Iraqi Christianity, which dates back to the earliest days of the Church, has an unlikely new centre: a suburb in Sweden.
Chaldean Catholics have long hoped that Södertälje, a town 20 miles from Stockholm, could be a “new Jerusalem”.
It is where many thousands have settled since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Now, after years of fundraising, a huge new church has been inaugurated. The Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, funded in part by the Church in Germany, has room for up to 6,000 people.
The inauguration service was led by Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Stockholm – the first Swedish cardinal – and the Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako.
Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne was also present. The Archdiocese of Cologne contributed €500,000 (£440,000) towards the church.
Cardinal Woelki told domradio.de: “The Chaldean Catholics, who are the largest Christian refugee group in Sweden, invited Armenian and Syrian Catholics but also Syrian Orthodox, Melkites and Maronites. We celebrated in the Latin Rite, but as Arabic was the mother tongue of most of the parish members, the liturgy was interwoven with their own, familiar hymns from Syria, Mosul or Baghdad.”
A leaflet fundraising for the new church said that Catholics in the Stockholm area had “longed for a Marian shrine for a long time. The Chaldean church can become a destination of pilgrimages and a new place to venerate the Blessed Mother.”
The Chaldean Church is an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See.
Vatican launches new site in radical shake-up of its media
The Vatican is launching a new website as part of a radical reform of its media operation.
Mgr Dario Viganò, prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, said the multimedia news site, vaticannews.va, would be launched before Christmas. The Vatican Radio and Vatican Television Centre sites will be accessible as archives, he said. The announcement came after Mgr Viganò presented the site to Pope Francis and his Council of Cardinals and explained the progress made in unifying Vatican media.
The “cornerstone” of the new system, he said, would be an editorial multimedia centre – a single structure producing audio, text, video and graphics for a variety of platforms.
The Secretariat for Communications’s editorial board will determine how various events and issues are covered.
The centre will begin its work with 70 people working in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Eventually, Mgr Viganò said in a statement, it will include 350 employees drawn from the 40 language sections of Vatican Radio and eight other Vatican institutions, including the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
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