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The Destruction of the Ancient
Church of Assyria in Mosul
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There are no Christians left in
Mosul. For the first time since the days
of the Apostles, the city of Mosul in what is today Iraq is devoid of its
ancient Christian population. Built on
the foundation laid by the preaching of the Apostles Thomas, (Jude) Thaddeus,
and Bartholomew, and—by tradition—visited by the Apostle Simon Peter, it is one
of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, a direct daughter
of the original Church at Jerusalem and certainly as old as the Churches of
Rome, Alexandria, Philippi, Corinth, India; centuries older than the Churches
of England, Ireland, Germany, or Poland.
Mosul, by the way, contains the site of ancient Babylon (which is
referred to in 1 Peter 5:13), though there are other interpretations of what
the author of 1 Peter meant by “Babylon” which was also a primitive Christian
code word for Rome.
Ancient Mesopotamia was never
part of the Roman Empire and by the fifth century political strife between
Constantinople and the Sassanid Empire of Persia, led the Church in the
Sassanid world to early establish its independence from any Romano/Byzantine
authority. The Churches had been in
communion up until this point and thus the Church of the East had always
accepted the Creed of the Council of Nicea which we Catholics (as well as
Lutherans and Anglicans) use each Sunday and the Orthodox and Byzantine Rite
Catholics use in every Divine Liturgy.
The bonds had been broken however by the time of the Council of Ephesus
(431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the Church of the East has never
accepted the Caledonian formula that Jesus Christ is One Person with two
Natures: a Human Nature likes ours in every respect and a Divine Nature which
is in essence identical to the Divine Nature of the Father. These two natures are inseparably united but
not in any way mingled, each retaining the purity of its particular Nature
intact. The Chalcedonian Christians
(Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans) use the Title for the Virgin Mary
of Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) loosely meaning
“Mother of God” as the theological symbol of this doctrine in as that Mary
carried in her womb and gave birth to One Person Who is both God and man. Mary
is clearly the mother of the man, Jesus.
In Jesus his Divine Nature is inseparable, though totally distinguishable,
from his Human Nature, thus permitting us to say that she who gave birth to the
man Jesus also gave birth the Second Person of the Trinity for in him his
humanity, while distinct from his Divine Nature, cannot be separated from his
Divinity. For Catholics, this is the Gold Standard of Christian Orthodoxy. For the Ancient Churches of the East there is
a reluctance to accept this precise formula because they see in it that somehow
the Human Nature is subordinated to the Divine Nature though Ephesus and
Chalcedon went to great lengths to make sure that this idea that the one nature
absorbs the other is not the case. The
Ecumenical dialogues over the years since Vatican II have helped each side
better understand the position of the other and realize that the difference is
one of emphasis (the West emphasizing the Divinity of Christ; the East giving
more emphasis to his humanity) than of essential difference of faith.
From Mosul, Baghdad, Tabriz,
Maragheh, and other centers this “Assyrian Christianity” (also sometimes referred
to as East Syrian Christianity) spread southwards into India and eastwards far
into modern China. This led to the
ancient legends of Prester John (John the Priest) and the fabulous wealth of
his mystical kingdom. In the fourteenth
century, however, Tamerlane’s Turko/Mongol armies however brutally destroyed
the Christian communities of central Asia eventually reducing Assyrian
Christianity to the Mesopotamian communities from which it had originally
spread. (The southern communities in
India remained and still remain today.
We should take a look at them someday.) The Patriarchate located itself at Alqosh near
Mosul. At the end of the fifteenth
century Patriarch Shimun IV Basidi decreed henceforth Patriarchs must be chosen
from his family and this led to a rebellion among many of the bishops. In 1552 a group of bishops, dissatisfied with
the hereditary patriarchate, elected a rival patriarch in Mar Yohannan
Sulaqa. The patriarch-designate needed
to be consecrated bishop by a prelate of his own stature or higher and
consequently journeyed to Rome where he reestablished communion between his
faction of the Assyrian Church and the Catholic Church and was granted the
title of “Patriarch of the Chaldeans” by Julius III. The Church itself was called the Church of
Athura and Mosul. The communion between
Rome and the Chaldeans collapsed in the early seventeenth century but was
restored in 1672 by Mar Joseph I.
Meanwhile, various of the Alqosh Patriarchs made overtures about
entering the Roman Communion, but other than some doctrinal concords, nothing
came of it until 1804. The two patriarchal lines were merged by Pius VIII in
1830. There is still, however, a
patriarchal line not in communion with Rome and headed by Mar Dinkha IV who,
because of the instability in Iraq, lives in exile in Chicago from where he
administers the Church. The Patriarchate
in union with Rome under Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako is located currently in Baghdad.
These Christians have suffered
terribly ever since the United States invaded Iraq in the Second Gulf War. As evil as Sadaam Hussein was, he gave
protection to religious minorities. The
failure to establish a stable government has increasingly left Christians,
Jews, Mandaeans and other religious minorities at the mercy of Islamic
extremists. The internecine violence
between the Shia majority and the Sunni minority has been as vicious as any
persecution of non-Islamic sects.
The creation of the Caliphate by
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as the Iraqi State of
Iraq and the Levant, has raised the terror level for Christians to full
alert. Two weeks ago this
self-proclaimed Caliphate ordered all Christians in Mosul to convert to Islam
or be put to death. There have been Christians
in Mosul since the days of the Apostles!
Mosul has long been the center of Iraqi Christianity. A decade ago there were 60,000 Christians in
Mosul. Today there are none! Ancient Christian Churches have been turned
into mosques or burned to ruins. The
fleeing Christian population has been assaulted, beaten, robbed of whatever
valuable they were trying to bring out to safety with them.
I remember having dinner with
friends about two weeks before President Bush declared war on the Hussein
regime in March 2003. There were other
guests including a couple who are Christian Arabs. The husband is Egyptian; the wife
Lebanese. Both are Catholics. Rabid Republicans in every other respect,
they lambasted the upcoming war. “It
will destabilize the region. The human
suffering will be immense. And no one
will suffer more than the Christian population of the Mid-East.” This was at a time when all we heard from the
Bush Administration was how evil the Hussein regime was and how we were going
to “liberate” the people of Iraq. How
tragically true my companions’ words have come to be. Pope John Paul sent his emissary, Cardinal
Pio Laghi, a personal friend of the Bush family, to beg the administration not
to go to war. He at least was admitted
to the Oval Office. The bishops of
President Bush’s own Church, the United Methodist, were refused
appointment. So in the end Halliburton
and Vice President Cheney made their money but at the cost of immense human
suffering. There are two Chaldean
Catholic Dioceses in the United States—one located in Detroit, the other in San
Diego. Between them there are about
200,000 Catholics. The Assyrian Church
of the East, which is not in communion with the Pope, has three dioceses in the
United States but notably fewer adherents.
It is common practice for Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians to
share the Eucharist. The Liturgy of the
Church also has an ancient Eucharistic Prayer—far older than the Roman
Canon—which has the distinguishing factor of there being no “Words of
Institution,” that is the repetition of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper. We will have to do a posting on that
sometime. In the meantime pray for the
Christians of Iraq.
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