BRUSSELS (ACN News): The plight of Christians in Iraq was highlighted in a meeting of two leading bishops from the country and Council of Europe president Hermann Van Rompuy.
In their meeting with Mr Van Rompuy on September 13, Arch-bishops Bashar Warda of Erbil and Amil Nona of Mosul said there was no religious freedom in Iraq.
The two Chaldean-rite bishops stressed the need for Christians to receive help to build schools, saying that with Muslims making up 90 per cent of places available, Church-run education schemes benefitted the whole of society.
“Education would help to develop a new culture as well as freedom of religion, opening up new perspectives for young people,” Archbishop Warda said.
The half-hour meeting in Brussels took place in the framework of visits organised by the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), which supports persecuted and other suffering Christians.
During the discussions, Mr Rom-puy asked about living conditions in Iraq, women’s rights and how Europe could help.
Both bishops have given bold witness to the suffering of Christians and others in Iraq.
Christians and Church buildings in Archbishop Nona’s Mosul archdiocese have come under repeated attack and his predecessor Archbishop Boulos Faraj Rahho died in captivity in March 2008.
Speaking in March in London at the launch of ACN’s “Persecuted and Forgotten?” report on oppressed Christians, Archbishop Warda declared that since 2003 up to 500 Christians had been killed for specifically religious or political reasons.
He said that over the same period 66 churches had been attacked and 4000 Iraqi Christian families had fled to his diocese of Erbil in Kurdish northern Iraq to escape violence and intimidation.
During the meeting with Mr Van Rompuy, the bishops highlighted human rights concerns stemming from Article 3 of Iraq’s constitution which enshrined the supremacy of Islamic Shari’a law.
“Article Three of Iraq’s constitution grants primacy to Islamic Shari’a law – no legislation is permitted to violate the Shari’a,” Archbishop Warda said.
During the ACN schedule of meetings bishops also met Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), European Union Commission officials and former President of the European Parliament present chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Hans-Gert Pöttering.
The meetings demonstrated the EU’s growing concern about Christ-ians in the Middle East.
