Why John Paul II was never able to visit Iraq

“If it be God's will, I would like to go to Ur of the Chaldees, the present-day Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq, the city where, according to the biblical account, Abraham heard the word of the Lord…”

Pope John Paul II had expressed his desire to visit Iraq several months before the start of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.

But, as we know, the papal trip never took place. And of all the biblical lands, Iraq has remained the only country in the Holy Land not visited by a pope. 

That is about to change next Friday when Pope Francis is scheduled to begin an historic, four-day journey to Iraq.

In mid-1999, most people were convinced that John Paul II, already 79 years old and in declining health, would be able to make that trip. He had been officially invited by the country’s bishops and the government of Saddam Hussein.

The late French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, at the time only recently retired from heading the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, had discreetly visited Iraq a few months earlier to study the feasibility of the trip. 

The United Nations had even made a tacit promise to suspend the “no fly zone” over Iraq to allow the pope’s plane into the country. 

"The visit will take place between December 2-5," announced the then-Chaldean Patriarch Raphael I Bidawid at the end of August 1999.

Opposition from the United States

So why did the trip never take place?

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who was Deputy Secretary of State for internal affairs (or Sostituto) from 1989-2000, revealed in a February 2017 article in L'Osservatore Romano that the papal trip to Iraq had been strongly opposed by one country -- the United States.

Three American diplomats went to Rome in June 1999 to "inform the Holy See of the situation in Iraq and to point out the difficulties that the United States and Great Britain see in the pope's project," wrote Re, who became Dean of the College of Cardinals last year.

The Vatican tried to reassure the U.S. envoys that John Paul would be making "a purely religious trip", but Washington was not convinced.

Thomas Pickering, President Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, went to Rome in the spring of 1999 to argue against the Iraq trip, but John Paul was still intent on going.

At the end of August, the United States publicly expressed its "concern" about the "likelihood that the Iraqi regime will try to manipulate the visit for political reasons".

"John Paul II, who had already anticipated this opposition from the United States, remained determined to go ahead anyway," recalled Cardinal Re in his 2017 article in L’Osservatore Romano.

Saddam Hussein's doubts

While the Vatican continued to make arrangements for the papal visit, Baghdad became increasingly reticent.

The on-site visits of the Vatican organizers were constantly delayed.

"The technical deadlines are no longer sufficient to bring in the pope at the beginning of December," lamented Patriarch Bidawid at the end of October. 

Iraq’s Ambassador to the Holy See requested a meeting with the Secretariat of State in early December. He said that, because of the "abnormal situation" in the country, "the pope's trip had to be postponed until circumstances could permit it".

Behind the diplomatic language, the Vatican officials understood that "the door for the trip was definitively closed."

Since John Paul would not be able to go to Iraq, two French priests decided to make the pilgrimage in the pope’s name.

One of them was Dominique Lebrun, the current Archbishop of Rouen. The other was Pascal Gollnisch, a parish priest in Paris who has been director general of L'Oeuvre d'Orient since 2010.

The two French clerics were received in Baghdad at the beginning of the year 2000 by Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, then apostolic nuncio to Iraq.

The Italian archbishop told them Iraq’s strongman president had back-pedaled on the papal visit. 

"According to him, Saddam Hussein had difficulty convincing himself of the sincerity of the pope when he condemned international operations against his country," recalled the Archbishop Lebrun.

Three earthen urns from Ur

The two French priests rented a non-air-conditioned car and despite a scorching wind, made their way to the site of ancient Ur.

"We heard American bombing in the desert," the archbishop said of the trip.

"That left us with a big impression, but it didn't discourage us," he said.

Once there, the two men saw that a helicopter landing pad had been laid out, a sign that material preparations had been carefully made for John Paul’s trip.

After a time of prayer, they gathered up some earth.

"I had three terracotta pots made in which we distributed this soil," Archbishop Lebrun said. One for himself, one for Father Grollisch and the other one for the pope.

The archbishop was spiritual director at the French Seminary in Rome at the time, and he gave John Paul the terracotta pot during a Wednesday general audience. 

"He thanked me and, in a symbolic gesture similar to the one he made each time he arrived in a new country, John Paul II kissed the soil."