The Love of the Beautiful: Iraqi priest shot dead in Baghdad

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Iraqi priest shot dead in Baghdad

Armed guards posted outside Iraqi churches have not deterred attackers
An Iraqi priest has been killed in a drive-by shooting by unidentified gunmen in central Baghdad.
Fr Adel Youssef, an Assyrian Orthodox priest, was gunned down near his home in the capital's Karrada district.
His death follows the discovery of the body of Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of Mosul last month, two weeks after he was kidnapped.
Iraqi Christians repeatedly complain of being targeted by Islamist militants, and many have fled Iraq since 2003.
Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, head of the Chaldean Catholics - Iraq's largest Christian denomination - said Iraqi Christians were shocked by Saturday's killing.
Fleeing Christians
"We are praying and asking God for security in Iraq," Cardinal Delly told Reuters.
What can we do? How many people have been killed?
Cardinal Emmanuel DellyChaldean patriarch
Christians besieged in Iraq
The cardinal said the Church was "ready to forgive the people who committed these crimes for the sake of the single family of Iraq".
"What can we do? How many people have been killed? Christians, Muslims, Sabaens, people who have dedicated themselves to serving this country but they are killed."
Many Christians have fled as a result, and their number, believed to have been around 800,000 five years ago, has dwindled since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Shortly after the murder of Archbishop Rahho, Pope Benedict XVI had issued an anguished plea for Iraq's Christians, and called for an end to bloodshed in the country.
Elsewhere in Baghdad on Saturday, a bomb exploded on a minibus, killing three people.

-BBC

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I believe everything which Eastern Orthodoxy teaches.
I am in communion with the Bishop of Rome as the first among the bishops, according to the limits recognized by the Holy Fathers of the East during the first millennium, before the separation.

" We must fight to insure that Latinism and Catholicism are no longer synonymous, that Catholicism remains open to every culture, every spirit, and every form of organization compatible with the unity of faith and of love. At the same time, by our example, we must force the Orthodox Church to recognize that a union [...] with the See of Peter can be achieved without their being compelled to give up Orthodoxy" -His Beatitude Maximos IV, Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem of the Melkites

"It is true that we have been latinized. And this is the great merit of Metropolitan Sheptytsky at the beginning of the 20th century: that he tried to reverse this process. Personally, I consider myself a follower of Metropolitan Sheptytsky, together with many others who would like to get rid of all that has illegally entered into our spiritual, theological, liturgical, canonical heritage. We were told: If you want to be a real Catholic, you have to be Latin. And they pushed us into it. And it is only with Metropolitan Sheptytsky that we could say: Dear brothers from Rome, one can be Catholic without being Latin. And we were attacked on two fronts, Catholic-Latin and Orthodox-Byzantine. And we said: No, dear brothers, one can be Ukrainian, one can be Byzantine, one can be at the same time Catholic. These different elements do not contradict one another. So this is why neither the Latin Church nor the Orthodox Church is very happy with us. "- His Beatitude Lubomyr Husar, Patriarch of Kviv-Halych

"In other words, Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium." - former Cardinal Ratzinger