article_snippet.sent: In June 2012, Bishop Shlemon Warduni of Iraq told the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "We beg you to help.
article_snippet.sent: By then, nearly every remaining church in Iraq had constructed a blast wall around nearly every remaining church in Iraq building to buffet the threat of the inevitable church bombing.
article_snippet.sent: Again and again the world did not respond as it might have, and now the inconceivable has happened: Iraq's Nineveh Plain has been emptied of Iraq's Nineveh Plain ancient Christianity community, which existed there for more than 1,500 years.
article_snippet.sent: On March 27, in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako referred to the present reality of Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako fellow Iraqi Christians as a "catastrophic situation.
article_snippet.sent: Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako's right.
article_snippet.sent: Christian communities that took 2,000 years to build, and that were started by the apostles the apostles, lie in ashes between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
article_snippet.sent: Survivors waste away as refugees, often in deplorable conditions, with no homes or churches to return to if the region eventually stabilizes.
article_snippet.sent: Whether no homes or churches to return to if the region eventually stabilizes be Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, Christian communities are united in what Pope Francis has called an "ecumenism of blood," recognizing that Christianity is experiencing more martyrdom today than in the first century.
article_snippet.sent: As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson's Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, has aptly put it, "Piece by piece, Middle Eastern Christianity is being shattered.
article_snippet.sent: It is also true that Christianity faces a legitimate threat of extinction in several parts of Iraq and Syria and Christianity faces a growing threat in nations such as Nigeria.
article_snippet.sent: In solidarity with those being threatened we agree with the words delivered by Jordan's King Abdullah II at the United Nations last fall, "Christians are an integral part of [the Middle East's] past, present and future.
article_snippet.sent: When history writes of our time will our be able to say that our tried everything in our power to cease this attempt to eliminate 2,000 years of Christianity from the Middle East and to stop this threat before this threat spreads to other nations?