Militia manipulation of Cardinal Sako’s words |
Vulgar distortion is not an occasional behaviour in Iraq; it has become the official language of the state’s looters — those who possess nothing but noise, bad faith and the instinct to weaponise words. They lie in wait for any phrase, seize any sentence, twist any meaning and turn it into ammunition against the few remaining voices of integrity.
This is precisely what the ruling parties and militias did with the remarks of Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, Patriarch of Babylon, a man who has remained a rare model of Iraqi loyalty in a political class dominated by sectarian oligarchs who see Iraq only as spoils.
Cardinal Sako has never ceased to condemn the fragmentation of Iraqis, nor has he ever compromised on his Iraqi identity, which he has always placed above any religious or sectarian affiliation.
A year ago, during the same Christmas Mass, he addressed the political elite directly. Seated before him were Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the figurehead of the Coordination Framework, and Ammar al-Hakim, a man weighed down by political and familial contradictions.
Sako then declared that Iraq had been hijacked by militias and was trapped in a challenging regional and international environment. He said that the only way out was for the country to rediscover its national identity.
Speaking from the pulpit of St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Baghdad, he reminded his congregation that religious platforms exist for prayer, compassion and mercy, not militarisation or the promotion of chaos. He said that a cleric is a man of God, not a man of the militia. He has a duty to speak out against injustice, but not to........