People, Look East

"People, Look East" is one of my favorite Christmas songs.

It is also a good clarion call to the Church in the West.  We are complacent, and we have problems: complacency, corroded morale, secularism on the warpath against anything remotely healthy or humane, and so on.  But we are not being murdered in the streets.  For most of us in the West, the Apostle's words still apply: "In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood," (Heb 12:4).

That is not the case in the East.  The Chinese and Vietnamese governments have certainly been violently opposed to and contrived all manners of repressing the irrepressible growth of the Church in East Asia.  It is a little considered fact, though, that in what was perhaps his only remotely endearing quality, Saddam Hussein insisted on a peace that permitted the Church to continue in the region called Iraq, where she has existed since apostolic times, or shortly thereafter.  My studies in ancient Syriac (Suraya, in its own language) focused on literature from that region: from that region comes the earliest translation of the Bible.  At the time, it was called Chaldea (Kal-dee-ah), and from that name the Christians of the region derive theirs, although they call themselves Suraya.  The were more or less absorbed into the Nestorian heresy, but that heresy had more or less dwindled over a thousand years or so, and since 1553 they have been (back) in union with the Catholic Church.  It was these Chaldean Catholics that continued on in Iraq.  Under Saddam Hussein, one of them was even a foreign minister.

It is not so anymore.  With a sort of forced secularism removed from society, the sectarian violence that has engaged Sunni against Shiite has also engulfed the much smaller Chaldean community.  These people are our brothers and sisters in Christ, united in one Baptism, one Faith, one Church, sharing with us the Pope as supreme pastor on Earth.  And they are being tortured and murdered to death in the streets, their bishops assassinated in public, and their churches torched and razed.  Their attackers do these things with complete impunity.

For more information about the Chaldean Catholics, check out the Wikipedia articles - they are probably reasonably kinda accurate-ish.

They have their own website / newsource / blog.  Check it out, too, by clicking here if you have a few free minutes.  We can at least pray for our brothers.  We can try to find concrete ways to encourage them.  Perhaps we can find someway to get our godless government to pressure their corrupt government to stop its people from killing our people... er, I mean, its own people.