Chaldean Patriarch: Middle East Christians Need Unity to Survive

Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako

In a message titled “The Eastern Churches need a breath of fresh air,” published ahead of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the Patriarch of Baghdad, Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, warned that “future generations will be without faith” unless Churches overcome their differences to address the reality of life in the region.

According to Agenzia Fides, the Cardinal said that he found too many priests proposing outdated ideas – “what they said seemed to have no relation to the present reality” – and that many Church pronouncements “neither touch the feelings of the recipients, nor nourish their hope, nor give consolation and refreshment.”

He said that the Eastern Catholic Churches (the 23 independent Churches in full communion with Rome) had not garnered much benefit from the Second Vatican Council or from the Synod for the East convened by Benedict XVI in 2010.

“Our strength lies in our harmonious unity, which is a guarantee of our survival and our continuity in spreading our message,” he said.

The Cardinal, a consistent advocate of Church unity, said last September that he saw “nothing to prevent the union of the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East.”

The Chaldean Church is based in Iraq, where it makes up 80 per cent of the rapidly diminishing Christian population (estimated at 1.5 million in 2003, and 200,000 in 2021).

The Cardinal’s message for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity emphasized the need to address these dangers rather than pursue internal quarrels. “Church leaders must overcome petty differences, fanaticism and fear in order to safeguard the Christian presence in the Middle East,” he said.

– The Tablet