“We know the situation of our brothers and sisters still in Iraq who wake at night frightened by the knock at the door, the unusual sound, the gunshot or the explosion, the knowledge that few if any will defend them, the constant fear and tension of not knowing what will happen next,” Bishop Kenney said in his homily.
“We who are here in England are angry when our government said … that it was safe for people to be repatriated to Iraq,” he told a congregation drawn largely from London’s Iraqi Christian community. “You know in a way few others do how untrue that is.
“Our emotions are of deep sorrow and possibly also of anger: anger that innocent people are killed in this way, that our friends, our relations are sacrificed for, at best, short-term political gain, and, at worst, for no real reason at all, other than that they are followers of Jesus Christ.”
