[T]he Rev. Benedict Kiely had been doing a lot of thinking, and he was troubled.
His worry wasn’t about Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church in Stowe, where he’s been the pastor for six years.
It was about Christians being persecuted in the Middle East.
Christianity has struggled in the Mideast for centuries, but the Islamic State terrorist group rampaging through parts of Syria and Iraq has made things far worse. The Islamic State group has been slaughtering people who won’t convert to Islam, and this week executed an American hostage who had, in fact, converted to Islam. People have been driven from their homes; women and girls have been kidnapped; unspeakable atrocities have occurred.
When the Islamic State group trapped 40,000 Yazidis on a mountaintop, 120,000 Christians were out in the open, too, Kiely said, but drew far less attention.
In Iraq, when Mosul fell to the group, no Mass was said in the city for the first time in 1,600 years.
“Christians were there from the beginning, before Islam,” said the pastor everyone calls Father Ben. Remember Paul on the road to Damascus? And the tomb of Jonah was in Damascus until the Islamic State group blew it up; beneath the debris was a Christian church from the fourth century.
The week after Mosul fell, a visitor approached Father Ben at church and asked what people could do. Call your congressman, the pastor suggested.
Then he went for a walk on the Stowe Recreation Path. He was wearing one of those ubiquitous bracelets promoting a cause, and he remembered that the Islamic State group was marking Christian homes with the Arabic letter N to identify them — much the way the Nazis marked the homes of Jews. The Arabic N is the first letter in “Nasrani/Nasarean,” the Muslim word of contempt for Christians.
That’s when it struck him: Sell items marked with the Arabic N, and use the money to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
Friends step in
Kiely took his idea to Esbert Cardenas Jr., whose Stowe-based company Image Outfitters supplies promotional materials to businesses and all sorts of other organizations.
They settled on bracelets, lapel pins and zipper pulls, each bearing the Arabic N, each black with the letter in gold.
Father Ben called it the Nasarean project, and set up a website at Nasarean.org.
But then he had a vision of long nights in the church basement, working with three little old ladies to pack up bracelets, lapel pins and zipper pulls and somehow ship them to the buyers.
Enter John and Monica Clark, who run the UPS Store in Stowe. They took on all packing and shipping, and the Nasarean project has to pay only the shipping charges.
The project launched Sept. 24; it has already received donations for 15,000 items and has sent a $10,000 check to Aid to the Church in Need.
Kiely selected the Aid to the Church in Need because it has boots on the ground. It’s an international Catholic charity founded more than 50 years ago to help persecuted Christians around the world. The charity now supports more than 5,000 projects in 145 countries.
More than symbolism
Father Ben cites three purposes for the N bracelets, pins and zipper pulls: A showing of solidarity — persecuted Christians have people on their side. A reminder to pray for them. And charity that will help them in their plight.
“It’s not just Syria and Iraq,” Kiely said. Coptic Christians are at risk in Egypt. Christians are being attacked in Nigeria. A report a couple of weeks ago concluded Christians are now the most persecuted religious group in the world.
Syria used to be a haven for Christians, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled there, because it was safe. “Now it’s not safe for anybody,” he said.
“People feel so useless” about situations like this, “but they can do things,” Kiely said. “We can do something.”
Grateful for help
Kiely says he’s been moved by the generosity of parishioners, visitors to the church, and people who hear about the project and want to help. He was able to line up start-up money, set up the website and start taking orders inside of a month.
And word of mouth has helped, too. A teenager who visited Stowe told a priest in New Jersey about the Nasarean project, and he ordered 900 items. Other people who visited Stowe have taken the idea home.
He praises Cardenas and the Clarks, saying he couldn’t have done this without them.
But Cardenas said it’s all Father Ben: “He’s so gung-ho, and he’s done it all.”
Cardenas was in a good position to help; he’s been supplying promotional items to the U.S. market and some overseas markets for more than 15 years. Kiely didn’t have to start from scratch in coming up with the bracelets, pins and zipper pulls.
“It’s been a pleasure to be able to do this with him,” Cardenas said.
John Clark said much the same: “It’s been pretty easy for us. It’s what we do. All the credit should go to him.”
The packing and shipping have taken a fair amount of time, but the orders came in waves, luckily at in-between times before and after foliage season. And people stepped up: An employee at the Stowe store jumped in and set up the system, and people in the St. Albans UPS store volunteered to help.
“People want to do it,” Clark said.
Others helping, too
Others feel the same way. Among them are reality TV producer Mark Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, who starred in the “Touched by an Angel” TV series.
They aim to raise $25 million to help provide housing, food and clothing to Iraqi and Syrian Christians and other minorities displaced by the Islamic State group so they can survive the coming winter. They have already donated $1 million and have set up the Cradle of Christianity Fund through which people can give. The money will go directly to churches for distribution to people in need, and the fund is administered by the Institute for Global Engagement, which works on international religious freedom issues.
The United Nations reports 800,000 people in the Iraq-Syria region urgently need shelter and 2.8 million urgently need food.
Publicity helps
Father Ben says that if more people knew the facts, they’d do more to help. He laments that foreign news coverage these days is not what it used to be.
So, he’s doing what he can to tell people about the crisis. He traveled to Washington, D.C., to do a five-minute interview on EWTN, the religious cable channel; that interview alone prompted orders from Australia, Chile, England and Ireland.
“We got hundreds of orders from it,” he said.
Vermont Catholic magazine published a piece about the project, and Kiely hopes for more publicity, because every time he does an interview, orders go up.
He’s just two months into the Nasarean project, and assumes it will be a long-term effort. The nightmarish events in the Middle East have caused tremendous suffering, with long-lasting ramifications.
“Lots of Christians are saying they can’t go back” to their homes, Kiely said; they’ve already been driven out three or four times. “It’s a tragedy. A culture that’s been there for nearly 2,000 years is going away.”
This is a humanitarian crisis, as well as religious, and Kiely says people don’t have to be Christians to wear the Nasarean symbols. In fact, he says, some Muslims are wearing them as a sign of solidarity with the people being persecuted.
A matter of conscience
Kiely grew up in England and held a number of jobs, including driving a double-decker bus in London, before deciding to become a Catholic priest.
He was a priest for five years in London, then decided he was ready for a change and came to the United States. He’s been here for 15 years now, the last six in Stowe.
Kiely has never done anything like this before, but the issue was weighing on him, and “my conscience wouldn’t allow me to do nothing. I felt compelled to do something. It’s small, but it is something.”
If you ever needed proof that one person really can make a difference, here it is.
