This report by Raymond A. Sebastián was posted on the website of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines yesterday.
DAGUPAN City, Pangasinan, September 8, 2014—In response to the mounting persecution of Christians in many parts of the world, particularly in Iraq and Syria, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) declares September 14, 2014—the “Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross”—as National Day of Prayer for Peace, calling on all Church leaders to celebrate Mass for the special intentions of these modern-day martyrs and to raise funds for them.
“We request the Most Reverend Archbishops and Bishops to oblige all priests to celebrate all Masses that day for the special intentions of the persecuted Christians in Syria and Iraq,” says CBCP chief and Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates B. Villegas in a letter addressed to his brother-bishops.
Special intentions for peace
At the Permanent Council meeting held September 2, the bishops unanimously chose September 14, Sunday as “National Day of Prayer for Peace in Iraq and Syria”, coinciding with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.
“In all our Masses on the feast of the Holy Cross, let us unite ourselves with our suffering brothers and sisters, commending to the God who is our hope their pains, their shattered lives and dreams, their bereavement and their loss,” says Villegas.
He explains, “Helpless and defenseless persons are victims of a brutal imposition of a rigid and unforgiving version of faith. Religion is as much a victim, for those who kill and slaughter, wound and maim, destroy, and burn in the name of God, send the world the awful message that religion divides, that faith is oppressive, that belief can engender so much unkindness!”
The prelate urges the faithful to pray that even as many of the persecuted Christians now “see no way out of the misery that has been visited on them, the God who opens paths through the sea and ways in the desert, may make a way for them to the future that can only be His gift!”
According to Villegas, the “Gospel of peace, love and brotherhood is under siege in many parts of the world, especially in Iraq and Syria”.
Villegas notes that the same Gospel of brotherhood and peace invites Filipinos to respond first and foremost through “prayer accompanied by charity and solidarity”.
The archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan also requests for a charity collection for the Iraqi and Syrian Christians, stressing that it is “Christ in Iraq and Syria” who has been evicted from his home.
He adds, “Places of worship—many of them, thousands of years old—have been razed to the ground by a godless rage with which no genuine religion can ever identify!”
“For many, the food and drink that sustain life are daily issues. They rise from sleep each day to struggle just to keep themselves alive. We must be generous, and the fact that we have our own needs here in the Philippines does not excuse us from the Christian obligation of sharing with our suffering brothers and sisters in Iraq and Syria from our own need.”
The collections, which will be remitted to CBCP Secretariat by September 30, 2014, will then be immediately sent to the charity aid of the Apostolic Nunciatures in Iraq and Syria.
Quoting Matthew 25:40, Villegas shares, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Today’s gospel looks at forgiveness, mainly from the point of view of helping someone to acknowledge a wrongdoing and thereby asking for and receiving forgiveness. During this week I kept thinking about a Christian Brother who taught me in Dublin and one incident involving him that I witnessed and another I heard about years later. I’ll simply copy from a previous post, with one or two slight changes.
During my primary school years I came to know an exceptional person, Brother Mícheál. S. Ó Flaitile, known as ‘Pancho’ from the sidekick of the Cisco Kid, a syndicated comic-strip [above] that we used to read in The Irish Press, a no longer existing Irish daily newspaper. Our ‘Pancho’, like the Cisco Kid’s friend, was on the pudgy side, though minus the hair and moustache. He organized an Irish-speaking club and arranged for me to be secretary. I don’t think I was too happy at the time to get that job but I realized later that he had spotted my ability to write. Other teachers had encouraged me in this too.
My class was blessed to have had Brother Ó Flaitile in our last two years in secondary school, 1959 to 1961, when we were preparing for our all-important Leaving Certificate examination. He taught us Irish and Latin. He probably should have been teaching at university level. What I remember most of all about him was his character. Everyone described him as ‘fear uasal’, the Irish for ‘a noble man’ – as distinct from ‘a nobleman’. A stare from him made you feel humbled, but not humiliated. He had the kind of authority that Jesus had, as we read in the gospels.
I remember one event in our last year. ‘Pancho’ used to take the A and B sections for religion together in our last class before lunch every day for religion class. One day he scolded a student in the B section for something trivial or other and the student himself and the rest of us took it in our stride and forgot about it. We were nearly 70 boys aged between 16 and 18. ‘Pancho’ was probably around 60 then. The next day Brother Ó Flaitile apologized to the boy in question and to the rest of us because he had discovered that the student hadn’t done what he had accused him of. Whatever it was, it had been very insignificant. But ‘Pancho’’s apology was for me a formative moment. I mentioned it to him many years later when he was in his 80s. He told me he didn’t remember the incident, but he smiled. He died in the late 1980s.
