Now his mission is to tell the whole world ;that there is an ongoing genocide against Christians in the Middle East. He knows this because he lived in Aleppo for three and a half years and witnessed the systematic killing of people in his parish, for being Christians.
FR. RODRIGO MIRANDA
Priest, Institute of the Incarnate Word
'The experience is extreme. No person in the world is prepared for a war, regardless of the causes. You see how the whole population is disappearing, all the material structure is disappearing, and the heinous crimes committed. It touches us dearly, particularly genocide against Christian communities. It is a true and documented genocide.'
Father Rodrigo Miranda arrived in Syria a few months before the start of the war in 2011. He has lived under the bombs as a Syrian without leaving the community entrusted to him.
FR. RODRIGO MIRANDA
Priest, Institute of the Incarnate Word
'I always say that I learned to be a priest in Syria. I remember a phrase from the day of my ordination, and it is: 'No one has greater love than the one who gives his life for his friends.' That phrase was really true in Syria when you literally had to give life, in every way.'
The outbreak of war he says forcefully is a foreign conflict, not born from Syrian society. He says that while the Syrian government also committed atrocities, nothing ravaged the country like that for over 5 years.
According to some sources, 470,000 people have died from bombs. Many other people were injured or suffered psychological scars for life.
FR. RODRIGO MIRANDA
Priest, Institute of the Incarnate Word
'Finding resources and benefactors to rebuild a country is possible. Therefore it is possible to reconstruct a country in structure, but there is another problem: who reconstructs a soul?'
Radical Islam, represented by its bloodiest Daesh end, relentlessly pursues religious minorities. In Syria Christians suffered even before the arrival of ISIS, facing no opposition from the international community. Father Miranda says that Christians also feel abandoned by the Church itself.
FR. RODRIGO MIRANDA
Priest, Institute of the Incarnate Word
'Some individuals and communities experience pain and abandonment from within the Church. They expect more from us. They are our neighbors. He is a that brother dies, it is the same mystical body of Christ's suffering.'
Combining this suffering, the European Union has extended a year embargo on the government of al-Assad that, it affects civilians by depriving them of the basics like medicine or food.
