POPE LEO XIV
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In a recent article for the National Catholic Register, Zelda Caldwell profiles Stephen Rasche, an American lawyer whose life took a dramatic turn after heart surgery in 2014. While recovering in Maine, Rasche began to rethink everything — his work, his purpose, and most of all, his faith.
That same summer, ISIS overran the Iraqi city of Mosul, forcing more than 150,000 Christians to flee their ancestral homes. Rasche, who had previously worked with the Church in Iraq, began receiving desperate messages from friends. Within months, he was on a plane to Erbil, where he would spend the next five years working with the Chaldean Catholic Church.
What began as legal and humanitarian work turned into something more enduring: a visual witness. Rasche’s camera has captured the faces of displacement, the ruins of desecrated churches, and the stubborn hope of people who refused to let violence define them.
His new photo exhibit, Among the Persecuted and Displaced, now on display at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center in New Haven, Connecticut, documents both Iraqi and Nigerian Christian communities—those driven from their homes by ISIS, Boko Haram, and Fulani militants. These are not images of pity, but of presence. They ask us to see.
After years walking alongside persecuted Christians in Iraq and Nigeria, Stephen Rasche speaks not only as a witness, but as a friend. His photographs have helped the world see what these communities have endured — but in conversation, it’s clear his deeper mission is solidarity.
In this interview with Aleteia, Rasche reflects on what he’s learned from those who suffer for their faith, and what the West must remember before their stories fade from view.
Aleteia: You spent years living among displaced Christians in Iraq and are now expanding your mission to Nigeria. What have these communities taught you about faith in the face of persecution?
Rasche: Everywhere that I have seen real persecution, the impact on faith has always been an inverse—the more the faithful are persecuted, the more deeply and courageously they hold fast to their faith. This has been true everywhere on earth where I have seen it, throughout the Mideast and Africa, increasingly as well here in the west. This is nothing new, of course. We see it throughout Christian history, but it remains striking nevertheless when you see it, the courage that comes up from the soul of people to hold fast to their faith when they are persecuted.
Aleteia: Your work often places you in situations of deep suffering. How do you stay grounded and hopeful while walking alongside people who have lost so much?
Rasche: It's not always easy, I confess. When you are in situations where the people are truly in extremis, you can see that sometimes they have already reached despair and that is a dark hole to go down into. In those situations, you are really just relying on the virtues that will get you through it—fortitude, hope, faith—and you just move ahead. But where the people have retained some hope of their own you can always see it and sense it. In these situations, which is really most of the time even in these difficult places, you can see that the people will do everything they can to retain some basic dignity and humanity so that you can just fall in with them and start moving ahead together. And I think walking with the people together in faith is really the fundamental thing -- they know when you are there to stay and help and be with them. There is a tremendous solidarity and strength that comes from this, regardless of the situation.
Aleteia: The exhibit “Among the Persecuted and Displaced” shares powerful images from Iraq and Nigeria. Is there one story or photograph that continues to stay with you—and why?
Rasche: There is a photo of then Father Thabet of Karamles on the Nineveh Plains. We had just entered his parish church after the town was liberated from ISIS and there was still fighting on the outskirts of town. The inside of his church had been burned out, there were bullet scars everywhere, the altar destroyed and the whole place was desecrated with a statue of the Virgin Mary beheaded and hands cut off. And Fr Thabet is just standing there trying to take it all in and he looked at me as I took his picture. I remember everything about that moment, how stunned we were, trying to comprehend the hatred and violence behind what we were seeing.
Over the years Fr Thabet and I became close friends and later he was made Bishop of Alqosh. Tragically he developed pulmonary fibrosis, likely from all the toxic fumes in his burned-out town where he worked himself for years in reconstruction. He is gravely ill now and I think of him every day. The photo has since become famous and gone all around the world. I hope when people see it they can think of him and pray for him. He is a very special and courageous man and priest.
Aleteia: In the West, we often hear about religious persecution from a distance. What do you wish more people understood about the realities Christians face in places like Erbil or Kaduna?
Rasche: We waste so much time and effort here on things that are of really superficial importance. I think we have lost our ability to understand what the words in our language actually mean. We throw around “genocide” and “horrific” and “traumatic” so loosely that we remove all depth of meaning from them. In Nigeria thousands of people have been hacked to pieces and then lit on fire. In Iraq whole towns fled across the desert, terrified, on foot in the middle of the summer, with ISIS taking and burning town after town behind them. And having survived this, the people still face a deeply institutionalized persecution as second-class people under the various forms of Sharia law that prevail in the Mideast and much of Northern Nigeria. And still these persecuted people revere and protect their faith. I do wish the faithful here in the west would understand how fortunate we are to have our faith and our churches here and available to us. I do think we could reflect on that more, and perhaps on our brothers and sisters that still suffer elsewhere.
Aleteia: As someone working at the intersection of law, faith, and humanitarian aid, where do you see signs of hope and renewal for these communities moving forward?
Rasche: These persecuted communities, perhaps in large part because of what they have been through, have been forced to decide whether they truly value their faith or not. For those that have made it through with their faith intact, they are now capable of moving forward in ways that instill deep hope and inspiration to any observer.
In terms of the international aid paradigm that has existed until just now, it is clearly going through a massive reset, and much of it I think has been necessary. If handled thoughtfully, much of this reset can be to the good of humanity. And I think the communities of the faithful, especially those that have lived through real persecution, can have a fundamentally important role in what comes next if we listen to them. But we need to truly listen, not simply instruct from a place of detached superiority. Our existing aid paradigm contains very little humility I am afraid, and even less listening so that the dignity of the human person is so often missing from what we do. But we are at an historical moment of real hope and possibility for the future of humanitarian service as a true vocation as we understand this meaning within our Catholic faith. I pray for it certainly.
