Pope Francis is about to be in Iraq from March 5-8, with visits deliberate to Baghdad, the northern metropolis of Mosul, and Ur.
Pope Francis will meet prime Shia spiritual chief Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani throughout the first-ever papal go to to Iraq in March, a senior Catholic cleric advised the AFP information company on Thursday.
Louis Sako, the patriarch of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Church, mentioned it could be a “non-public go to” between the 2 spiritual figures “with out formalities”.
Sako mentioned he hoped the 2 figures would signal the doc on “human fraternity for world peace”, an interreligious textual content condemning “extremism” that Pope Francis signed with the main Sunni scholar, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, in 2019.
Pope Francis is about to be in Iraq from March 5 to eight, with visits deliberate to the capital Baghdad, the northern metropolis of Mosul and Ur, the place Abraham is claimed to have been born.
Iraq as soon as counted greater than 1.5 million Christians, however the neighborhood has been ravaged by successive conflicts.
Following the US-led invasion of 2003, sectarian warfare prompted followers of Iraq’s a number of Christian denominations to flee, and assaults by the ISIL (ISIS) group in 2014 additional hit all minority communities.
Now, an estimated 400,000 Christians stay in Iraq.
Many have expressed hope that the pope’s go to will spotlight the challenges going through the neighborhood, together with extended displacement and little illustration in authorities.