On the last day of October, 58 men, women and children were killed and 80 wounded in Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church. Terrorists had taken hostage an entire congregation; when Iraqi forces stormed the building, the terrorists detonated their explosives. Iraq’s al Qaeda node, the Islamic State of Iraq (isi), claimed responsibility for the assault, the deadliest against Iraq’s Christians on record.
Since the United States removed Saddam Hussein’s regime from power in 2003, Islamists have regularly targeted Iraq’s Christian populations, driving over 1 million Christians to flee the country. Christian leaders say that around 1.5 million Christians remain in Iraq.
On November 1, Pope Benedict xvi denounced the isi’s attack as “ferocious’’ and called on the international community to increase efforts to bring peace to the region.
Three weeks earlier, at the start of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East, the pope delivered an unscripted homily in which he said the following about Islamic extremism:
And then the power of the terrorist ideologies. Violence is done apparently in the name of God, but this is not God: These are false divinities that must be unmasked, that are not God. … These ideologies that are so dominant that they impose themselves by force are divinities. And in the suffering of the saints, in the suffering of believers, of the mother church of which we are part, these divinities must fall.
The pope’s belief that “terrorist ideologies” “must fall” has likely been intensified by the attack on Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church.
The tsunami of anti-immigrant fervor sweeping through Europe reveals that the Continent’s Catholic-influenced nations are rapidly losing tolerance for the hordes of Muslims practicing within their borders. As Europe sees the Catholic Church bleeding in Muslim countries, its tolerance for Islamism will erode away completely, contributing to what the Bible describes will be a blitzkrieg attack against certain Middle Eastern nations.
