Easter Messages Focus on Need to Rebuild Iraq

Christians around the world celebrated Christ’s Resurrection at Easter observances Sunday, but many prominent churchmen chose to emphasize the world’s responsibility for the future of Iraq in their sermons to the faithful.

In Britain, the archbishop of York, David Hope, urged allied forces to put as much energy into reconstructing Iraq as they did into toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“Quite frankly, despite all the promises, given how things currently are in Kabul and Afghanistan, postwar does not bode well as to how things might be in Baghdad and Iraq,” Hope told worshipers at York Minster in northern England.

“At least as much determination, commitment and resolution will be needed on the part of the coalition which pursued the war now to pursue the reconstruction,” said Hope, the most senior member of the Church of England after Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury.

Williams, the leader of the world’s 70 million Anglicans, also talked of Iraq in his own sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, warning against extreme views either for or against the war.

“Every choice is flawed,” Williams said in his first Easter Sunday address as archbishop.

In St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II said Iraqis must take charge of the rebuilding of their own country with international help, but he also made a ringing appeal for an end to bloodshed elsewhere.

Marking the 25th Easter season of his pontificate, John Paul spoke of “other parts of the world, where forgotten wars and protracted hostilities are causing deaths and injuries amid silence and neglect on the part of considerable sectors of public opinion.”

The leader of the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics mentioned conflicts in Africa and “attacks on people’s freedom in the Caucasus, in Asia and in Latin America,” although he named no country. The breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya is in the Caucasus, as are rival former Soviet nations Azerbaijan and Armenia.

“With profound grief,” the pope added, “I think of the wake of violence and bloodshed, with no sign of ceasing, in the Holy Land.”

In Jerusalem, only a small crowd of worshipers gathered in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where a somber atmosphere contrasted with the traditional joy of the holiday.

Unlike past years, there was room to walk around the center of the ancient church during the Easter Mass.

Usually, it is packed with pilgrims, tourists and local Palestinian Christians, but many people have been frightened away by more than 30 months of Palestinian-Israeli violence.

Michel Sabbah, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, adorned in red headgear and a gold-flecked robe for the holiday, conducted the Mass in front of an ornate stone structure that represents the tomb of Jesus.

The fortress-like church, built by Emperor Constantine in AD 330, marks the biblical site of Calvary, a hilltop where the Crucifixion took place.

According to Christian belief, Jesus rose from the dead three days later.