By the time this runs, the pope will have flown home from Iraq after a historic trip that apparently went without a hitch. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both wanted to go to Iraq; Francis actually went and did it.
There were so many reasons not to go: The pandemic, the security situation and the potential for misunderstanding or disaster. But Iraq put on an impressive show, keeping the pope safe, creating venues at which he spoke (the tableau in Mosul was particularly dramatic) and accommodating a press corps of several dozen reporters.
Which leads to mentioning how difficult covering a papal trip really is. I’ve covered two U.S. papal trips (John Paul II in 1987 and Benedict XVI in 2008); one papal election in Rome (Benedict, 2005) and spent plus two weeks in northern Iraq (July 2004), so I have a feel for the conditions. Covering a pope is a succession of 18-20-hour days spent getting checked over by security, traveling to the event, covering it and then filing your story and doing the research for the next day’s story.
Even the timing was tricky. The pope had to dodge major religious holidays along with national ones such as Nowruz, the Persian new year that’s also observed in Iraq and is on the first days of spring. He also had to avoid coming much past April as that part of the world is scorching for half of the year. (When I was there in July, it was 111 degrees).
Listen here to CNN’s Vatican correspondent Delia Gallagher as she talks about waiting in Rome for the papal plane with 75 other journalists, all of whom, she said, were vaccinated. Notice the band playing the hymn “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” when the pontiff came down the stairs to the tarmac. I’m sure that tune was a new one for the Baghdad airport.
I also caught this NBC report about reporters taking an Iraqi military plane to get to Ur. I hope to hear more about what it was like to report from Iraq.
News outlets with Baghdad and Rome bureaus understandably had the best ringside seats to the visit and it was the foreign correspondents, not these outlets’ religion beat reporters, who got to cover the trip.
Even Religion News Service’s and the Associated Press’ Vatican reporters had to cover the event from Rome, so I am very curious as to who these 75 journalists were who actually got on the plane.
Putting on such a trip was quite the production, according to a detailed 25-minute special report by alJazeera, which informed us that Iraq employed 10,000 members of its security forces to make sure nothing went wrong.
I’ll open with the Washington Post’s account of the pope’s arrival.
BAGHDAD — With cheering, partially masked crowds and armed security lining the roads, Pope Francis began the first-ever papal trip to Iraq on Friday, seeking reconciliation in a country with an extraordinary biblical history, a surging coronavirus outbreak and ongoing political turmoil.
He called for cooperation among ethnic groups in the palace once used by autocrat Saddam Hussein. He called for an end to religious violence in a church where, 10 years earlier, gunmen had killed 58 people, leaving flesh on the pews.
That last sentence was a nasty — but interesting — tidbit of information.
Notice the newspaper only had one person on the ground in Baghdad. The other two were in Rome and Istanbul. Covering an event from thousands of miles away (while making it sound like you are there) is stunningly hard to do. Been there. Done that.
"I come as a pilgrim of peace," Francis said.
Francis’s four-day visit is his first international trip since the start of the pandemic and marks a return to the globe-trotting diplomacy — especially to minority-Christian countries — that had been his hallmark.
The Post also had a helpful backgrounder on why the pope’s visit matters for Iraq’s Christians. I saw more pieces in various outlets about Iraq’s persecuted Christian minority in one week than normally appear in a decade. The story of how these people have been forced out by ISIS and how a country whose Christian (and Jewish) roots are far deeper than its Muslim ones has depopulated its religious minorities is worth telling over and over again.
As this New York Times story relates, sometimes the Christians’ efforts to keep certain towns Christian leads to less than happy endings. It’s worth a read; what it doesn’t get around to saying is that mixing of populations isn’t new; Saddam Hussein sought to water down the Kurdish population of the oil city of Kirkuk by importing Turks and Arabs. Christians saw how the Kurds lost Kirkuk this way and are determined not to repeat history by not allowing Muslims to move into — and presumably take over — what few towns the Christians control.
By far the most dramatic part of the papal visit was the pope’s visit to Mosul. From the New York Times:
Appearing on a brilliant red carpet against a backdrop of rubble and ruin, Pope Francis visited the once-vibrant Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday to illustrate the terrible cost of religious fanaticism, showing how, in that ravaged place, the price had been blood.
