My spiritual journey began when I began going to Mass with my wife. And when we decided to baptize our children in the Catholic faith. It's a path which has taken 25 years, and maybe longer. Over time, emotionally, intellectually and rationally it became clear that the Catholic Church was the right home for me. But it happened after a very long period of time. When I left my political post, and no longer had all the tensions linked to being prime minister, it was something I wanted to do.
It would be unfair to suggest that Tony Blair’s Catholicism is a mere veneer, or to say that it has originated from a place of insincerity within him.
Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning his conversion while considering the reason for which he has made the news this past week. The announcement that Queen Elizabeth II had included him in her list of honours has caused widespread disgust, with one million people quickly signing a petition of opposition.
When Blair made the fateful decision to join George W. Bush and the United States in their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was not a practicing Catholic, though his wife was. Yet, the horrific decision to willingly commit war crimes was to have consequences for people of faith across the world. Initially cast in Islamic media as a ‘crusade’, the criminal invasion was the most devastating single event to happen to any Christian population in this century.
As Christian Iraqis huddled in fear inside their homes in March 2003, they crouched together in terror and breathlessly counted down the seconds until the deadline set by the United States came into effect.
Saddam Hussein had been given 48 hours to leave Iraq by US President George W. Bush. The conditions were academic, Bush was ready to strike regardless, having ensured the cooperation of a vast array of characters including the New York Times and Joe Biden, to create the blatant lie that Iraq had been readied to unleash Weapons of Mass Destruction. Outside of the States, Fabian Society member Tony Blair rowed in behind Bush’s lies. Blindsided, most of the West was left powerless to oppose those who were exploiting the terror elicited by the sight of those planes crashing into the Twin Towers in 2001, apart from France’s Jacques Chirac.
At 2.30 on the morning of March 20th, the first explosions could be heard inside the historic city. A ‘bunker’ believed to have contained Saddam Hussein was amongst the targets heavily bombed by the jets, a ‘bunker’ which it was later revealed to have been entirely fictitious.
Journalist Robert Fisk detailed these attacks from within Iraq:
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
It’s a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafes. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could only say two words. “Roar, flash,” he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.
How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.
For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nassiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?
These were the sufferings of the Iraqi people as a whole, but the sufferings of the Christians of Iraq were entirely unique and entirely awful.
Early in the war, Christians began to be targeted by Islamists, leading to many having to either flee the country or face certain violence. The full scale of this nightmarish crescendo became apparent in 2008, when Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was kidnapped in Mosul, murdered by Islamists and dumped in a shallow grave.
Another priest, Fr. Ragheed Ganni, was was shot dead in a church in Mosul after refusing to convert to Islam. He has celebrated his first Mass at the Irish College in Rome, which now depicts his image on the wall alongside St. Oliver Plunkett and others martyrs for the faith.
There are countless other stories. Take for example that of 3 year old Christian boy Adam, who begged terrorists ‘enough’ after they had murdered his family and others. He was shot dead by them.
To the Christians of the Middle East, this is the legacy of Tony Blair’s political career. This is the legacy which Queen Elizabeth II has decided to honour.
Perhaps Tony Blair the Catholic has repented of these abominable war crimes, comparable to any of the horrors of the Twentieth Century. However, even if he already has, he should do the right thing and turn down this insult to the Christian peoples of the Middle East.
They have suffered enough.
