KARAMLESH, Iraq — From Mosul’s rubble-strewn streets to ancient churches at Karamlesh, badly damaged by the Islamic State group, Archbishop Najeeb Michaeel is preparing for the first-ever papal visit to Iraq.
Amid the cleanup and reconstruction, the priest has ensured some scars of war from IS’s brutal campaign remain –a broken chalice, a smashed cross on a church bell tower — to remember the horrors the Christians of Iraq’s Nineveh plains have survived.
“We forgive, without forgetting,” said Michaeel, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, as he visited Karamlesh and other war-ravaged Christian villages of northern Iraq.
“But the most important thing is that joy ent…
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