In the early church, witnesses to the faith who had been
persecuted and tortured but not killed were known as
"martyr-confessors." It's been one of the great privileges of
my life to have known such men and women: Czech priests who
spent years as slave laborers in uranium mines; Lithuanian
priests and nuns condemned to Perm Camp 36 in the Gulag; a
Ukrainian Greek Catholic scholar who knew the bone-chilling
bite of the Siberian winter because of his fidelity to Christ
and to the Bishop of Rome. These modern martyr-confessors are
part of that "great cloud of witnesses" who form a living
link between the church here and now and "the assembly of the
first-born who are enrolled in heaven" (Heb 12:1, 23).
I treasure the memory and the friendship of these great
souls. All their stories are remarkable; so was the
equanimity they exhibited as I got to know them - the sense
they conveyed, quite naturally, that it was a privilege to
suffer for the faith. Comparative martyrology is out of place
in such a company of heroes. Still, none of the
martyr-confessors I have met had a story quite like that of
Father Douglas Bazi of the Chaldean Catholic Diocese of
Erbil, whom I met three weeks ago.
Simply because he was a Christian and a Catholic priest,
Father Bazi had had his teeth knocked out, his nose smashed
and his back broken with a hammer. And that was before ISIS
turned large parts of Iraq into a killing zone in which
Christian lives were automatically forfeit. Today, Father
Bazi lives with his exiled people in the Kurdish Autonomous
Region of crumbling Iraq. The ISIS assault on his people, he
told me, was but the latest of eight different assaults on
Chaldean Catholics over the last century, which have reduced
what was once a population of 3 million to about 180,000. In
the brutal politics of a region where the withdrawal of
American power has led to seven demons worse than the first,
Chaldean Catholics especially are at risk because, as Father
Bazi put it, they "can't play the game the way the others do"
- they can't indulge in revenge killings because their faith
forbids them to do so.
Father Bazi was in Washington to bear witness for his people
in the U.S. House of Representatives, which, a few hours
after we spoke, voted unanimously to declare that what ISIS
is doing to Christians in Iraq is "genocide." Three days
after that, Secretary of State John Kerry met a
congressionally mandated deadline by actually using the
"G-word" - "genocide" - to describe ISIS' assault on
Christians, Yazidis and Shiites in the areas of Iraq and
Syria under its control. The new thing, and the welcome
thing, in Secretary Kerry's statement was the mention of
Christians as targets of genocide.
That statement would not have happened without the
relentless, persistent work of human rights campaigner Nina
Shea, who has lobbied for redress for persecuted Christians
in the Middle East with a tenacity that deserves the highest
respect. It wouldn't have happened without the leadership of
Nebraska Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, who introduced the
House resolution that passed March 14 while Father Bazi
looked on from the House gallery. And the Kerry statement
wouldn't have happened without the prod of a report,
"Genocide against Christians in the Middle East," prepared by
the Knights of Columbus and the organization, In Defense of
Christians. It is a remarkably detailed account of
anti-Christian persecution, destruction and slaughter that
was addressed to the secretary of state and contained a legal
brief arguing that the "G-word" should be invoked and the
matter referred to the criminal division of the Justice
Department and the Security Council of the United Nations.
Father Bazi was aware that merely saying the "G-word" would
change nothing on the ground for his people. But he welcomed
the congressional resolution and the administration's action
because it called this ongoing atrocity by its proper name
and thus would give his people hope that someone knew and
someone cared. That caring, I suggest, should now extend to
helping Chaldean Catholics rebuild their communities in the
West.
Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C.