We Are Our Mother of Perpetual Help Parish

ACI MENA, Aug 9, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Eleven years have passed since ISIS seized Mosul and the Nineveh towns and with every anniversary commemorated each year, the same question arises: How many Iraqi Christians remain?

Despite tensions and renewed challenges from regional conflict, Iraqi churches remain full. Just weeks ago, Christians there celebrated joyfully as 1,000 young boys and girls received their first Communion.

In Iraq’s capital, Chaldean parishes celebrated first Communion for 50 children, while 32 others received the sacrament at the Syriac Catholic parish. 

Most significantly, 11 children took their first Communion at the Syriac Catholic Church of Our Lady of Deliverance — the same church that witnessed a horrific massacre in 2010, when dozens of worshippers and two priests were killed and hundreds wounded.

Guarding the deposit of faith

In Qaraqosh (Baghdeda), churches belonging to the Syriac Catholic Archdiocese of Mosul and its dependencies celebrated first Communion for 461 children across three separate ceremonies. Another 30 children received the sacrament in nearby Bashiqa and Bartella, with liturgies led by Archbishop Benedictos Younan Hanno.

During his homilies, Hanno praised the faithful’s determination to stay on their ancestral land and their courage in returning after forced displacement. He commended their commitment to preserving their faith and passing it to their children, who have grown up in stable, united, devoted families.

Some celebrate, others wait

In Basra, Christian families have dwindled to fewer than 350 across all denominations — Chaldean, Armenian, Syriac, Presbyterian, and Latin — yet they remain on their land despite harsh living and environmental conditions. This year, the Chaldean and Syriac Catholic dioceses postponed first Communion celebrations, waiting to gather enough children for next year’s celebration.

In Karemlesh, part of the Chaldean Archdiocese of Mosul, 26 children are preparing to receive the Eucharist. Meanwhile, the Chaldean Diocese of Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah celebrated first Communion for 26 children at Kirkuk’s Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. The Church in Sulaymaniyah, like Basra, is looking ahead to next year.

Towns of northern Iraq

Ankawa’s churches within the Chaldean Diocese of Erbil experienced two extraordinary days. 

Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda presided over three Masses where 210 children received first Communion. In his homilies, he emphasized that the sacrament goes far beyond beautiful photos and white gowns: It represents a lifelong commitment that transforms communicants’ homes into places where Jesus’ presence lives through forgiveness, active listening, and generosity.

Children process into the St. Mary al-Tahir Church, also known as the Church of the Immaculate Conception, in Baghdad, for their first Communion.

Also, in Ankawa, 66 children from the Syriac Catholic Diocese of Adiabene received the Eucharist, along with 15 others in Duhok. In the Chaldean Diocese of Duhok, 75 children celebrated first Communion, while 150 did so in neighboring Zakho Diocese. A similar number in Alqosh Diocese, bereaved of its spiritual shepherd, will receive the sacrament in coming days.

The Syriac Orthodox Church also celebrated first Communion for about 70 children in Bartella and 40 in Ankawa, including children from other denominations.

This story was first published by ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner. It has been translated for and adapted by CNA.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 9, 2025 / 04:00 am (CNA).

On Aug. 9 the Catholic Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein. St. Teresa converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the course of her work as a philosopher and later entered the Carmelite order. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.

Stein was born on Oct. 12, 1891 — a date that coincided with her family’s celebration of Yom Kippur, the Jewish “day of atonement.” Stein’s father died when she was just 2 years old, and she gave up the practice of her Jewish faith as an adolescent.

As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Stein gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the nonreligious Stein met several Christians whose intellectual and spiritual lives she admired.

After earning her degree with the highest honors from Gottingen University in 1915, she served as a nurse in an Austrian field hospital during World War I. She returned to academic work in 1916, earning her doctorate after writing a highly-regarded thesis on the phenomenon of empathy. She remained interested in the idea of religious commitment but had not yet made such a commitment herself.

In 1921, while visiting friends, Stein spent an entire night reading the autobiography of the 16th-century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Ávila. “When I had finished the book,” she later recalled, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” She was baptized into the Catholic Church on the first day of January, 1922.

Stein intended to join the Carmelites immediately after her conversion but would ultimately have to wait another 11 years before taking this step. Instead, she taught at a Dominican school and gave numerous public lectures on women’s issues. She spent 1931 writing a study of St. Thomas Aquinas and took a university teaching position in 1932.

In 1933, the rise of Nazism, combined with her Jewish ethnicity, put an end to her teaching career. After a painful parting with her mother, who did not understand her Christian conversion, she entered a Carmelite convent in 1934, taking the name “Teresa Benedicta of the Cross” as a symbol of her acceptance of suffering.

“I felt,” she wrote, “that those who understood the cross of Christ should take upon themselves on everybody’s behalf.” She saw it as her vocation “to intercede with God for everyone,” but she prayed especially for the Jews of Germany whose tragic fate was becoming clear.

“I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death,” she wrote in 1939, “so that the Lord will be accepted by his people and that his kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world.”

After completing her final work, a study of St. John of the Cross titled “The Science of the Cross,” Teresa Benedicta was arrested along with her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic) and the members of her religious community on Aug. 7, 1942. The arrests came in retaliation against a protest letter by the Dutch bishops decrying the Nazi treatment of Jews.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz on Aug. 9, 1942. Pope John Paul II canonized her in 1998 and proclaimed her a co-patroness of Europe the next year.

This story was first published on Aug. 9, 2011, and has been updated.

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