Primary Source Document

Recently my Mom was going through some stuff in what is referred to in my family as "Upstairs" - the top floor of the house in which my Nana currently lives. This is where my great-uncle and two of my great-aunts used to live; when my brother and my cousins and I were younger we would always go up to visit "the Upstairses." Sugarless hard candy and tiny powdered donuts were the standard fare in a place where the air was thick with stale cigarette smoke. They have all passed now; my aunt is now living in the renovated Upstairs and my Mom has been going through a vast number of old photos recently and scanning them into her computer. She put together a slideshow for my aunt for her 50th birthday and she's now working on one for my Nana.

My Mom's father, who died before I was born, had a cousin, Father Michael, who was one of the Jesuit priests assigned to Baghdad College, back when Iraq was pro-Western, ruled by King Faisal II - before the rise of the Soviet-friendly Baath party, before Saddam, before our wars with Iraq. My Mom said he would come home to visit every couple years with stories of the Middle East - exotic fare for a young girl raised in a poor Irish-Catholic New England family.

She recently found a letter from Father Michael Upstairs, scanned it and emailed it out to the family. It's essentially just a quick note home, but it's from half a century ago. I thought it was a cool piece of history, from a time when we were threatened by a very different enemy, but from a place that is all too familiar to us today.


(Click to enlarge)

There's also an interesting Globe article from 2000 about the Jesuits who were over there below:

[The Boston Globe Online][Boston.com]

Alumni reminisce on Jesuits' role in Iraq

By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff, 8/5/2000

They are old men now, these Jesuit
priests; their legs weak, their
hair thin and white. But their eyes still
flash with the intense commitment that
propelled them to Iraq a half-century ago.
They still glow with the sense of purpose
that won respect from generations of
schoolboys at Baghdad College.

Starting in 1931, New England's branch of
the Society of Jesus dispatched a stream of
teachers to the Tigris River campus, a high
school akin to Boston College High. They
taught boys math and science, and, more
importantly, how to think.

In a testimony to the bonds they forged,
600 former students - surgeons, engineers,
and executives from around the world - have
gathered in Framingham this weekend,
renewing ties with one another and with
their old teachers. The reunion comes 32
years after the Jesuits were forced to flee
Iraq, expelled by the Baathist regime that
gave rise to Saddam Hussein.

''Want to see a miracle?'' asks the Rev.
Tony Paquet, 72, the youngest of four Roman
Catholic priests reminiscing at the Jesuit
health center in Weston about Baghdad
College days. A man of French Canadian
ancestry and Dorchester nativity, with a
talent for leavening gravitas with humor,
he stands up from his wheelchair, steps
forward to greet a visitor, and sits down
again. ''That's a miracle!''

Then, with tears punctuating their laughter
and nostalgia, Paquet and the other priests
talk about the joys of teaching in Iraq,
the emotional wounds inflicted by the
expulsion, and what they consider the
immorality of US-backed sanctions that, a
decade after they were laid on Iraq for its
invasion of Kuwait, are estimated by the
United Nations to be killing 5,000 children
a month.

''The American press beats up on Saddam
Hussein,'' Paquet says, ''but they don't
tell you about all the little kids in the
streets selling Chiclets by the one.''

Baghdad College grew out of a petition from
Iraq's Christian community to Pope Pius XI
for a school, according to the Rev. Robert
J. Sullivan, 88. ''The Holy Father went to
the general [of the Society of Jesus], the
general told the New England province
`You!' and that was it,'' Sullivan said.

Actually, there was a bit more to it than
that. New England became a free-standing
Jesuit province in 1926, and was burgeoning
with young people entering religious
orders, when the opening came in Iraq,
according to Brother Jim McDavitt, a
reunion organizer and the director of the
Jesuit seminary in the South End.

McDavitt became aware of Baghdad College
long before he knew much about Iraq or
considered entering a religious order.
While he was growing up in Worcester, his
aunt was active in the Iraqi Club, through
which mothers, sisters, and other
supporters of the Jesuits organized school
fund-raisers.

The priests were gung-ho as well, as was
reflected in an introduction by one
founder, the Rev. Edward F. Madaras, to a
1936 complilation of articles from the
mission newsletter.

The newsletter ''treated the Baghdad
venture, not as a lark, to be sure, but as
a gay adventure for the King of Kings,''
Madaras wrote. ''The fathers were knights
setting out on a jousting match to defend
the honor of their Liege Lord, and although
they felt they were going to get many a
hard knock and be unhorsed more than once,
they looked forward to the contest with a
glint in their eye, a smile on their lips,
and a song in their hearts.''

Their jousting ground was an oasis amid the
dusty streets and yellow brick of Baghdad.
The school's site was large and removed
from the city center, fronting the historic
Tigris, which watered the school's gardens
and playing fields, and the orchards around
them.

''It was very green,'' says Laith Kubba, a
longtime opponent of Hussein's who now is
senior program officer for the Middle East
at the congressionally funded National
Endowment for Democracy. ''The moment you
entered the school you entered a different
world. Everything inside was American.''

If the adventure was a jousting match, the
manner of scoring remained obscure.

The school for Christians that was
envisioned in the petition to the pope did
nurture Christian youths, offering low-cost
education to boys whose families otherwise
could not have afforded it. But Muslims,
Jews, and members of smaller ethnic groups
knocked at the doors of Baghdad College and
were accepted, and, Paquet says, ''in all
my years in Baghdad, I never baptized
anyone.''

In the 1960s, ''Baghdad College was
overwhelmingly Muslim, which I am,'' says
Kanan Makiya, author of a bestseller on
Iraq titled ''Republic of Fear'' and
director of the Iraq Research and
Documentation Project at Harvard
University. ''They never proselytized in
our faces at all. They did set an example,
and one admired them, for their
capabilities as teachers and for their
personal characteristics.''

When folks back in New England heard that
the Jesuits were not making converts to
Christianity, Paquet recalls, they often
would ask: ''What do you go there for? Why
pour yourself down the drain in Iraq?''

The fathers wrestled with that question.
The answer, he decided, was that ''we
established a visible and admirable
presence of Christ in this land that was no
more than 5 percent Christian, and provided
a shot in the arm to Iraqi Christians, gave
them something to look up to.''

When the Baath Party swept into power in
1968, the days of the Jesuit school were
numbered.

Waves of anti-American sentiment swept the
Mideast after the US-backed Israelis
humiliated their Arab neighbors in the 1967
Six-Day War. Iraq's new secular leaders
also saw a threat in the nation's Shiite
Islamic movement as well as a US-linked
establishment, says Dahfir Nona, an alumnus
who is now a Detroit-based engineer.

The new rulers ''really wanted to close the
Shi'a schools,'' Nona said, ''and they
couldn't close Muslim schools without
closing the Christian schools, too.''

Whether they are apolitical or fiercely
opposed to the regime, all agree the
sanctions imposed on Iraq - technically by
the United Nations but primarily due to US
policy - are ineffective against Hussein
and are depriving innocents of basic
nutrition and medical care.

''Millions of people are in misery,'' Kubba
says. ''They are losing their dignity, and
the physical effect on them is horrifying.
The reason many of us have opposed Saddam
all these years is because he harmed
people. Now this policy is also harming
people, and I feel an equal moral
obligation to oppose it.''

The priests and their former students sent
their own mission last December to
investigate.

''What the Jesuits really taught us was how
to think,'' says Kubba, ''how we break a
problem apart in our minds, how we seek an
answer. It is a formula I use even today.''

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston
Globe on 8/5/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.