Some years ago a classmate told me about an incident between himself and Brother Ó Flaitile in 1959 when we were on a summer school/holiday in an Irish-speaking part of County Galway. If my friend had told me the story at the time I would not have believed him. He got angry with ‘Pancho’ over something or other and used a four-letter word that nobody would ever express to an adult, least of all to a religious brother and teacher whom we revered. The lad stormed back to the house where he was staying and before too long felt remorse. He went back to ‘Pancho’ and apologized. The Brother accepted this totally and unconditionally and never referred to the incident again.
After my father, I don’t think that anyone else influenced me more for good when I was young than ‘Pancho’.
Looking back on the first incident I figure that the student in question must have gone to ‘Pancho’ afterwards and explained to him what had really happened. Brother Ó Flaitile was the kind of authority figure whom you felt free to approach in such a situation. If that is what happened, and I believe it was, then the opening words of today’s gospel were what we all experienced in class the following day: If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.
Brother Ó Flaitile’s asking for forgiveness that day was all the more powerful because he was more than three times our age, an authority figure, a religious brother and a truly revered person. What he did showed why he was revered, as did the ‘four-letter word incident’ with my classmate.
For me ‘Pancho’ exemplified the Christian leadership that Jean Vanier, founder of L’Archeand, with Marie-Hélène Mathieu, co-founder of Faith and Light, talks about in the video below. He knew and called each of us by name and loved each of us, especially when we were ‘the enemy’, wrongdoing or perceived to be such, and led us by example, most powerfully of all when he asked our forgiveness for having judged one of us wrongly.
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Schola Bellarmina, Brussels, Belgium
Antiphona ad introitum Entrance Antiphon Ps 118[119]:137, 124
Iustus es, Domine et rectum iudicium tuum;
You are just, O Lord, and your judgement is right;
fac cum servo tuo secundum misericordiam tuam.
treat your servant in accord with your merciful love.
Ps 118[119]:1. Beati immaculati in via: qui ambulant in lege Domini.
Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum, Amen!
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen!
Iustus es, Domine et rectum iudicium tuum;
You are just, O Lord, and your judgement is right;
fac cum servo tuo secundum misericordiam tuam.
treat your servant in accord with your merciful love.
[The text in bold is what is in the Ordinary Form of the Mass. The fuller text is used in the Extraordinary Form, the ‘Tridentine Mass’. It may also be used in the Ordinary Form when it is sung.]
At his General Audience last Wednesday, 3 September, Pope Francis once again expressed his concern for the Christians of Iraq, many of whom have been driven from their homes. It cannot be stressed enough that their ancestors accepted the gift of our Christian faith in the time of the Apostles, that they are Arabs and that the places from which they have been driven by ISIS are the places where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years.
The Pope’s words of encouragement and solidarity:
Today, I want to reassure my closeness to Christians, to the defenseless and persecuted. You are in the heart of the Church. The Church suffers with you and the Church is proud of you. It’s proud to have sons and daughters like you. You are its strength and you offer a concrete and authentic testimony of salvation, forgiveness and love. I embrace all of you. May the Lord bless and protect you.
+Louis Raphael SakoPatriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church
Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, to which most Iraqi Catholics belong, published an impassioned statement on the website of the Church on 3 September. He calls what is happening ‘genocide’. Some extracts:
. . . The curtains have been drawn on the painful events, and 120.000 Christians are uprooted from their historical homeland because the Political Islam does not want them there, and the world is silent, standing still, either because it approves or because it is incapable of acting . . . These people were living in their hometowns in prosperity, pride and dignity; in the blink of an eye, they were ousted from their homes, terrified and fleeing on foot in search of a shelter. It is a scene that takes us back to the dark centuries of the past although it has become a horrific reality of our present civilization!
What these peaceful Christians and loyal citizens experienced is a real genocide, a sad ending, and a proof of the privation of the religious, human, moral, and national values. Therefore, it is a shameful stain in history. Everybody should know is a threat for all.
Few days ago we saw the 13 year old girl on Ishtar satellite channel, screaming: ‘I want to go back to my own town, Qaraqosh. I am tired of this life here; I would rather die for it rather than living here in humiliation’. It’s a loud call to the conscience of the world!
This BBC report was published 9 August
Let us, with Pope Francis, embrace our suffering Christian brothers and sisters in Iraq and others being persecuted there, at least through our prayers, most of all as we celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
