WASHINGTON (OSV News) — As Father Thabet Habib Al-Mekko stood in the sanctuary of a church in Karamles, Iraq, he looked around. Pieces of broken stone and ripped cloth littered the floor, the altar was smashed in half, and bullet holes surrounded the tabernacle.
Most prominently, in the middle of the church recently recovered from ISIS, a decapitated statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary stood.
The priest tried to comprehend the scene before looking up. That moment, from 2016, is one of many captured by award-winning photographer Stephen M. Rasche and displayed in a new exhibit at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.
The exhibit, “Among the Persecuted and Displaced: The Christian Experience in Iraq and Nigeria,” presents nearly 100 black-and-white photos taken by Rasche, a religious freedom expert. The photos feature the faces of persecuted and marginalized Christians in Iraq and Nigeria.
“I hope that you’ll find within all of these faces a spark of human dignity,” said Rasche, a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington and director of the Institute for Catholic Humanitarian Service at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, where he is also a professor of theology. “And in that spark of human dignity, that you will see some commonality of the human experience — of the solidarity that we as Catholics, as human beings, believe is so important.”
Rasche made his comments while leading a panel, “Seeing the Persecuted and Displaced: Experts Tell Their Stories,” held Dec. 2 at the shrine. Dozens of people gathered to hear him and other experts in religious persecution speak during the discussion that launched the exhibit. Two experts joined Rasche: Father Athanius Barkindo, executive director of the National Peace Committee in Abuja, Nigeria, and of the Kukah Center in Abuja, and Father Karam Shamasha, provost of the Catholic University in Erbil, Iraq.
Speaking in a room adjacent to the exhibit, which will remain open until Feb. 8, the panelists invited American Catholics to see the human dignity of Christians suffering in Iraq and Nigeria. They asked Catholics to pray and remember the persecution that their brothers and sisters face worldwide.
While commenting on particular photos, Father Shamasha and Father Barkindo shared stories from Iraq and Nigeria. Both countries appear on Open Doors’ World Watch List 2025, which ranks the 50 countries where Christians suffer from the most severe persecution. The global network that supports persecuted Christians places Nigeria in seventh place and Iraq in 17th.
Drawing from their own experience, the priests described the persecution and discrimination that Christians face in their respective countries. Father Shamasha described how, before he helped establish the Catholic University in Erbil, violence forced his seminary to close multiple times in the early 2000s and how he was displaced in 2014 when ISIS invaded Nineveh.
“We were more than 120,000 Christians,” Father Shamasha remembered. “We were forced to leave our towns, our church, everything that we have.”
Father Barkindo spoke about the persecution Christians in Nigeria face through government policies and physical violence. He described how Christian churches, schools and hospitals are targeted and how Christians are killed and kidnapped.
He hoped that event attendees would remember the victims in IDP camps, or settlements of internally displaced persons who rely on humanitarian aid, he told OSV News.
“Sometimes they have to give their bodies, particularly women, in exchange for food,” he said. “People should remember and pray for the church, because most of these people in IDP camps are Christians.”
Priests, he said, have to go to IDP camps for Mass.
“Most times they are kidnapped and taken away,” he told OSV News. “One of our priests in the Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna was taken last week by the kidnappers from his parish in the night.”
Rasche also spoke from personal experience. He went to Iraq in 2014 to serve the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil, which was responsible for the care of nearly 150,000 homeless Christians. In 2020, his work expanded to Nigeria, where he helped with the Catholic-run healthcare, education and catechetical teaching of displaced persons.
“These two countries are both countries in which the Knights of Columbus have had a history of involvement in supporting persecuted, marginalized Christians,” Rasche, a member of the Knights, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organization, told OSV News of the event’s focus on Iraq and Nigeria.
Throughout the event, the panelists repeatedly thanked the Knights for their service. Among other things, the Knights supported Rasche’s work, the founding of the Catholic University in Erbil and the shrine hosting the exhibit.
Following the event, attendees explored the exhibit where Rasche’s photos hung from the walls. Posters described the persecution of Christians in Iraq and Nigeria. In a back corner, a decapitated and bullet-riddled statue of Christ the Redeemer from Nigeria stood. It came from a Catholic Church in Bazza, after Boko Haram destroyed the town in 2014. Cards from the Knights with an icon of Our Lady Help of Persecuted Christians and a prayer for persecuted Christians were available to take home.
Rasche called his 2016 photo of the ruined church most meaningful to him. The priest, he said, later became a bishop. He died of pulmonary fibrosis after working to rebuild towns. But before he passed away, he witnessed a change: The statue of Our Lady was repaired, presented at the historic 2021 papal Mass in Erbil, and returned to its now-restored home, the church of Mar Addai.
Rasche’s photos capture this hope in the midst of suffering and pain. The exhibit places his photo of the destroyed statue next to his photos of the restored one. They show the joy of the Mass in Erbil celebrated by Pope Francis.
“It was a very blessed moment for me and for all my people, because we felt this presence, this nearness of all the church to us,” Father Shamasha remembered the Mass during the panel. “Having his holiness with us in the Mass, saying, ‘We are with you. Don’t fear, don’t fear. You are not alone.'”
“This is the message of the exhibit — and all the words that we want to say,” he added. “We want you to not forget about us, to not forget about Christians in this persecuted land.”
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