Fr Georges Massouh on European and Muslim Concern for the Plight of Christians

Arabic original here.


Their Concern about Us Terrifies Us

For a long time there has been concern about Middle Eastern Christians. Since the rise of Islam until the present day, through all the countries that have ruled these lands, there has been concern about Middle Eastern Christians. This concern will remain so long as a single Christian treads the land of this Middle East. But what a difference there is between one kind of concern and another! The concern of Middle Eastern Christians is not the concern of Europeans, which has various causes and is treated differently in its roots. Europeans' anxiety about Middle Eastern Christians cannot be isolated from their own interests and the necessity of preserving something that can be invoked in order to gain a foothold in the conflicts between nations for this region's wealth.

What has France-- and by extention Europe-- done so that the Christians of Palestine, Iraq, and Syria can remain in thier homelands? Have we not heard some circles in Europe encouraging them to leave and preparing to lodge them in the countries of emigration? We know that this is nothing new, as we still have the example of the Armenian Genocide, the flight of the Greeks from western Turkey, the Syriac Christians from Mardin and Diyarbakr, and the Orthodox of Antioch at the time of the dissolution of the Ottoman state and the rise to power by the secularist Turks, the allies of France.

On the other hand, however, it is impossible for us to accept the wooden discourse of some Islamists when they raise the issue of the Christian presence. You see them pulling out some verses from the Qur'an and some reports and accounts from history that talk about Islam's tolerance and acceptance of non-Muslims in Islamic society... It's almost as though we find ourselves today faced with two Islams-- an imaginary Islam that exists in books and a completely different Islam whose news and fatwas we read in the papers and see on the TV screen.

However, the concern on the part of Europeans for Middle Eastern Christians is absolutely not reassuring at all, since countries toss aside slogans when the time comes to measure the benefit they gain from them. This European concern for the Christians of the Middle East worries us more than it reassures us. Nothing will lessen the impact of this worry apart from the sort of citizenship that can preserve for Christians, no matter how few their numbers or how small their proportions, their dignity and their feeling that their presence is vital for their partners in this hoped-for citizenship.

It remains that the anxiety of Middle Eastern Christians over their remaining in their homelands is a real anxiety. However, it has causes that are different from the goals and interests of Europeans. One of the chief causes for this anxiety is the collapse of the dream of a just state that respects total equality between all its citizens, regardless of their sect or creed.

And there is something else, the emergence of a radical Islam that only sees modernity in terms of the return to the righteous predecessors. This does not mean exculpating the moderate Islamic institutions from their serious responsibility for the growing extremism for various reasons, the most important of which is their total submissiveness to the wills of the various regimes holding power.

The crisis of Middle Eastern Christians is part of the crisis of Muslims and there is no solution to one without solving the other. The two fates are intertwined and it is only in vain that we might search for a solution outside this context. However, what is surprising is the absence of any viable Islamic response that would contribute to puting a stop to this humanitarian catastrophe that is effecting Muslims, Christians and others. The basic question is: Is the Christian presence in the Arab Middle East still necessary for Muslims? Or does the flight of Christians not matter to them?

Met. Ephrem on Priests

Arabic original here.


The Priest

The priest is not an employee. His service is nothing other than a sign of God's presence. Before everything else, he is an icon of Christ, the God-Man. "Icon" means a living, incarnate image that points to the source, to that which or the one who is above. The priest's work as shepherd is not merely social work. It is the path by which he himself becomes an instrument for announcing God, for a constant manifestation of God that is especially realized at every divine liturgy, with the participation of the faithful present in the church as well as the angels and the saints. Priests are fundamental links in the transmission of divine life to humanity, and instrument for connecting heaven and earth.

God is holy, above everything. He is  "ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same", but on account of His love for humankind, He became man in order to become the Great High Priest and and perform the divine, bloodless sacrifice through the priest who is His image, His living icon.

In order for this to happen, the priest must remain in a state of familiarity with divine realities. The true priest is always in communication with God and God is constantly responding to him. He is an angel, not a man. In practice, then, he must be persistent in prayer and stay in close familiarity with the Gospel and spiritual and patristic reading in addition, of course, to the divine divine service.

In this way he becomes a person filled with joy, the joy of the Lord, despite his conviction that he is a sinner. This comes not from his personal strength, but from the grace of the priesthood (the divine grace that perfects the imperfect) and from Christ's presence in his mind and heart and in his entire life. 

