By Joseph Tulloch
Christians in Iraq want to be “not just a statistic”, but “a light in society”.
That’s how Fr Karam Shamasha describes the inspiration behind the founding of the Catholic University in Erbil.
With the university’s ten-year anniversary approaching, Fr Shamasha, its Provost, spoke to Vatican News about its original goal of educating Iraq’s religious minorities, its new department of Oriental Studies and Comparative Religion, and his plans for its second decade.
The following transcript has been edited for style and brevity.
Vatican News: How did the Catholic University in Erbil get started?
Fr Karam Shamasha: The university began in 2014, when Iraqi Christians were being displaced from their villages by ISIS. In 2015, His Excellency Archbishop Warda, the Archbishop of Erbil, saw that the Church was helping people by feeding people, protecting them, giving them places to stay, and decided that we had to educate them, too.
So he started the Catholic University in Erbil. We began contacting people around the world to help us make this dream a reality. In the beginning, we had help from the Italian Bishops’ conference, and other organisations. At first, we had students from the minority groups, like Yazidis, Christians, and so on. They had been displaced by ISIS, forced to leave their houses.
Today, we have around 725 students. Most of them are Christian, around 60%, around 30% Muslims, and the other 10% are Yazidis and other minorities. So we have all the colours of Iraq, all the ethnicities.
We hope to be a light, the place where people can learn about virtue. We don’t want to just provide a normal education. The majority of Iraqis are Muslims, and the Christians are very few – we’re getting to be as few as 200,000, and the number is always decreasing. But we really want to be a light in society, not just providing education, but also peace-building, and building relations between different groups.
What sort of reactions have you had to your mission?
In the beginning, people thought it was a little bit strange that we were trying to build something Catholic in a Muslim-majority region. But our view is: this is our land, and we want to be here, not just as a statistic, but as a light in society. It would be terrible, for all Christians, if in the future there were no Christians in Iraq.
So the fact that we now have a university, a Catholic university – that’s not a small thing for us.
It’s the only university in the Middle East with that kind of name. There are many Catholic universities in Lebanon, in Palestine, and so on, but none of them have the title ‘Catholic University of X’.
In September, the university will celebrate its tenth anniversary. What does that feel like, and what’s your vision for the next ten years?
We’re so excited about the anniversary, and very grateful for all the people that helped us to get here.
For the next ten years, we want to integrate more into the world of international Catholic higher education. A few months ago, we were able to get membership of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, and I’m now working to connect with the International Federation of Catholic Universities.
As I said, we don’t want to just provide a normal education. We want to provide a very high-quality education based on the Catholic intellectual tradition. In our mission statement, we say that very clearly. We also really want to provide a good education in Oriental Studies, about Mesopotamia and the origins of Christianity and the other religions.
We’ve already opened a department of Oriental Studies and Comparative Religions, and this is an area we’re really focusing on – teaching our students about the origins of their own religions and other religions, and in this way contributing to peacebuilding.
You said that 40% of your students aren’t Christian, so this comparative approach must be something that students of other religions also really appreciate?
Yes, definitely. In fact, when many people in Iraq hear that the Church is behind the university, they have confidence in it, and they feel sure that their children will be safe there, and will receive the best kind of education.
This is also the mission of the Church, which is mater et magistra, mother and teacher. Providing an education is part of our mission, and we’re working to be an education centre for students of all faiths. Part of that is this new department of Oriental Studies and Comparative Religion, dedicated to peacebuilding. We really want to be a place for spreading the light of good relationships among communities, and building the common good together.
Changing the subject a bit: You’re in Rome for the Jubilee with a group of parishioners, and you’ve all made the trip from Iraq.
It’s really wonderful to be here in these days. They are days of grace for every Christian.
We came from Nineveh to Rome. It’s not an easy thing to do, because Rome is a city full of martyrs, and in Nineveh, we also have a lot of martyrs. So our visit is almost like a hug between sisters. We bring with us all the suffering that we’ve lived there, and we came here to receive the hope that Pope Francis invited all Christians to receive when he announced the Jubilee year. And we want to go out from here and spread that light of hope. We travelled from the land of the martyrs, where as Christians we don’t know what our future will be, to the city of the martyrs.
We came here with a number of different families. I have 45 with me, of all ages, including youth, adults, the elderly. And we came with hope, because we come from a Church that sometimes feels isolated, but we know that the Popes have never forgotten about us in their homilies and in their words, and all of them have been praying for us, from the invasion in 2003 to the present day.
And so we also came to say thank you, and to be in communion with the Church of Rome. We’ve seen pilgrims from all over the world here, and we’re very happy to be a part of that. – Vatican News
