Pope Francis will travel to Iraq next year. The Holy See Press Office director Matteo Bruni made the announcement on Dec. 7.
Following the invitation of the Republic of Iraq and of the local Catholic Church, Pope Francis will make an Apostolic Journey to Iraq on 5-8 March 2021. The pontiff will visit Baghdad, the plain of Ur, linked to the memory of Abraham, the city of Erbil, as well as Mosul and Qaraqosh in the plain of Nineveh.
For the Church in Iraq, for Iraqi Christians and for the whole country, including Muslims, this “represents a source of great and immense joy, which we have been waiting for many years, since the time of St Pope John Paul II, in 2000, with the first reports of a journey that was not possible then,” said Mgr Basel Yaldo, Auxiliary Bishop Baghdad, a close aide to the Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako. Francis will undertake the journey that St John Paul II was unable to make in 1999. Ur of the Chaldees was supposed to be the first of three stages – the other two were the Sinai and Jerusalem – in a journey along the path of history before the 2000 Jubilee, said in 2014 Card Giovanni Battista Re, who at the time was sostituto (substitute) for general affairs of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
St Pope John Paul II was able to visit the Sinai and Jerusalem (pictured) in February and March 2000, but not Ur of the Chaldees. The site, located in southern Iraq, is the place where, according to the Bible story, Abraham heard the voice of God and left. Today, ancient Ur is now nothing more than a collection of archaeological remains.
This first stage, which St Pope John Paul II “dreamed and desired,” was however very difficult to do at that time, coming as it did a few years after the First Gulf War, which ended with the liberation of Kuwait. In those years, Iraq was under a UN embargo for the refusal of Saddam Hussein’s government to allow inspectors to see his alleged nuclear and chemical weapons programmes. No plane could travel to the country.