How can he say to the people, "Peace be with all of you", how can he transmit peace and tranquility to the faithful (especially in these difficult days) if he has not attained it within his own being? This transparency requires of him total preparedness before every service, before every divine liturgy, before every visit, sermon or talk.

This preparedness helps him to distance himself, or even separate, from worldly things-- "Let us cast aside all earthly cares"-- because he wants to move within God's presence and transmit his flame to the people that he wishes to encounter. True life, living presence, is  not usually realized by jumping from here to there or by being constantly busy, but rather it comes about through transparent openness to God's presence.

Something that also helps him acquire this transparency, especially at the divine liturgy, is passing the night before in calmness and spiritual contemplation of the Gospel. Likewise, fasting-- or at least light food-- and keeping vigil in prayer help very much.

Last but not least, Saint John Chrysostom says that the priest or pastor must be  concerned with everything, know everything, and be connected with everyone, while at the same time striving to be distant from everything, distant from everyone, in order to be united with God alone.

+Ephrem
Metropolitan of Tripoli, al-Koura and Dependencies

Further Protests in Jordan as the Patriarchate of Jerusalem Attempts to Remove Archimandrite Chistophoros

Arabic original here.

Today crowds rallied around their good shepherd, Archimandrite Chistophoros Atallah, at the Monastery of Dibbeen, saying "We are all Christophoros! The Monastery is a red line! Cristophoros is a red line!"

This morning, October 3, 2014 the children of the Arab Orthodox Church at the Monastery of the Virgin of the Life-Giving Spring in Dibbeen, in extremely large numbers estimated at more than one thousand people, including the elderly, men, women and children who reiterated their support for the living conscience of the Church, the Arab Archimandrite Chistophoros Atallah and denouncing the Jordanian government's threat, through the Minster of the Interior, to carry out the decisions of the Greek Patriarch Theophilos to exile this spiritual father from the children of the Church and to exile him from his homeland.

Those gathered expressed their dissatisfaction with the reaction from the government, which stood behind the Patriarch and ignored its responsibilities to Christian citizens of Jordan and Palestine, first and foremost of which is to support the flock and its concerns and to pressure the Patriarch to halt the current tyranny and injustice over the Arab priests and flock.

The demonstrators questioned the reason for the government's intervention into some of the Patriarchate's decisions while it ignores the Patriarch's commitments towards them, the non-application of any of the commitments that were made to the Ministry of the Interior, and the non-application of Law 27 of 1958.

Additionally, the demonstrators expressed that they and many children of the Orthodox Church regard this step as a dangerous precedent, especially in light of current circumstances in the region. They see it as further curtailing the role of Arab Christians in society, contrary to the policies and orientation of His Majesty King Abdallah II, may God preserve him, who strives to cement the role of Christians in Jordan and the region. Thus the voices of the demonstrators cried out to urge His Majesty the King to stand alongside them and support them.

A human chain was made around the monastery, echoing prayers and chanting "We are all Christophoros!"

Fr Georges Massouh on Abraham's Sacrifice

Arabic original here.


Human Sacrifice and Animal Sacrifice

Eid el-Adha, the commemoration of Abraham's offering his son as a sacrifice, is coming. May it cause us, like every year, to examine the symbolism of this event. We will not delve here into the question of the event's historicity or the question of determining the identity of the child (Isaac according to the Torah and Ishmael according to Islamic tradition) that Abraham intended to sacrifice as an offering to God. The only thing we are concerned with here is answering the question, what does this event mean for us today?

Before Abraham, whom religious researchers estimate to have lived in the fourteenth century before Christ, some Middle Eastern societies, like many societies all over the world, practiced human sacrifice in their worship. The Torah's account of the "child sacrifice" and his replacement with a lamb came, by divine command, in order to put a stop to human sacrifices and to replace them with animal sacrifice. The story of Abraham and his son, then, regardless of the historicity of the event, is a story with clear pedagogical aims, the most important of which is the revocation of human sacrifices and their being regarded as a crime against both God and man.

In the story of Abraham and his son, we also find a call for fathers to refrain from killing their children, not only in the physical sense, but also in the symbolic sense. In our societies, fathers still proceed to kill their children by giving them an inheritance of servitude instead of raising them on freedom and creativity. Fathers cause their children to grow up in inauthentic religious traditions and shopworn societal customs, sectarianism and prejudice.

