Fighting fear with faith

BAGHDAD — Hope has become increasingly rare among Iraq’s Christian minority, which says it is under threat as never before.

But Sister Beninia Hermes Shoukwana, the nun who has served as headmistress at the Hebtikar public school for more than 30 years, sees the threats and violence against her faith as just another challenge to be met.

About 10 percent of Iraq’s estimated 800,000 Christians have fled the country, most of them to neighboring Syria.

“The people are terrified, actually, about what is happening,” said the Rev. Saad Hanna, a priest at Mary Jacob Church in the Dora section of Baghdad, which recently was blackened by a bomb. Its parishioners number a third of what they did before the war.

“The people no longer come to church,” Father Hanna says. “The truth is we are in trouble and we don’t know how to overcome this.”

Sister Shoukwana, 64, does not hide her distress over the fate of her fellow Iraqi Christians, most of them Chaldeans — members of the Nestorian sect who converted to Catholicism in the 16th century.

“For years, Christians and Muslims lived like brothers and sisters. Today, the extremists are trying to separate us,” she says.

She vows to continue running her white-brick school attended by 3,000 students and keep building bridges between Iraq’s faiths.

For years, she says, she has been peppered with the same innocent questions from her mostly Muslim student body.

“‘Madame Headmistress,’ they ask me, ‘why don’t you dress like mommy? Why do you always wear the same white dress?’ ”

But this year, she began hearing more vicious remarks from parents and students.

“I’ve been accused of trying to convert little Muslims into Christianity,” Sister Shoukwana says as the worry creases spread across her forehead. “Leaflets have been distributed asking the parents to withdraw their kids from my school.”

She says fliers were distributed in her hometown of Mosul during Ramadan, ordering Christian women to wear Islamic-style head scarves.

Before that came a wave of attacks on five Baghdad churches in October, the second mass targeting of churches. Attacks on churches in August killed at least 10 and wounded nearly 50 Iraqi Christians.

Through it all, Sister Shoukwana has been fearless in defense of her school.

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