By Baghdadhope

On Sunday June 7, 2009, in the chapel of the Pontifical Irish College in Rome there was a mass in memory of Father Ragheed Ganni, the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic priest killed in cold blood along with three sub-deacons of the church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul on June 3, 2007, and who from 1996 to 2003 studied at the pontifical university.
 

Baghdadhope spoke with Father Amer Youkhanna, himself a priest of the diocese of Mosul and a student at the Irish College who celebrated the Mass in honor of Father Ragheed. "It was a moving celebration. All those people gathered to remember our friend and brother Father Ragheed. There was the rector of the College, Msgr. Liam Bergin, the bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Down and Connor, Msgr. Patrick Walsh, the whole staff and the students."

During the celebration were there specific moments in remembrance of Father Ragheed?
"Sure. At the end of the Mass celebrated according to the Latin rite and in English, I recited in Italian and Aramaic, and together with the other three Iraqi students of the college, one of the hymns that our liturgical tradition dedicates to the martyrs of the faith. Two priests led to the altar two relics donated the Diocese of Mosul to the Irish College that after being blessed on the altar have been placed temporarily at the bottom of the chapel in a glass display case. They are one stole of Father Ragheed and the prayer book he used when living in Rome and that came from Ireland, and specifically from Lough Derg, a major pilgrimage site in Donegal County where Father Ragheed spent a long time."

The relics will be moved to another place?
"In his homily Msgr Bergin said that the intention is to donate the stole to the Basilica of San Bartholomew on the Tiber Island while the prayer book will be placed permanently in the Irish College. In addition to this a portrait of Father Ragheed will be part of a great mosaic the College commissioned to the creative genius of the Jesuit Father Marko Ivan Rupnik and will recall the first martyr of the Irish College who died for his faith in the XXI century."
 

Father Amer, the diocese of Mosul paid the highest price for the violence in Iraq. In addition to Father Ragheed and the three sub-deacons killed with him we remember Father Paul Iskandar, a Syriac Orthodox priest who was also killed in cold blood, and especially Archbishop Faraj P. Raho, the bishop who was kidnapped and died in Mosul on last year. You live in Rome but you are in contact with Mosul, can you tell us if and how those deaths changed the life of the diocese?

"They changed much in the heart of the people. The faithful who took part to all the masses of commemoration of Father Ragheed and Msgr. Raho. Those who remember them for what they were, brave men and priests who did not hesitate to witness their faith in an obviously dangerous situation. With bitterness, however, I must confess that little else changed. After the moments immediately after the deaths, and the words of pain, the local church seems to have forgotten those martyrs. In the final document of the synod held in late April, the first to which Msgr. Raho did not participate, a bishop who died not because of a illness or an accident but because of a horrible criminal act, there was not even a hint at his figure, at the spiritual heritage he left in his diocese. I was deeply saddened. I wanted to read in that document the signs of a synod addressed more to the hearts of the faithful in remembrance of the martyrdom of Archbishop Raho and all the martyrs of the faith. "

And you, Father Amer, what signs did the deaths of two people so close to you leave to you?

"A dull, persistent pain that sometime become worse. With Father Ragheed I lost a brother, with Monsignor Raho a father. It is not easy but now I know, even more than before, the value of the faith in God and the task I have in spreading it."