We likewise find in the story of Abraham and his son a call for fathers to refrain from sacrificing their children, since they have authority over them and decide their fates. Right now, fathers continue to kill their children with this inheritance full of hatred, rancor and the rejection and lack of respect for the other...

The story of Abraham intends to show us the God calls all people to liberation from everything hideous in religious and social history, especially killing. Nevertheless, some still raise in the name of God, may He be exalted, hordes of extremists, fanatics, killers, criminals and thugs. Added to this is the failure of religious institutions to raise generations that are free and capable of openness and of facing the challenges of the age. These institutions have failed because they have estranged their children from reason, this reason that must always strive to discover what is appropriate for each generation. This is because they regard their inheritance, its strengths and its weaknesses, to be sufficient for them. No wonder, then, that we are witnessing a return to barbarity and random killing. Those doing the slaughtering, no doubt, are the products of our societies that are filled with fanaticism, hatred and revenge. They are the products of pursuing whims, passions and lusts. They are the products of the religious backwardness that has led them away from the most weighty thing that God has called us to-- mercy.

With the old Abraham, the Friend of God who listened to God's voice, human sacrifices were abrogated. With the new Abraham, Ibrahim al-Badri, known as "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi" who most certainly does not listen to God's voice, and those like him who justify his actions, the beastliness of sacrifice has returned, the sacrifice of those of whom God said, "We have honored the children of Adam" (Surat al-Isra 70).

We hope in the coming feast that sacrifice [al-adha] will return to its proper meaning and that man will regain his dignity.

Israel Seizes Land from Russian Orthodox Monastery

French original in La Croix here (paywall) or here.


Orthodox Monastery at the Sea of Tiberias Partially Appropriated



The Russian Orthodox Monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene, located in Tiberias (Northern Israel)  on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, has lost part of its land because the Israeli authorities have decided to develop a recreation area there.

This monastery is located close to Magdala (modern Migdal), the town where Saint Mary Magdalene was born and the place where, according to tradition, Christ would have expelled the seven demons who were in her.

On this land, acquired in 1908 by Archimandrite Leonid Sentsov, then the director of the Russian mission in the Holy Land, Orthodox monks built a small church in the 1960's. The garden also has warm springs withe therapeutic properties.

According to the Russian news agency Interfax, residents of the area regularly destroy the property's fence despite a sign reading "Private  Property", in order to swim in the hot springs and hold barbecues, leaving behind trash and unextinguished fires.

Local media even announced that a free beach was opened on the grounds. Celebrities visit the beach on holidays, loud music is played, and visitors behave in a manner that bothers the monks.

In order to prevent people from Tiberias from performing Jewish rites in the monastery basins, the mission's monks put crucifix mosaics in them, but unknown people dismantled them and stole the tiles.

Elias Khoury on Palestinian Christian Identity

Arabic original in al-Quds al-Arabi here. For more on Israel's decision to create an "Aramaean" nationality, see here.


The Aramaean Game

by Elias Khoury

Amidst the host of identity conflicts in the Arab Middle East, the Israeli magician has pulled out of his hat a new identity that he wants to give Palestinian Christians. The Hebrew state, which succeeded in transforming Druze identity into a national identity within Israel-- at least on paper and in enlistment documents-- has discovered a new national identity for Christians, so now they are not Palestinians or Arabs, but Aramaeans! This was the decision of Mr Gideon Saar, the Israeli minister of the interior, with the agreement of the priest Gabriel Naddaf, an Orthodox priest in Nazareth!

I do not know why some orientalist working in Israeli intelligence decided to revive an Aramaean nationality, without any basis outside the Israeli imagination, which always strives to fragment what remains of the Palestinian people in their occupied nation into different nationalities! After the priest Naddaf's failure to convince Christians to enlist in the Israeli army in order to serve the state that stole their land, occupied their homes, and plundered their possessions, his mind or the mind of his employers hit upon the 'genius' idea of creating a special nationality for Christians. Naddaf or his employer can't talk of a Christian nationality that extends from the Vatican to America, since no such thing exists apart from the fact that it would disturb Israelis, so he had to go back to the past and extract some identity from the graveyard of history.

The level of ignorance in the Aramaean proposal is enough to make you feel pity. Mr Naddaf, apart from his ignorance of the history of Palestinian Christian families, most of which come from Hawran, the cradle of Arab Christianity (most believe that the Naddaf family, who have roots in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, are of Hawrani origin), is ignorant of the history of the relationship between the Aramaic language and the land from which it came and the transformations experienced by its speakers.

