attempt to make them abandon their Christian faith.

Khiria said: “I answered [the terrorists] immediately, I was born Christian and if that leads me to death, I prefer to die a Christian.”

Quoting from the Gospel of St Matthew (10:33), she said: “Jesus said: ‘Whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven’.”

Khiria said that the women were often assembled as a group to be whipped so that they could witness how the others were suffering grievously.

She said that none of the women capitulated under the scourging and other cruelties inflicted upon them. “All of us were crying but refused to convert,” Khiria said.

She added that when an ISIS terrorist who was flogging her across her back told her he would “hurt you more” unless she became a Muslim, she answered him:

“I am an old lady [and] sick. I have not got any daughter or son that may increase the number of Muslims or follow you, what is the benefit if I will convert?”

On the 10th day all of the women were assembled together again and a terrorist “put the sword on my neck in front of all the ladies and said to me: ‘Convert or you will be killed.’”

Khiria answered: “I am happy to be a martyr.”

At that point the terrorists relented, and robbed her of all possessions, including money she had saved for a kidney operation, and drove close to Kurdish territory where she was released on September 4 along with her husband and two other women.

The following day 14 men and women were also expelled from Qaraqosh. It is not known what has happened to the remaining Christians.

Sahar Mansour, a refugee from Mosul who interviewed Khiria in Ankawa refugee camp near Irbil, said the woman was now unable to sleep because of nightmares about her experiences.

Source: Catholic Herald

Retired pope says interreligious dialogue no substitute for mission

VATICAN CITY — Retired Pope Benedict XVI said dialogue with other religions is no substitute for spreading the Gospel to non-Christian cultures, and warned against relativistic ideas of religious truth as “lethal to faith.” He also said the true motivation for missionary work is not to increase the church’s size but to share the joy of knowing Christ.

Retired Pope Benedict XVI. (CNS photo)

The retired pope’s words appeared in written remarks to faculty members and students at Rome’s Pontifical Urbanian University, which belongs to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Archbishop Georg Ganswein, prefect of the papal household and personal secretary to retired Pope Benedict, read the 1,800-word message aloud Oct. 21, at a ceremony dedicating the university’s renovated main lecture hall to the retired pope.

The speech is one of a handful of public statements, including an interview and a published letter to a journalist, that Pope Benedict has made since he retired in February 2013.

“The risen Lord instructed his apostles, and through them his disciples in all ages, to take his word to the ends of the earth and to make disciples of all people,” retired Pope Benedict wrote. “‘But does that still apply?’ many inside and outside the church ask themselves today. ‘Is mission still something for today? Would it not be more appropriate to meet in dialogue among religions and serve together the cause of world peace?’ The counter-question is: ‘Can dialogue substitute for mission?’

“In fact, many today think religions should respect each other and, in their dialogue, become a common force for peace. According to this way of thinking, it is usually taken for granted that different religions are variants of one and the same reality,” the retired pope wrote. “The question of truth, that which originally motivated Christians more than any other, is here put inside parentheses. It is assumed that the authentic truth about God is in the last analysis unreachable and that at best one can represent the ineffable with a variety of symbols. This renunciation of truth seems realistic and useful for peace among religions in the world.

“It is nevertheless lethal to faith. In fact, faith loses its binding character and its seriousness, everything is reduced to interchangeable symbols, capable of referring only distantly to the inaccessible mystery of the divine,” he wrote.

Pope Benedict wrote that some religions, particularly “tribal religions,” are “waiting for the encounter with Jesus Christ,” but that this “encounter is always reciprocal. Christ is waiting for their history, their wisdom, their vision of the things.” This encounter can also give new life to Christianity, which has grown tired in its historical heartlands, he wrote.

“We proclaim Jesus Christ not to procure as many members as possible for our community, and still less in order to gain power,” the retired pope wrote. “We speak of him because we feel the duty to transmit that joy which has been given to us.”

source: The Compass News