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Our Faith PROFESSION OF THE ORTHODOX FAITH OF THE HOLY APOSTOLIC CATHOLIC ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT; AMEN. We believe in one God the Father, the Omnipotent, the Maker of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God; the Only-Begotten and the Firstborn of all creatures. He who was born of His Father eternally before all worlds and was not created, true God from true God, of the same nature of His Father, by whom the...

The new school year has started this month in Turkey, but Assyrian Christians, otherwise known as Syriacs or Chaldeans, still do not have a single primary school in the country where they could learn their native language and culture. The Istanbul-based newspaper Agos reported that the activists of the Syriac community applied to the Ministry of National Education in 2012 to get its permission and support to open a Syriac kindergarten in Istanbul. When their application was rejected, they took on a legal struggle and were finally able to open the Mor Efrem kindergarten without any economic support from the...

A view from the Christian town of Alqosh in the Nineveh Plain.For more than two years it lasted, just minutes away from Islamic State-held territory. The Iraqi town of Alqosh (50km north of Mosul) is the only Christian stronghold in the country that survived IS. Looking for signs of hope for the future of Christianity in Iraq? This town, with its four churches, two monasteries and 500 Christian families, is where it can be found. For those who grew up reading the Bible, Alqosh might ring a distant bell. It was the town where Old Testament prophet Nahum, "the Elkoshite",...

Why he continues to exist despite Islam's continued slaugher of Christians. The phenomenon of the Islamo-Christian” deserves wider attention, and the word wider use. An “Islamo-Christian” is, in its strictest sense, a Christian Arab who identifies with and works to advance the Islamic agenda, out of fear or out of a belief that his “Arabness” requires loyalty to Islam. Islamization by the Arab Muslim conquerors of Mesopotamia, Syria, and North Africa was a vehicle for Arab imperialism. This imperialism, the most successful in human history, convinced those who accepted Islam to also forget their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic pasts. It...

At the same time, Barack Hussein Obama is trying to bring in up to 200,000 Syrian Muslim so-called 'refugees,' but apparently has decided there is no room in America for 12 Chaldean Christians who are being persecuted and slaughtered in Iraq by ISIS. What's more, Chaldean leaders in the US were advised by the attorneys representing the Christian 'detainees' NOT TO COMMENT on their deportation. Or what? Nearly half of the 27 Iraqi Christians the Obama administration has been holding for the past six months at an ICE detention center in Otay Mesa, California, are set to be deported in...

 Supreme Knight Carl Anderson  Congressman Tom McClintock  Archbishop William Lori My Muslim computer teacher Asim showed me pictures of his Hajj to Mecca with his Mom, Dad, Wife & Kids. His face was overcome with emotion. It was an intensely spiritual experience. I realize most ISIS victims are Muslim, and I do worry about their families.I also worry about the families of the parishioners of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Assyrian Chaldean Catholic Church in Orangevale, Sacramento. A Deacon (Shamasha) has said his parishioners have seen dogs licking up their families' blood off the streets.Twenty-seven Christians at the Otay Mesa...

An Iraqi Christian woman fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Mosul sits inside the Sacred Heart of Jesus Chaldean Church in Telkaif, Iraq, in July 2014. (CNS photo/Reuters) While the US government has approved the entry of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees fleeing war in their country, 27 Iraqi Chaldean Catholics, seeking to escape violence and anti-Christian persecution in their homeland, were denied entry into the United States last month. The Chaldeans were held at the Otay Detention Center near San Diego, California, and the majority had family in the area willing to take them in and...

Amarillo Police boarded the plane and removed six passengers described as “unruly”Members of a San Diego-based recreational soccer league were removed from a cross-country flight Monday and arrested on suspicion of federal charges. A dozen members of the San Diego Chaldean Soccer League were flying Southwest Airlines to Chicago’s Midway Airport for a tournament, friends tell NBC 7. A "level one threat" was declared onboard Flight 1522 and prompted pilots to divert the flight and its 117 passengers to Amarillo, Texas, just after 10 p.m., according to court documents. Southwest Airlines said in a statement that “several passengers traveling together...

Catholics in Iraq are 'challenging' the Islamic State not with weapons or violence but through education and teaching, thanks to the contribution and support of Australian Catholic University. This October courses will begin at the Catholic University of Erbil, which was desired by the Chaldean Church in Iraq as a concrete way to aid the Christian youth in the Middle East. In recent days, Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda of Erbil for Chaldeans met with representatives of Australian Catholic University (ACU) and the President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Archbishop Denis James Hart of Melbourne in order to better...

A Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, Dr. Kessel was sitting in the library of the manuscript's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific material in Baltimore. At that moment, Dr. Kessel realized that just three weeks earlier, in a library at Harvard University, he had seen a single orphaned page that was too similar to these pages to be coincidence. The manuscript he held contained a hidden translation of an ancient, influential medical text by Galen of Pergamon, a Greco-Roman physician and philosopher who died in 200 A.D. It was missing pages and Dr. Kessel was suddenly...

