Vicar: Dire Times For Iraq's Christians

Tells 60 Minutes Most Of Iraq's Christians Have Fled Or Been Killed

(CBS)  This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 2, 2007. It was updated on June 26, 2008.

From the time of Jesus, there have been Christians in what is now Iraq. The Christian community took root there after the Apostle Thomas headed east in the year 35.

But now, after nearly 2,000 years, Iraqi Christians are being hunted, murdered and forced to flee -- persecuted on a biblical scale in Iraq's religious civil war. You'd have to be mad to hold a Christian service in Iraq today, but if you must, then the vicar of Baghdad is your man. He's the Reverend Canon Andrew White, an Anglican chaplain who suffers from multiple sclerosis and from a fanatical determination to save the last Iraqi Christians from the purge.

White invited 60 Minutes cameras and correspondent Scott Pelley to an underground Baghdad church service for what's left of his congregation. White's parishioners are risking their lives to celebrate their faith.

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"The room is full of children, it’s full of women, but I don’t see the men. Where are they?" Pelley remarked.

"They are mainly killed. Some are kidnapped. Some are killed. In the last six months things have got particularly bad for the Christians. Here in this church, all of my leadership were originally taken and killed," White explained. "All dead. But we never got their bodies back. This is one of the problems. I regularly do funerals here but it's not easy to get the bodies."

Many Iraqi Christians' churches are destroyed or abandoned. The congregation is smuggled in and out of this secret sanctuary. Even letting 60 Minutes come to the service was a terrible risk. White is among the last Christian ministers here, a savior with crosses to bear. Larger than life, stricken with MS, and by his own reckoning, driven a little bit mad.

He was first sent to Baghdad by the Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, well before the Christian persecution.

"You were here during Saddam’s reign. And now after. Which was better? Which was worse?" Pelley asked.

"The situation now is clearly worse” than under Saddam, White replied.

"There’s no comparison between Iraq now and then," he told Pelley. "Things are the most difficult they have ever been for Christians. Probably ever in history. They’ve never known it like now."

"Wait a minute, Christians have been here for 2,000 years," Pelley remarked.

"Yes," White said.

"And it’s now the worst it has ever been," Pelley replied.

To understand the history of Iraqi Christianity, start with the Last Supper. One saint to the right of Jesus is the Apostle Thomas, who took the gospel and headed east after the death of Christ.

In modern times, under Saddam, Christians were treated much the same as Muslims; Saddam's right hand man, Tariq Aziz, was Christian.

Before the war, it's estimated there were about a million Christians in Iraq. They were a small minority, but free to worship, free to build churches, and free to speak the ancient language of Jesus, Aramaic. But, after the invasion, Muslim militants launched a war on each other and the cross.

[reply60min]

re: scalia
on the recent 4th guantanamo ruling allowing proper rights to the accused, he opined/fear mongered "if we let the prisoners go, they will kill again". What an argument against mccain!
Jeffrey toobin ("the nine", interviewed on moyers) has it right. scalia is just as guilty of "legislating from the bench" and failure of "strict interpretation" of the constitution. if the goal was really to interpret "a well regulated militia..." then english academics should have created equivalent constructed phrased, polled for interpretation, and the result would likely show the prefatory clause and operative clause syntactically bound. the smug and hypocrite scalia only gloats not because he is right, but because he can bully with the narrow 5 of 9 majority vote (largely installed by partisan politics), besides, the "rights" of the individual can be limited when it interferes with the rights of the masses (stolen cheap "saturday night specials") or to law enforcement safety. btw, recall it was at the same time bush told iraqis they needed to incorporate more women in parliament, that the female representation in the supreme court was reduced by 50% (o''conner retiring and roberts replacing). With pro choice women''s rights in contention, the 1 of 9 disparity must have looked like pure hypocrisy to the iraqis.

[reply60min]

Unfortunately the iraq invasion was promoted highly on religious grounds. from the christian airforce, boykin, bush''s "voices from god" go-ahead, ashcroft/rice''s prayer and hymn singing sessions, and well paid mercenary eric prince(of amway fortune)/blackwater, the real "hijacked religion" occured by your own "born again/thou shalt not kill" bush. the unitary/labeled fascist bush and neocons relied on levi strauss'' "the public needs to be lied to because they can''t understand". it bode well in the 2nd term elections with 2 large voting block factions that rely solely on non-questioning and doing what one is told, the church sheep and the military. the west''s religious involvement is inseparable.

[roe1352]

The report was somewhat misleading. It made it look like the Christians in Iraq were from Western based churches. Many (if not most?) of the Christians in Iraq are Assyrian and has essentially been there since for 2,000 years. It seems logical (not fair or right) that Muslim Iraqis would feel resentment for a western religion looking for converts in the country, but their punishment has also been doled out to a religion and people that have been living in their neighborhoods with them for the past 2,000 years.

There are also many Iraqi Assyrians in the US, and also working with the US military. Why not get their angle on this since they have an American and Iraqi perspective?

[reply60min]

(cont from alhura story)
much of israel''s taking of palestine (besides violating 242 and geneva conventions) looses potency if the sympathy falls from the spotlight. It is pure hypocrisy to have a "museum of tolerance" and run a apartheid regime that terrorizes the palestinian population to ethnically cleanse the land for racist zionist inhabitants, simply because they would loose in an equal rights democratic society as the minority. recall when schwarzenegger "donated" $700k (latimes) to the holocaust memorial to have his family genealogy researched for nazi involvement as a precondition for jewish support. Of course, there is a "holocaust industry". The "story" has to be kept alive while people don''t even know of other mass killings that are more significant. ahmadinijad may be a denier to the same extent bush is, but don''t be afraid to admit points that are true.

mcgoiter for vp

CAN YOU PLEASE NOT YELL AT US...TY

last time i checked it was xian catholics who molested those kids not the jews, just a small observation

[reptilian96]

I don''t know why? POPE doesn''t do anything about this propaganda?

rlukas2:
i''m waiting...

and if god doesn''t have a sense of humor, (don''t mock god) then why do we laugh?