Hating in the name of God is ‘greatest blasphemy’

Pope Francis entered a narrow alleyway in Iraq's holy city of Najaf to hold a historic meeting with the county's top Shia cleric and visited the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham yesterday to condemn violence in the name of God as "the greatest blasphemy". 

The back-to-back inter-religious events some 200 km (125 miles) apart, one in a dusty, built-up city and the other in a desert plain, reinforced the main theme of his risky trip to Iraq - that the country has suffered far too much.

"From this place, where faith was born, from the land of our father Abraham, let us affirm that God is merciful and that the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters," Francis said in Ur, where Abraham was born.

With the desert wind blowing his white cassock, Francis, sitting with Muslim, Christian and Yazidi leaders, spoke within sight of the archaeological dig of the 4,000 year-old city that comprises a pyramid-style Ziggurat, a residential complex, temples and palaces.

Hours earlier in Najaf, Francis met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a visit that was a powerful signal for coexistence in a country torn by violence.

The US invasion of 2003 plunged Iraq into years of sectarian conflict. Security has improved since the defeat of Islamic State in 2017, but Iraq continues to be a theatre for global and regional score-settling, especially a bitter US-Iran rivalry that has played out on Iraqi soil.

Sistani, 90, is one of the most influential figures in Shia Islam, both within Iraq and beyond, and their meeting was the first between a pope and such a senior Shia cleric.

After the meeting, Sistani called on world religious leaders to hold great powers to account and for wisdom and sense to prevail over war. He added Christians should live like all Iraqis in peace and coexistence.

Although Abraham is considered the father of Christians, Muslims and Jews, no Jewish representative was present at the inter-religious event in Ur.

"Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion," the pope said at Ur. "We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion; indeed, we are called unambiguously to dispel all misunderstandings," he said.

Islamic State militants, who tried to establish a caliphate covering several countries, ravaged northern Iraq from 2014-2017, killing Christians as well as Muslims who opposed the insurgents.

Iraq's Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has been particularly devastated, falling to about 300,000 from about 1.5 million before the U.S. invasion and the brutal Islamist militant violence that followed.

The pope, who began his four-day visit to Iraq in Baghdad on Friday, was expected to say Mass later yesterday at the capital's Chaldean Cathedral of Saint Joseph.

Today he travels north to Mosul, a former Islamic State stronghold, where churches and other buildings there still bear the scars of conflict.