“How cruel it is that this country, the cradle of civilization, should have been afflicted by so barbarous a blow, with ancient places of worship destroyed,” he said. Thousands of Muslims, Christians and Yazidis, he said, “were cruelly annihilated by terrorism, and others forcibly displaced or killed.”
CNN talked about how various sites the pope visited used to have churches that were leveled by ISIS, remnants of which still linger. The most striking was Church Square in Mosul, where sit the ruins of four churches. The pope spoke with the partially collapsed walls of the centuries-old Syriac Al-Tahera (Immaculate Conception) Church as a backdrop. The effect was quite stunning, somewhat like having the barricades of Les Miserables in the background.
CNN’s correspondent, reporting from Erbil (the Kurdish capital) talked about the hope people felt after the pope closed his speech with a few words in Arabic (too bad he didn’t use Kurdish, as that’s what folks in northern Iraq --where Irbil and the area around Mosul is -- speak but you can’t have everything).
Back to the Times:
In the streets of Ankawa, the Christian enclave of Erbil, thousands of people holding flowers and olive branches stood behind plastic tape strung between barriers, hoping to catch a glimpse of Francis as he drove to the stadium.
Musicians played drums and flutes as children danced on the sidewalk.
The streets of upscale shops and beauty salons were a far cry from the Ankawa of 2014, when tens of thousands of Christians fled the Islamic State takeover of towns in the Nineveh Plains and took refuge in an unfinished shopping mall, construction sites and tents erected in church gardens.
Being that few in the crowds understood the pope’s remarks in Italian, the crowds were mainly rejoicing in the symbolism of the final defeat of ISIS in Iraq.
The Catholic press, of course, was all over this, and CruxNow’s Inés San Martin was one who was on the papal plane. The Catholic outlets added a lot more subtlety to the mix, such as John Allen’s analysis on Sunday:
ROME — Every papal trip is, in a sense, an exercise in storytelling. A pope chooses to travel to a given destination in part because he believes it has a story the world needs to hear, and, for a few days, he lends it his spotlight, so the global media pay attention.
Pope Francis’s March 5-8 trip to Iraq, currently in its third day, is no exception. Iraq’s story is harrowing, made up of upheaval, violence, and unimaginable human suffering, all of it compounded by global neglect. Its Christian minority has been especially afflicted, a point Francis recalls today with his visit to the Christian village of Qaraqosh that was devastated under ISIS occupation from 2014 to 2017.
Certainly Iraqis seemed to get the point. Sunday morning while Pope Francis was arriving in Mosul, a young Iraqi psychology student in Rome named Sana Rofo told Italian TV that she’d never seen her country so united, enthusing, “The pope has performed a miracle!”
Meanwhile, a tweet from an Iraqi Muslim watching the trip unfold was going viral in the country: “I hope the pope comes every year,” he wrote, only half-kidding.
Certainly, Allen wrote, the trip was expensive, potentially dangerous and politically questionable, but it was because of these factors — and how Iraq of all places desperately needed a shot in the arm from a world leader who cared to show up — that Francis slated his visit in early 2021.
The National Catholic Register also got to send along a reporter, who gave us details of the papal visit to the Christian village of Qaraqosh; the National Catholic Reporter was also there.
The whole moral of this story is that one must never underestimate Pope Francis, who definitely pulled off a public relations coup with this trip. As the New York Times concludes:
MOSUL, Iraq — After the Islamic State took control of Mosul seven years ago and declared it the capital of its caliphate, the terrorist group sought to strike fear deep into the West by vowing to conquer Rome.
But with the Islamic State pushed from the city, it was Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, who on Sunday came to Mosul. In an extraordinary moment on the last full day of the first papal trip to Iraq, Francis went to the wounded heart of the country, directly addressing the suffering, persecution and sectarian conflict that have torn the nation apart…
Other popes have dreamed of visiting Iraq, but Francis is the first to make the trip. In doing so, he has sought to protect an ancient but battered and shrunken Christian community, build relations with the Muslim world and reassert himself on the global stage after being grounded for more than a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
As always, many questions remain.
Will his trip really make a difference for Iraqi Christians? Will al-Sistani, the Shi’ite leader with whom the pope met on his second day of the trip, rein in the militias because of this papal visit? Will the political leaders of Iraq carry out the pope’s wishes for tolerance for the downtrodden Christians? Long after the pope has left, these stories will remain to be covered.