Future Melkite Catholic Patriarch Gregorius III Laham on the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (1992)

 Translated from the French report in: Service Orthodoxe de Presse no. 166 (March 1992), pp. 12-13.

Fribourg: The Orthodox Church of Jerusalem should be recognized as the Mother Church by the other churches of the Holy Land

In one of its most recent issues, the Catholic press agency APIC, based in Fribourg, Switzerland published an interview with Archbishop Lutfi (Laham) vicar of the Melkite Greek-Catholic (Uniate) patriarch of Jerusalem, who held a series of lectures in Switzerland in February. 58 years old and of Syrian origin, Abp Laham evokes the dramatic division of the Christians of the Middle East and in particular calls on the different communities of the Holy Land to recognize that the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem is, from both a historical and an ecclesiological point of view, the Mother Church.

Today the Christian presence in the Holy Land is directly threatened with disappearance. In the 1940s, Abp Laham recalls, Jerusalem had almost 45,000 Christians belonging to 13 officially-recognized churches. Now, they are no more than 10,000. To stop this trend, the Christians of the Holy Land, who are overwhelmingly of Palestinian origin, should be given the confidence to not see emigration as the only solution to escape the harshness of the Israeli occupation and poverty. It is likewise necessary to act upon the cultural factors that cause Arab Christians to be marginalized in an Arab-Muslim society.

Addressing relations between the Christian communities, Abp Laham stresses that the divisions were worsened by the "Anglo-Prussian" missions in the 19th century, which carved up the local Christian community that until that point was made up of Orthodox and Uniates. The Anglican and Protestant confessions could only grow by recruiting believers from the traditional Eastern Churches, since it was impossible for them to convert Jews and Muslims. In this way these believers were estranged from their spiritual roots and cultural identity. The same policy of proselytism had been previously followed by the Latin-rite Catholic Church.

To mend these historic errors, today it must be recognized that the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem is the Mother Church, Abp Laham explains frankly, since all the other churches either came out of her or are churches of pilgrims that developed around holy places, monasteries or neighborhoods, as is the case of the Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopian churches. The Christians of the Western tradition established in the Middle East following crusades and colonization, whether Latin-rite Catholics, Protestant or Anglican, should themselves admit that they do not have the same legitimacy as the Mother Church.

The churches of the Western tradition have never recognized this historical reality, observes Abp Laham, but they need to do so. It is not a question of forcing them to become Orthodox, but they should become aware of this state of affairs. For their part, he continues, the Eastern-rite Catholics feel the pain of not being Orthodox: "We have always regretted, not our communion with Rome, but the fact that this communion led us to separate ourselves from Orthodoxy." "We will simply feel at home with the Orthodox when the Orthodox and the Latins come together and we will be ready to resign as patriarch and as bishops to give way to our Orthodox confreres," he affirms again.

Several initiatives have already been made in common by the main religious leaders of Jerusalem in recent years. For the moment, however, these declarations have limited themselves to one-off actions. The plan to create a Council of Christian Churches of Jerusalem, proposed by Abp Laham in 1974, never went forward. Relations with the Orthodox community, estimated at 46,000 believers, are nevertheless good because, unlike what it happening in Eastern Europe, the archbishop explains, "We form a single nation. We do not have any ethnic conflicts, since we are all Arabs, both the Greek Orthodox and the Greek Catholics."