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Newsflash
Archives > The Top Ten People of 2006: #5 & #6
Every January Inside the Vatican names top ten "People of the Year." This Newsflash features 2006's number 5 and 6. We will be updating you each day with two new profiles from our "Top 10" for 2006.
Top Ten People of 2006: #5 & #6
ELISABETTA VALGIUSTI #5
BY MICHAELA BIFERALI
The world always needs courage and enthusiasm: Elisabetta Valgiusti has both of them. Valgiusti, an Italian laywoman and film-maker who attends Mass daily, has been chosen by Inside the Vatican as one of our "Top Ten" because of her efforts to remind the whole world of Christian minorities, often forgotten by the rest of the world, especially those who live in war zones, but also those who have to coexist with truly different cultures.
Photo: Valgiusti with a guide in Iraq during the filming of her documentary The Christians of Nineveh (Photo by Paolo Grana)
Valgiusti heads an organization called Salva i Monasteri (Save the Monasteries) which she founded to try to bring attention to the plight of Christians in places like Kosovo and Iraq where Christianity and its heritage face persecution and destruction.
During 2004, 2005 and 2006, she traveled repeatedly to Kosovo and Iraq to capture the dramatic situations of Christian minorities inside these countries in film documentaries.
Who is Elisabetta Valgiusti? She is not world-famous. But she is one of the most courageous Christian filmmakers in the world, a creative and capable director with a penchant for picking up her camera and heading off, alone, to the most dangerous parts of the world to record the lives of ordinary believers caught in crossfires not of their making.
Born in Venezuela to an Italian father who was a dentist, Valgiusti studied cinematography in the US before returning to Italy, where she has studied theology, philosophy and iconography at three pontifical universities (Pontifical Institute Theresianum, Pontifical Gregorian University and Pontifical Institute San Anselmo) while working in television and cinema, producing programs about childhood and films for television on Christian figures like St. Catherine of Siena and St. Ambrose.
In 2004, her life changed course. On March 17 and 18, 2004, the Orthodox monasteries of the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija were struck with unexpected fury. About 35 monasteries were completely destroyed, among them the Church of the Holy Virgin of Lyevish, a jewel of medieval art. Valgiusti decided to do something against the destruction of a Christian culture, and founded Salva i Monasteri. "The incapacity of the international community to protect Serbian churches and monasteries in Kosovo, the indifference of the media, which dedicated very little coverage to the desecration of these precious medieval treasures, has filled us all with pain,' she said at the time. "Consequently, we launched the Salva i Monasteri of Kosovo campaign." (The official website is www.salvaimonasteri.org.)
The movement has grown over the past three years and now includes more than 200 eminent intellectuals, art historians, philosophers and others with a conscience and intellectual integrity, all interested in stopping violence against artistic treasures of world importance.
"It is a difficult task to involve people or to attract their attention, but I remember that suddenly I was hit by a strong will to react," she told Inside the Vatican. "I could not bear any more the weight of silence."
With the help of a film crew from many countries, Valgiusti directed an hour-long documentary entitled The Enclave of Kosovo. After the presentation of the documentary in Rome in October 2004, Italian public attention was alerted to this tragic situation. Before her efforts, only Massimo Cacciari, mayor of Venice, and the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire had emphasized the serious situation.
Thanks to Elisabetta’s documentary, people really understood what was happening and the indifference was swept away. This aroused our own interest in her work and ideas.
I met Elisabetta only in December. I found her a very direct person, with an instinctive approach. She is filled with faith, fond of her work, and very good at conveying her enthusiasm.
Together we watched her most recent documentary, Cristiani di Ninive ("Christians of Nineveh), recently presented in Venice. During the film she explained details of the footage and answered questions.
She spoke about the fear she experiences whenever she sets out to make a new film, aware that she is going to unknown places, but said that fear is followed by a calm that sets in as soon as she reaches her destination.
After traveling in Iraq twice this year, Elisabetta was enchanted by Iraq’s Christians and their profound faith, which is deeply rooted in their life and manners. Many of them helped Elisabetta when she was in Iraq, including Msgr. Mikhael Al Jamil, patriarchal vicar of the Syrian Catholic Church of Antioch, Msgr. Luis Sako, bishop of Kerkuk, and Georghes Casmoussa, bishop of Mosul.
The documentary, filmed in Iraq, shows many monasteries and churches in the Mosul region (called Nineveh in ancient times), where there are some of the most ancient Christian communities in the world. Years of wars, persecutions, and embargoes have led to the emigration of thousands of young people and impoverished many of the Christians who remain, whose cultural, social and economic level used to be quite high.
The witness of the Church in Iraq and its almost 1,400 year coexistence with Muslims provide a valuable source of cultural, spiritual and social knowledge, particularly useful in coming to the right interpretation of some aspects of the ongoing conflict and the creation of adequate tools and forms of relationship.
