Aid to the Church in Need: Profile on Archbishop Louis Sako, the Archbishop of Kirkuk in Iraq

Profile on Archbishop Louis Sako, the Archbishop of Kirkuk in Iraq

Posted by Information Report on 28/6/2004, 7:38 pm
Board Administrator

Profile on Archbishop Louis Sako, the Archbishop of Kirkuk, northern Iraq
By John Pontifex (Press officer for Aid to the Church in Need)
ARCHBISHOP Louis Sako has a claim to fame few can match – he confronted Saddam Hussein face to face.
The extraordinary incident happened when the Iraqi priest made plans to return to his native country after completing a doctorate in Rome.
The Saddam government refused to recognise his qualification and prevented him from returning home so that he could begin teaching.

For most people, such a bombshell would have stunned them into silence but if he was angered and upset, Louis Sako did not let his feelings get the better of him.
Instead, he demanded to see President Saddam Hussein in person. Astonishingly, the request was granted and soon he was whisked off to one of Saddam’s palaces.
The sight of Saddam shocked him to the core. “He is not like you see him on television at all,” said an animated Monsignor Sako as he recalled the incident, which took place several years ago.
“In public he wears a lot of make-up. When I saw him, he seemed just like an old sheik, his face all wrinkly – but he was very, very tough.”
Ruthless, maybe, but the Archbishop also recalls Saddam as displaying a kindly streak. “He told me: ‘God Bless you – please pray for me’.
Then it was down to business: “I presented my problem to him and told him it was my right to go back and help my people.”
Saddam told his visitor to wait and an answer would come in a month or so.”
But – shock horror – a letter soon came through once again rejecting his application.
Undaunted, the then Fr Sako began studying for another doctorate. This time, luck was on his side - the government recognition came through because his subject – Roman/Persian cultural exchange – had precious little religious content.
A steely nerve quickly emerges as Archbishop Sako’s strongest trait – a characteristic hardly hinted at by his self-effacing demeanour and a stature so slight he is barely shoulder height to most men.
Interviewing him on the eve of his appearance as the keynote speaker at Aid to the Church in Need’s Birmingham conference, it is plain for all to see that he will need all the verve and determination he can muster. There are dark days ahead – bleak, even by Iraqi standards.
The problems are many – few priests, he has only four in his Kirkuk diocese, in northern Iraq, churches are few and far between and there are fears that Iraq’s massive Muslim majority with turn as militant as its Iranian and Saudi Arabian neighbours.
These problems and more cast long shadows over the prospects for Kirkuk’s new 56-year-old Archbishop, consecrated only last autumn.
But perhaps the biggest worry is the emigration of Christians from Iraq and the Middle East – a phenomenon that amounts to little less than a mass exodus.
In Iraq alone, Archbishop Sako maintains that about 10,000 Christians leave the country every year. Given that this figure matches the total number of Catholics in his diocese, shows that he has reason to be deeply concerned.
Now Iraq’s total Christian population barely numbers 750,000, a third down on the figure of 15 years ago.
Why are they leaving? Iraq’s security crisis combined with the Americans’ decision to open up the country’s borders means that a people see little or no Christian presence in a land where the Church once thrived.
It is an ancient civilization, which holds some of Christianity’s oldest and most revered cultural icons, many of them now reduced to dust. Half the country was Christian when the Muslims first made their presence felt in the early seventh century.
“We must encourage the Christian communities to stay in Iraq,” he says emphatically. “Yes, the security situation is bad but I am very optimistic about the future.”
Stressing the “liberal” nature of Iraqi Islam, he speaks of the “conviviality” of relations between Christians and Muslims and the growth of Christian parties and magazines since the overthrow of Saddam.

What’s more, he has close personal ties with the two men central to building the Iraq of tomorrow.
As parish priest of Mosul until late last year, Archbishop Sako lived close to Iraq’s new President Ghazi al-Yawar and the Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, both of whom he describes as “very open-minded”.
He explains how he has met Mr Allawi several times. “When he was a child, he was at the school of the nuns in Mosul. In his first speech as Prime Minister he said that when he was a boy his mother had taken him to all the Muslim shrines and also to a church. He told me that he would definitely look after our interests.”
With his experience as vice President on Mosul Provincial Council before becoming Archbishop, Monsignor Sako said Iraq’s new politicians knew they couldn’t deceive him.
Theirs is a clear-cut relationship.
With such a clear grasp of the main issues at stake in modern Iraq, it is highly significant that Archbishop Sako should be sketching out bold plans for the future.
He has already set up vital support schemes to poverty-stricken families – foster-homes, food and clothing all backed by emergency aid funding from Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity, which supports persecuted and oppressed Christians.
Archbishop Sako wants to build on these foundations with new hospitals, medical dispensaries, youth centres and women’s groups. He has plans to set up computer courses, launch new magazines and set up programmes teaching people vocational skills such as farming.
Key to his strategy is to blaze a trail for the Christian community to show the wider Muslim groups a way to a brighter future.
“If we want to be a strong Church, we have to be different from the Muslims. We have to be strong enough to speak up when it is necessary to do so.
“We have to teach the Muslims a new theological language in which they don’t look at everything as pre-destined by God, and completely beyond the control of human beings.
“We need to show them that we as a society must work for the improvement of human rights, of the value of the individual. We must not be people motivated by revenge.”
By nature a man of rigorous intellectual independence, Archbishop Sako said it was only right that the Church had to reform itself before putting pressure on Muslims to do the same.
“There are too many churches in our part of the world – there’s us, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Latin-rite, the Orthodox. If we stay as we are, we will have no future. We are already losing ground. We need to reform ourselves at all levels – human, pastoral, religious and canonic.”
The more the Archbishop spoke, the more passionate he became. His was a language rich in complex thought and subtle expression, a linguistic elegance, which came across despite the fact that English is not his first language.
In fact it ranks well behind Arabic and French, just two of the eight languages he has mastered.
But while he dreams of a brighter future, he is looking at charities such as Aid to the Church in Need as a beacon of hope amid today’s traumatic times.
He described how immediately on arrival in Kirkuk, he opened his house for all to come in and discuss with him his problems and concerns.
As he struggles for repairs to the few churches in his diocese, the immediate concern is to find something other than a few plastic chairs as seating in a chapel not far outside Kirkuk.
Urging me and several others to join him in Iraq, he is a modern day Pied Piper, calling on everyone to follow him in reconstructing a better country.
The Americans too have an important part to play. How so, I asked? “Well,” he said. “There is an American general who comes to my church every Sunday. I asked him to be a special minister. And he agreed – I am very happy to have him.”
It wasn’t quite the answer I had expected. And yet the same could be said of so many of the questions I had put to him.
But by then, surprise had long since turned to admiration. Such were my thoughts as I took my leave of the conventional-looking little man whose intellect and willpower even Saddam could not destroy.

This message is locked.

(Responses are not allowed)

Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148 ABN: 62 418 911 594
Ph/Fax (02) 9679-1929 e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org web: www.aidtochurch.org