Displaced Mosul Catholics celebrate Easter
March 30, 2016
Nearly two years after the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State, most the faithful of the city’s Syriac Catholic diocese celebrated Easter in Iraqi Kurdistan, the autonomous region to which they fled.
Archbishop Youhanna Boutros Moshe, whose cathedral is a large room in Erbil, has recreated all the parishes of his diocese, and 95% of his 60,000 faithful are part of them, according to the SIR news agency.
“We have left our churches, our schools, the cultural and artistic patrimony of centuries, libraries, sacred objects, manuscripts,” said Father George Jahola. “We came away with nothing. Here we have started from zero.”
The faithful, he added, are maintaining “fidelity to tradition and to the faith handed down from father to son.”
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