Stay if you can.
Iraq had well over a million Christians in 2003 and has perhaps a fifth of that now. The church's clergy have argued, publicly and at cost, that emigration is the one loss that cannot be reversed, and bishops have stayed in emptied cities. It is an ethic that asks people to accept risk, and Chaldeans in Michigan and California answer that it is easy to preach from a pulpit that is not the one being bombed.
Estimates of Iraq's Christian population before 2003 run from 1.2 to 1.5 million; current estimates run from 150,000 to 300,000, and nobody has a firm number. The Chaldean church is the largest share of both figures. Clergy have consistently discouraged emigration and have been criticised for it by families who left; the counter-argument, made openly in the diaspora press, is that the hierarchy asks ordinary people to bear a risk it can insure against. Sako's tenure included a public quarrel with Iraqi political actors and, in July 2023, the revocation by presidential decree of the state recognition of his office, which was restored a year later. The church's largest single community is now in Michigan.
The same ground, other faiths
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