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Sister Diana Momeka (Image from adriandominicans.org)
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Conservative commentators are up in arms over the State Department’s
decision to deny a visa to a Catholic nun who was part of an Iraqi delegation
supposed to testify before Congress about Islamic State (ISIS) atrocities.
The US consulate in Erbil rejected
the visitor visa application of Sister Diana Momeka earlier this week, saying
she was “not able to demonstrate that [her] intended activities in the United
States would be consistent with the classification of the visa.”
However, visas were given to all the other
members of the delegation scheduled to speak in Washington about the Islamic
State’s persecution of minorities of the region, including Shia Muslims and
Yazidis. Meetings have been arranged for the group before the House and Senate
foreign relations committees, with State Department and USAID officials, and
with various NGOs.
US State Department Blocks Iraqi Nun
From Testifying Before Congress
Breitbart reports:
All but one of the members of an
Iraqi delegation of minority groups—comprising representatives of the Yazidi
and Turkmen Shia religious communities—have been granted visas to come for
official meetings in Washington. The lone member denied a visa was the only
Iraqi Christian in the group, a Catholic nun.
Nina Shea, director of Hudson
Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, reported Thursday that the U.S. State
Department prevented a persecuted Iraqi Catholic nun named Sister Diana
Momeka, “an internationally respected and leading representative of the Nineveh
Christians who have been killed and deported by ISIS,” from coming to Washington
to testify.
Sister Diana is a member of the
Dominican Sisters of Saint Catherine of Siena, a Catholic order of nuns that
traces its presence in Iraq back to the thirteenth century.
The nun is uniquely qualified to
testify to Islamic State atrocities in Iraq. When Mosul was overrun by Islamic
extremists in June 2014, about 500,000 civilians left the city en masse,
in an effort to escape the siege. At that time, the only group that chose to
remain in Mosul was the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, “a
congregation of Iraqi sisters that has witnessed generation upon generation of
war and carnage.”
On Tuesday, however, the U.S.
consulate in Erbil told Sister Diana that her visa application had been denied,
stating that she was unable “to demonstrate that [her] intended activities
in the United States would be consistent with the classification of the visa.”
The nun told Nina Shea she was
informed she was rejected because she is an “IDP,” an Internally
Displaced Person. In other words, the State Department suspected that the
Catholic nun could be secretly intending to stay in the United States.
Never mind that Sister Diana already
had meetings set up with the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees, the
State Department, USAID, and several NGOs, or that she submitted several
documents attesting to her character, as well as the temporary nature of her
stay in the U.S.
She is, in fact, contracted to teach
at the Babel College of Philosophy and Theology in Erbil, Kurdistan, for the
2015–16 academic year.
Moreover, Sister Diana had already
been permitted to visit the United States, and she delivered the commencement
address at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union in 2012.
According to Shea, the nun has
become internationally known as a spokesperson for the over 100,000 Christians
driven into Kurdistan under the ISIS “convert or die” policy. Former
Congressman Frank Wolf (R. – Va.) met her in Kurdistan a few months ago and
agreed to sponsor her trip to the U.S. to tell her story.
Wolf, cofounder of religious freedom
group 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, said they had hoped to facilitate
her trip to the states “so that she could speak with great candor, as is her
custom, to policymakers.” Wolf said that he views her as “a critical voice to
awaken the church in the West to the suffering of Christians and other
religious minorities in Iraq.”
For some reason, the U.S. consulate
does not see it this way. According to Shea, the State Department has pledged
that “every overseas post and domestic bureau will seek opportunities to engage
religious leaders” as part of its program for countering “violent extremism.”
Apparently, Catholic nuns do not fit the bill. 
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