CV NEWS FEED // Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako celebrated the inaugural Mass on Saturday for a Catholic church that had been destroyed by ISIS during its occupation in 2014.
The Chaldean Patriarch said during his homily at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on April 6 that he hoped the reopening of the Church would “encourage” Christians “to return to their beloved city, with the certainty that this will help create hope, promote harmonious coexistence and preserve the beautiful and diverse fabric of Mosul,” according to an Asia News report.
International dignitaries as well as political and religious leaders across Christian, Muslim, Yazidi, and Sabean backgrounds attended the celebration, in addition to some 300 faithful, including priests, nuns, and religious.
Bishop Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Msgr Imad Khoshaba, Archbishop of Tehran of the Chaldeans, and Msgr Michael Najib Michael, Archbishop of Mosul, were also in attendance.
Located in the northern al-Dawasa district in Mosul, the capital city of the Nineveh Governorate, Our Lady of Perpetual Help had been used by ISIS as a military base following the radical militant group’s invasion in June 2014.
After Iraqi fighters liberated the district, signs of the Church’s history as a place of Christian worship had been completely erased and replaced with posters and symbols from the Islamic militant group, as Asia News reported in 2017:
Posters put up on the marble columns [of the Church] help understand life in the Islamic state. One of them shows the 14 rules to live in Mosul under the Jihadi command, including the requirement for women to dress modestly and to appear in public only “if necessary.”
On the floor covered with debris, a leaflet was found listing the corporal punishments for those guilty of theft, alcohol consumption, adultery and homosexuality. The explanations are accompanied by violent representative images.
Christians at the time were forced to either convert to Islam, pay a tax, flee the country, or be killed. “Once a center of nightlife,” Dawasa was one of the areas “hit the hardest” by the extremist groups’ regime according to a 2017 Voices of America (VOA) report.
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