NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A little girl — maybe four years old — looks at you with disappointment. She wishes the boys with her didn’t cut in line for food, as the American photographer of this scene, Stephen M. Rasche, described it to me. (He assured me that the adults, including the photographer, attended to her hunger immediately.) Also in the gallery is a photo of that same girl exuding joy. It’s almost as if she’s expressing gratitude to the viewer for paying attention, even for a few minutes. She’s a displaced person, which is the focus of the exhibit running during the month of July at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture. The girl is a Christian in northern Nigeria, where it can be a risk to go to Mass or be known as a Christian.
Among the Displaced: Photographs of Iraq and Nigeria is the first time that Rasche is showing just a few of the thousands of photos he has taken while working with persecuted Christians. One of them, also taken last year, is of a beautiful woman who lost one of her eyes and went blind as a result of an attack by Boko Haram terrorists. She now lives in a housing development for both Christians and Muslims established by the Catholic Diocese of Yola. The photo makes clear her pain — and also that the terrorists never robbed her of her dignity.
Another photo from Abuja, Nigeria, shows a man with malaria. He goes untreated, which is not rare for the tens of thousands displaced in camps there. Typhus, cholera, typhoid, and yellow fever, among other conditions, may also go untreated. The man’s regard suggests that he knows it doesn’t have to be this way. And the viewer knows it, too.
If Black Lives Matter signs mean anything, the plight of these people would move us.
The exhibit also includes a window into the persecuted in Iraq. Rasche began working with the Chaldean Church in Iraq during the ISIS genocide against Christians and other religious minorities. Rather than renounce their faith, Catholics left their homes in Mosul and fled to Erbil, near Kurdistan. Knowing that what these people needed was hope for a future, Archbishop Bashar Warda and the Archdiocese of Erbil established a Catholic university and a hospital, besides caring for needs that were even more fundamental. Rasche became chancellor of the university and a voice for the people whom, one could argue, Americans had helped displace, via U.S. military interventions in Iraq over the years. (Much of the work by the school and the hospital was made possible by financial support from the Knights of Columbus.) As director of the Institute for Ancient and Threatened Christianity, Rasche works as a lawyer, advocate, photographer, and documentary producer; in recent years, his efforts have extended to Nigeria.
One of the photos in the exhibit shows a priest encountering what ISIS did in 2016 to his parish church in Karamless, Iraq. He looks astonished, saddened, and overwhelmed by the damage. The terrorists have destroyed and desecrated the altar and a statue of the Virgin Mary. In both Iraq and Nigeria, there is debate and discernment about what to do with statues that have been desecrated — also in the exhibit is a beheaded statue, from Nigeria, of Christ the Redeemer with bullet holes throughout. It’s unclear what they will ultimately do there as they rebuild, but Mary of Karamless was put back together, though with scars visible — her arms attached by wires so we know she is not as she was. The statue was presented to Pope Francis for a blessing when he bucked Covid-19 and security concerns to be with his persecuted people there.
Throughout Scripture, we read commands to care for widows and orphans. In Iraq, these take on new meaning. One of Rasche’s photos is of an “‘orphaned’ elderly displaced” woman. “As young families took the dangerous path of fleeing the country entirely, many of the elderly — exhausted, bewildered, and unable to face the journey of the international refugee — chose to stay behind,” the caption read. At the time Rasche took the photo, this woman was being moved to her third displaced-persons camp in six months. She asked Rasche, “When will I go home?”
Two photos in the exhibit are of Catholic religious sisters, one at the papal Mass in Erbil in 2021, another in Nigeria in 2022. After I took a first look at the exhibit, Rasche pointed to the photo of Sister Mary Joseph, a Dominican sister, and declared her a saint. He added that she frequently reaches out to him to ask how he’s doing and whether he needs any specific prayers. She, meanwhile, lives in a convent that routinely must cope with gunfire, abductions, and nighttime murders. The description beside the photo says, “While admitting that she and the others were often terrified at night, in the morning, we go out on the street, and return to our work with joy.”
July begins in the U.S. with celebrations of liberty. For those who don’t have the same kind of religious protections that we do, freedom is an internal choice to live life to the fullest with dignity and joy, even among existential threats. We may shy away from knowing the plight of the persecuted, for fear of our powerlessness. But in Among the Displaced, we see people who are not victims but rather victors in their perseverance in hope for the truth of what they believe about God and eternity. That’s how there are smiles amid the pain.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.