Living the Cross Neville Kyrke-Smith reports back from the Middle East
A girl at a refugee village in northern Iraq clutching our ACN Child’s Bible in Arabic. As well as food and other essential aid, ACN has provided simple gifts for displaced children.
I have recently returned from the Middle East – where I met Iraqi and Syrian refugees who are being helped thanks to you, the benefactors of Aid to the Church in Need. Because of your generosity, we are providing help to rent accommodation, provide basic food, offer medical help, give pastoral support, and provide catechetical material – as well as supporting priests and Sisters who themselves fled Daesh (ISIS)’s campaign of terror. Inside you will learn more about the various projects we are supporting. I spoke to many Christians we are helping. One mother, Nadir, told me
Aid to the Church in Need is a Pontifical Foundation of the Catholic Church and registered in Malta as a Foundation regulated by the second schedule of the Civil Code Chapter (16) of the Laws of Malta.
that her husband Amer had been a taxi driver in Mosul and how he had been kidnapped and killed because he was a Christian. Another man, Franco, had been a policeman in Baghdad. He told me how he had fled to Erbil, northern Iraq in November 2014 after he received a call saying “you are a Christian in the police… we have to kill you.” Archbishop Boutros Marayati, the Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, Syria told me: “Don’t forget there are still Christian communities in the Middle East and we still want to remain – please support us. We hope that people will return. We cannot build Christian-Muslim dialogue and rebuild
our homes and our country whilst war rages. We are shocked to see the suicide bombers… “Don’t forget we have to support all the priests and Sisters – they administer the sacraments, they are present for the people. We need the Catholic Church throughout the whole world to support us – as this is the meaning of Catholic.”
Armenian-Catholic Ar chbishop Boutros Marayati.
Helping the suffering Church today