Valgiusti says she fears the disappearance of the Christian community in Iraq and in the Middle East in the years ahead. But as long as they remain, she pledges her solidarity with that community in her work and prayers.
CAROLINE COX #6
BY ALBERTO CAROSA
Baroness Caroline Cox, an Anglican laywoman and former deputy speaker of Great Britain’s House of Lords, is a champion of human rights for the weak and defenseless. Due to her vigorous personality, she has also been described as a "British Joan of Arc" for our times, incarnating the noblest spirit of chivalry for her staunch anti-slavery campaigns.
Photo: Baroness Caroline Cox, defender of human rights
Sudan’s first saint, Josephine Bakhita, was a slave, sold and resold at the El Obeid and Khartoum markets. She was fortunate to end up in Italy, where she was freed and baptized in 1890. She was canonized by John Paul II in the year 2000.
Today, more than a century later, there are still slaves to be found between the Sahara and the Nile, victims of a trade which over centuries has sent an estimated 11 to 14 million Africans from the sub-Sahara region as slaves to Arab and Muslim countries. Little is studied or said about this trade, unlike the slave trade which was directed toward the Americas.
The issue of contemporary slavery has been at the forefront of the activities of Baroness Cox, especially in Sudan.
Between 1997 and 2000, as a member of the British branch of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, she traveled to Sudan to buy the freedom of slaves. In a letter to The Independent on Sunday Cox claimed to have redeemed 2,281 slaves on eight visits to Sudan.
Cox was born Caroline Ann McNeill Love, the daughter of a surgeon from Hertford. She became a staff nurse at Edgware General Hospital in London in 1960. She married Dr. Murray Newall Cox in 1959, remaining with him until he died in 1997. In the late 1960s she studied for a degree at the University of London where she graduated with a first-class honors degree in sociology in 1967. She became a sociology lecturer at the Polytechnic of North London and from 1974 on was head of the Department of Sociology. In 1977 she moved on to become director of the Nursing Education Research Unit at Chelsea College of the University of London. She was also made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Cox currently serves as vice president of the Royal College of Nursing.
But her most outstanding achievements have been in the humanitarian field and the defense of human rights in the British Parliament’s House of Lords. (Her peerage was announced on December 15, 1982 on a list of "working peers," on the recommendation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and she took the title Baroness Cox, of Queensbury in Greater London. She was deputy speaker of the House of Lords from 1985 to 2004.)
Baroness Cox is heavily involved with international humanitarian and human rights endeavors, serving as a director of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation and president of Christian Solidarity International and Christian Solidarity Worldwide (P.O. Box 99, New Malden, Surrey, KT3 3YF, England), as a trustee of MERLIN (Medical Emergency Relief International) and the Siberian Medical University, and chief executive of HART (Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust).
Her humanitarian work has taken her on numerous missions to conflict zones, including Armenia, the Sudan, Nigeria, the Burmese jungles and Indonesia. She even visited North Korea to help promote parliamentary initiatives and medical programs and has been instrumental in helping change policies for orphaned and abandoned children in the former Soviet Union.
She is also a prominent author. She co-authored the books The Rape of Reason, to decry Communist and hard-line Marxist infiltration in the British educational institutions, and The West, Islam and Islamism (2003), whose aim is to encourage mutual understanding between Islam and the West.
She has made headlines for unearthing abuses and atrocities that nobody else seemed to be able to discover; for example, the fact that in Sudan Christians have been crucified, unbelievable as it sounds in the 20th century.
Her purpose has always been to try to reach people who are cut off from aid organizations. The reason people may be cut off is that the big organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, Red Cross, etc., can only go to places with the invitation of the government. And if the government is victimizing a minority in its borders and is denying access to those major aid organizations, they can’t go. But, regarding it as her mandate to reach those who are most cut off, most isolated, most bereft of aid and advocacy, she goes.
Thus in Sudan she has been particularly targeting those areas designated by the regime in Khartoum as "no go" areas for the UN and Red Cross and so on. And so, going up to some of those prohibited areas, on the borderland between North and South, she saw clearly that there had been systematic and frequent raids by militia from the North, armed in ways which the Southerners are not traditionally armed. The raiders had descended in large numbers on the villages and massacred the men and rounded up the women and children and taken them as as slaves to the North.
But amidst such suffering, she also has countless inspirational stories of faith. Take Ma Su, a Karen refugee from Burma. The Burmese army had shelled her camp in Thailand. Everything was burned and destroyed. Her hut was burned and she had been shot by a Burmese soldier. Baroness Cox asked how she felt about the soldier who shot her, and her response: "I love him. It says in the Bible we should love our enemies, so of course I love him. He is my brother."
Top Ten People: #7 & #8
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Inside The Vatican (ISSN 1068-8579) is a Catholic news magazine, published monthly except July
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