MIDDLE EAST

FROM RUBBLE TO ROME
Fr. Aram Pano
Author: Meghan Allen,  11 May 2021

It was in the midst of missiles flying overhead that Fr. Aram Pano first learned to say Mass. His bishop had offered his family shelter when the tensions finally broke between the U.S. and Iraq, and his family’s city of Basra was targeted by a US-British military coalition. Fr. Aram, at the time, hadn’t even considered becoming a priest. In fact, he was attending technical school in hopes of becoming an electrician – a job very much needed in a city that had intermittent power outages daily. In 1992, about ten years prior to his call to the priesthood that night of the airstrike, Fr. Aram, a Syriac native speaker and Chaldean priest, was hurled into the Arabic-speaking world at just six years old. The Pano family had moved from a small Christian village in the north of Iraq to the southern city of Basra in search of job opportunities, as many other Christian families had done, following the war between Iraq and Kuwait. Looking for stability, his family was met, instead, with a number of challenges in their new city: in addition to power outages, Fr. Aram's family discovered saltwater ran from the sinks, the city’s sanitation systems were lacking, and a language barrier would prove difficult to overcome.

That decade spent building a new life for themselves began to crumble in 2003 with the city’s own demise.Saddam Hussein’s government had kept its citizens in the dark about how bad the state of affairs were with the United States by cutting all satellite lines and strictly feeding national programs to the Iraqi people. Furthermore, Hussein had built government fallout buildings throughout residential neighborhoods—one stood just a few hundred yards from the Pano family’s home. That meant that the impending attacks would also target residential areas, namely: Fr. Aram’s own street.

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After the first night of bombings, his father pleaded with the archbishop to let his family stay within the safety of the parish walls in hopes that God’s house would offer protection for him, his wife, and four children. Fr. Aram recalls, “We felt safe even as the missiles flew over the city because we knew we were in God’s house.” While his parents began tending to the care and upkeep of the church and rectory, Aram began to fill the role of deacon during Mass. It was a calling that had come to him just like that: in the midst of rubble and smoke.

His new role had taken him alongside the bishop to serve Mass for Christian families in a nearby city where about forty families would gather to attend the liturgy. Fr. Aram recollects this moment with stark vision: “It was the first time I saw Christians take off their shoes outside the church and enter on their knees. They brushed the altar with the palms of their hands and would then touch their shoulders, thinking the altar would offer them a blessing. I thought to myself, ‘What are they doing?’ They didn’t know what they were doing. During the Mass, the people didn’t know the prayers, nor when to sit or stand. I thought, ‘Our bishop is an old man, and these people will be like sheep without a shepherd when he dies . . .
 

Who will lead those people? Who will teach them?’”

This was the moment he responded to the call and decided to join the seminary. Between 2003 and 2005, Fr. Aram’s plan was delayed as the war raged on, but still he served in his church − now a fallout shelter for Iraqi veterans searching for protection. The nation divided between the Sunni and Shia peoples, his city became occupied by the British army, and all the while, car bombings were becoming a daily occurrence. “Who is my enemy, and who is my friend?” Fr. Aram says this was the question his people were asking themselves. It was in 2005 that he moved to the seminary in Baghdad, a city whose population was largely Muslim and where Al Qaeda control had terrorized civilians.

Through all this violence, Fr. Aram pressed on in his vocational journey, listening intently to God’s call to be a shepherd for people like those he met in the city of Al Amarah a few years prior, when serving as a deacon alongside his bishop. It was near Erbil that he concluded his final year in the seminary in 2011, graduating with degrees in philosophy and theology. “I was searching for eternal happiness. I feel that in becoming a priest, in serving all God’s people, there will be no end to my happiness. Even though I have chosen not to have a family of my own,
 

I am reminded of God’s purpose for me each time someone calls me ‘Father.’”

 

 

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For over ten years, Fr. Aram has served the people of Basra as both a priest and a leader in the community, heading a local organization to help those in need. Seeing his war-torn city in pieces and people suffering the fallout, he came together with a local doctor, professor, youth, men and women religious, Muslims, and other lay people to form the Good Samaritan brotherhood. While divisions deepened on both the local and the nationwide levels, ISIS dug their heals in, attacking people who were struggling to recover from the war and persecuting Christians in particular. The Good Samaritan brotherhood came to aid those who needed it the most: children in the cancer ward who were without medicine and children orphaned during the war, families living in squalor whose homes were in a state of disrepair, Muslim youth who knew nothing about the Christian way of life. As a leader in the Church, his city, and this brotherhood, Fr. Aram lives out God’s commandment to love all people. 

When envisioning his future, Fr. Aram sees a world of possibilities, thanks to the education he is receiving at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and those financially supporting him in his academic endeavors. He will soon graduate with a master’s degree in church communications and continue in his mission of being a servant of the Lord on Earth.

Fr. Aram exemplifies God’s design of all priests for His Church: a life of serving others. It is only with your generous support that we are able to ensure the Church has men like Fr. Aram leading God’s people. Priests and seminarians you support are given the unique opportunity to receive the formation they need to live out their apostolates faithfully, wherever the Lord calls them, through a life steeped in prayer and the sacraments.