Jesuit Priest Expelled from Syria

Father Paolo Dall’Oglio revived an ancient monastery in Syria, but the Jesuit priest has recently landed in hot water for criticizing the government. He talks with anchor Lisa Mullins about why he’s being expelled from the country.

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Lisa Mullins: To Syria now, where the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad is intensifying. Today, the head of the United Nations monitors in the country said that a recent spike in bloodshed poses significant risks for his team and he says that could prompt a pullout by the UN. One foreigner in Syria who has already been told to get out is Father Paolo Dall’Oglio. He’s a Jesuit priest. He has lived in Syria for more than twenty years now. Father Dall’Oglio first went there to oversee the restoration of a thousand-year-old monastery about fifty miles outside of Damascus. The monastery later became a popular tourist attraction in Syria, but recently Father Dall’Oglio has been critical of the government’s violent campaign against the opposition and, now, he says he has been ordered to leave the country.

Paolo Dall’Oglio: The reason I’m leaving is because I have been too clear in my speaking and my exercise of freedom of opinion and expression. The authority of the Church and then the Syrian authority has asked me to go out of the country.

Mullins: Who said, Father, that you need to leave? Was it the government or the Church?

Dall’Oglio: Both of them.

Mullins: You say that you were having to leave. You’re being expelled basically because of your outspokenness. What are you saying? What is it that’s forcing you to leave?

Dall’Oglio: I asked, for example, that the wounded people should be respected. I’m asking that the doctors and the nurses taking of the wounded people and the people trapped in closed areas under shelling should be respected. This is the very dangerous things I’m saying. I’m saying that these people are as worthy to have democracy as anybody else. I’m saying that instead of being afraid of each other, we should afraid for each other and to take care of each other in this country. This is the big mistake that, I’m working for Islamic-Christian harmony, I’m working for inter-Islamic harmony, and this [??] is seems is not well received.

Mullins: You have reason to feel strongly about what’s happening there. Are you still proselytizing harmony?

Dall’Oglio: Yes. Yes. Me, I’m for non violence and I hope that the international community will stay on non violence, but not with three hundred observers. We need three thousand courageous observers and thirty thousand assistants from to international, the global civil society to come and work with the Syrian civil society at grass level to try to repair the wounds and the disaster that have been done on one year of international irresponsibility, of international absence, leading these people just in front of this tragedy.

Mullins: Are you saying that you believe, I mean you’re saying that there should be more United Nations observers on there there, many, many more. Are you saying that you feel as though, in your view, that the west should be arming the rebels?

Dall’Oglio: It’s not up to me to say something like this. The Church declares that the right to defend yourself is not against your Christian faith. This is a fact. The Islamic religion says the same. But we all agree that it’s better when we can do things without violence or with as less possible exercise of violence.

Mullins: Father Paolo Dall’Oglio is leader of the Catholic community at the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian in Syria. He has just been ordered to leave the country.

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