I was born in Baghdad, but all my ancestors before me, including my parents, where born in Mosul and neighboring cities in Northern Iraq. Even now when I speak Arabic it is still with a Moslouy dialect. For many years, no matter where I was living or what I was doing, the answer to “Where are you from?” was one of identity: “Ana Maslouy.” I am a Mosulian. And I am, all the way down, in spite of my thoroughly Americanized personality—such is the deep and dual identity of immigrants.Born to a Chaldean Catholic mother and a Syriac Orthodox...

Mustafa Khayat The Islamic State group's attempt to erase any culture but its own continues apace. It now has blown up a 10th century Chaldean monastery north of Mosul and bulldozed a nearby graveyard, according to several reports. The Mar Gorgis or St. George monastery has been "wiped out" by ISIS militants, Nineveh Yakou , Assyrian Archaeologist and Director of Cultural Heritage and Indigenous Affairs at A Demand for Action, told IBTimes UK. The building, located on the Ba'werah neighbourhood on a hill north of Mosul on the other side of the Tigris river, was founded by the Assyrian Church of the...

Mother of God Church in Southfield, Michigan Two Iraqi-born Catholic priests who have been serving in the United States have returned to Baghdad to become bishops. One of them, who had once been kidnapped and beaten there by anti-Christian extremists, will be remaining in his native—and troubled—land. Father Basel Yaldo, 44, a Chaldean Catholic priest who has been serving at Mother of God Church in Southfield, Michigan, and Chorbishop Emanuel Shaleta, pastor of St. George's parish in Shelby Township, both suburbs of Detroit, were ordained to the episcopate February 6 in Baghdad. Bishop Yaldo will serve as auxiliary bishop of...

Christian refugees in a Chaldean Catholic church in Erbil The Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad Raphael Louis Sako calls on Iraqi Christians to fast on Christmas Eve in order to implore the Lord for the return of refugees in Mosul and the Nineveh plains. At the same time, he asks the faithful not to organise "any worldly celebration" for Christmas and New Year as "a sign of solidarity with their displaced brothers and sisters, who are going through indescribable suffering." ... For this reason, he urges them to fast from Monday 22 December until night on 24 December, not touching...

Tehran, Dec 20, IRNA -- Millions of Iranians all over the world Monday night will celebrate 'Yalda', the longest night of the year and the first night of winter as a token of victory of the angel of goodness over the devil of badness. 'Yalda' is a Syriac word meaning birth and according to Mithraism, a faith that initially originated from Persia and later spread out throughout the ancient civilized world, the first day of winter which falls on December 21 this year, was celebrated as the birthday of Mithra, the angel of light. Ancient Iranians believed that two groups...

One Faith - One Lord - One Baptism Do you wish there were ONE thing you could do to rescue Christians who are in the cross-hairs for slaughter by ISIS terrorists in Iraq? Listen: there IS something you can do. I got this appeal from Robert George, one of the most respected Catholics in the field of defending fundamental Human Rights. If you've heard of him, you know how great he is. If you've never heard of him, let me just tell you.. there's nobody I respect more. Please heed his call and sign an online petition. ------from Robert...

Islamic State jihadists who took over large areas of northern Iraq overnight have forced thousands of Christians to flee and occupied churches, removing crosses and destroying manuscripts, Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako has said. “(The Christians) have fled with nothing but their clothes, some of them on foot, to reach the Kurdistan region,” Patriarch Sako told AFP.

War On Terror: The fanatical Islamist group torches an 1,800-year-old church built before the founding of Islam and forces the Christian residents of Mosul to convert, pay a tax, leave or face execution. This is what the West faces. 'From Boston to Zanzibar, there's a worldwide war on Christianity," Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said at the Values Voters Summit last October, an annual conservative gathering. The number and intensity of attacks was so great, he said, that it's "almost as if we lived in the Middle Ages." That was an era when the swords of Islam had conquered much...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The head of Iraq's largest church said on Sunday that Islamic State militants who drove Christians out of Mosul were worse than Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu who ransacked medieval Baghdad. Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako led a wave of condemnation for the Sunni Islamists who demanded Christians either convert, submit to their radical rule and pay a religious levy or face death by the sword. At the Vatican, Pope Francis decried what he said was the persecution of Christians in the birthplace of their faith, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the...

Imagine being killed because of your religion. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical Islamic group, says this will start happening in Iraq by Saturday and the threat is sending shockwaves through the community of more than 50,000 Chaldeans in the San Diego area. At St. Michael Chaldean Church in El Cajon, locals are hoping for peace. Chaldeans visit the church in east San Diego by the thousands to pray for the thousands of victims killed in Iraq and people being persecuted because of their religion. One of the women praying there is Sister Francois. Though she’s...