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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi Christians marked a restrained Easter weekend as fear of attacks kept many from openly celebrating their most sacred day of the year and church officials urged them not to give up on the country.
At Our Lady of Salvation, where gunmen and suicide bombers killed 52 worshipers and guards in October, the church was tightly locked, guarded by Iraqi police who said the doors would be opened only moments before the Saturday evening Mass.
Only the arch and cross on the church roof were visible behind 10-foot-high concrete walls like others that have turned most churches in Baghdad into miniature fortresses.
"Our churches have become like prisons," said Monsignor Pious Casha, who arrived at Our Lady of Salvation during the siege moments after Iraqi special forces stormed the church. "The barbed wire and concrete are new. Yes they protect the churches, but they make the worshipers spiritually constrained."
At St. Joseph's Catholic Church in the relatively affluent neighborhood of Mansour, Casha said the church had been packed on Palm Sunday a week ago with families doing a procession through the streets around the church.
He said, however, that of the 1,300 families that had been in his parish in 2003, only 500 remained — with a few more leaving every week, most of them to Turkey. "It is a disease of immigration," he said.
With traditional escape routes closing as more countries in the Middle East are engulfed by unrest, Turkey has become the default route for Christians fleeing Iraq. Of more than a million Christians in Iraq before 2003, there are believed to be only about 650,000 left. The exodus has raised fears about the future of Christianity in the region where it first took root.
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