Iraqi patriarch: Trump executive order harms the Middle East’s Christians

January 31, 2017

The head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with the Holy See, said that he opposed US President Donald Trump’s decision to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

“Every reception policy that discriminates the persecuted and suffering on religious grounds,” Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako told the Fides news agency, “ultimately harms the Christians of the East, because among other things provides arguments to all propaganda and prejudice that attack native Christian communities of the Middle East as ‘foreign bodies,’ groups supported and defended by Western powers.”

It is not clear whether the Chaldean Patriarch understood that Trump’s executive order does not give preference specifically to Christians (as many media reports have suggested), but to any people suffering persecution for religious reasons.

 

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Further information:

• Chaldean Patriarch: the selective reception of migrants based on religion announced by Trump is "a trap for Christians" (Fides)
• EXECUTIVE ORDER: PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES (White House)