Login 
Msgr. Silvano Maria Tomasi, Permanent Observer to the United Nations Office in Geneva, spoke to Vatican Radio on Sunday about the plight of the persecuted Christians in Iraq.
Some of his comments underline the point we made in our last article, about the reporting on the mainstream media in the UK. For example, although the late BBC news on Sunday night at last, briefly, highlighted Chaldean Catholic refugees and their bishop, the reports on the BBC's main news last night again focused almost exclusively on the troubles being endured by the Yazidi. In conclusion, the newsreader spoke of the sufferings of Yazidis 'and other minorities.' This evasive phrase ignores the dramatic scale of anti-Christian persecution and displacement that is occuring every day in Iraq; there are now thought to be around 200,000 Christian refugees seeking shelter and protection. When Catholicism is not being attacked in the media, it is often kept from sight, as though the Catholic Church never existed or shaped our civilization. Such selective blindness should awaken us to the dangers we will one day face here in the 'liberal' West.
Msgr. Tomasi stated to Vatican Radio: 'It is obvious that there is an urgent need to physically defend Christians in Northern Iraq, provide humanitarian aid - food, water - because children are dying, the old are dying for lack of food aid. We must act now before it's too late. A humanitarian intervention is required from the reality of these tens of thousands of Christians and other minorities in the Ninevah Plain, which had to escape with nothing... only the clothes they were wearing. They urgently need to be helped. The military action, perhaps at this time, is necessary, but it seems to me also urgent to make sure that those who provide weapons and money to the fundamentalists, the countries that tacitly support them, are out and stop this kind of support, which eventually does no good for Christians or Muslims...
... It is a new tragedy in the Middle East, where the basic human rights of many people and entire communities are violated. We are facing a very difficult situation: on one hand we have these fundamentalist jihadists, who in the name of a Caliphate that they want to set up, they are destroying and killing without mercy and, secondly, a certain indifference on the part of the Western world. When it comes to Christians, in fact, there is a false modesty to talk about and defend their rights. So it is a moment when the voice of conscience should be clear.'
Let us not be silent when the Mystical Body of Christ is being crucified. Please keep interceding for our brothers and sisters in Christ and for all who are suffering from Islamist terror.     Â
