VATICAN CITY (CNS): Pope John Paul II sent his condolences to Chaldean Catholics around the world after the July 7 death of their spiritual leader, Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid.
The 81 year-old patriarch, whose offices were in Baghdad, Iraq, died in Lebanon, where he had been hospitalised for months because of a kidney ailment and complications from diabetes.
The patriarch, who repeatedly called for peace in Iraq and throughout the region, spent years appealing for an end to the economic sanctions imposed on the country following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and tried to explain to people in the West the danger of continually antagonising Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people.
In a February 2001 interview with Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the patriarch said: “You Westerners do not realise that an Arab can do without everything except his dignity. If you touch his dignity, he will be as ferocious as a lion.”
Patriarch Bidawid had led the 300,000-member Chaldean Catholic Church since 1989.