Anyone who knows the rudiments of Syriac history knows that the coming of Christianity to greater Syria and the rise of the Antiochian Church led Aramaic-speaking Christians to distinguish themselves by adopting the name "Syriac". Syriac is Christian Aramaic. Gabriel Naddaf, who claims to have studied theology, does not know this obvious truth, just as he is unable to invent a Syriac nationality, since the Syriac Christian community already exists in Palestine.

The use of Syriac in church services was not limited to the Jacobites and Maronites. All the Christian churches used Syriac in their prayers until Arabization began and the Church was Arabized. However, the Church did not abandon partial use of Syriac and this even applies to the Orthodox Church to which Naddaf claims to belong. As for the use of Greek in the Church, it came about after the Crusades, when the Eastern Church was subjected to the worst sorts of persecution under Crusader rule and so its leaders fled to Constantinople and when they returned, they came back with Byzantine rituals.

Christians, like all the people of the Levant, used two languages before the Arab conquest, Byzantine Greek and Syriac. With Arabization, Greek disappeared but Syriac filtered into the Arabic language and became a fundamental part of that langauge. Syriac was only preserved partially, in northern Mount Lebanon and among the Surianis or the Syriac Orthodox living in the Jezira. The Syriac identity of the Maronites dissapeared with their Latinization, that is, their incorporation into the Church of Rome, while the Syriac identity of the Surianis has been subjected  to many trials, chief among them the slaughter in their villages in Turkey during the Armenian Genocide.

The Christians of Palestine, like other childreno of the Palestinian people, can be related to a mixture that stretches from the Canaanites to the Arabs, as Palestine in the Torah is called the Land of Canaan. After the establishment of the Hebrew state, there was a cultural and literary movement called the "Canaanites" that called for belonging to the land and not to a Jewish religious identity. It regarded the Muslim and Christian Palestinian peasants as the remnants of the Jewish people who lived in the Land of Canaan. This movement, however, which counted Benjamin Tammuz among its pioneers, quickly dissipated under the dominance of racist Zionist ideology.

Everything I have written above would be unnecessary if Naddaf had any inkling of the history of his country and his people and had not turned into a petty informant whose head is being stuffed with false information by a stupid orientalist in the Israeli intelligence services.

The most amusing thing that I've read is where Naddaf says that we are Greeks and Aramaeans and not Arabs. By Greeks he means the Rum Orthodox community and here his ignorance is most evident. The appellation "Rum" was the name given to the Orthodox Christian Arabs by their Monophysite opponents who accused them of abandoning the Church of Syria, which at that time was the national church, much like the Coptic Church. The Rum are not Greeks and the adjective "Rum" that was attached to them was adopted over time. As for the Greek domination over the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, it is one of the consequences of the Ottoman era and the circumstances of the occupation have prevented this from changing as happened in the Antiochian Church in Syria and Lebanon.

The premise of the Israeli minister of the interior and his follower Naddaf is a pile of imaginary notions. The goal is to fabricate an identity out of nothing in order to promote enlistment in the Israeli army among the Christian youth.

If this Naddaf knew what he was saying, he would go to the villages of Iqrit and Kafrbirim and join in the struggle for the right of their inhabitants to return. Just as a reminder, some of the inhabitants of those two villages are Maronites, who still use Syriac in their religious rituals.

This Naddaf is an embarrassment to the Church and to Palestine. If he just know how the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth has entered into the Arab mosaic and spread its words within it... If he knew how much we love this language, to the point that it is fused with our consciousness and our language... If he knew the staggering number of Syriac words have entered into our daily lexicon...

His problem isn't his ignorance, since someone who doesn't know is able to learn. His problem is called accepting inferiority to the point that it has led him to be a traitor.

As for the buffoonery called Aramaean nationalism, it is destined to be forgotten.

Amidst the madness of sectarian and identitarian death that is leading the Arab Middle East into the abyss, Palestinians know that their unity is the most precious thing that they possess, so they are not facing any problem of identity because they know who they are and do not need a Zionist teacher to guide them to themselves.

Let Palestinians leave questions of identity and racism to the Israelis who are searching for an identity for their nation that they will not find.

As for Palestine, her identity is the land, suffering, freedom and resistance.

Fr Georges Massouh: Life is Preferable to Martyrdom

Arabic original here.

Life is Preferable to Martyrdom

Life is holier than death, even if it is martyrdom. God created man to live, not to die. Life is holier than death, even if death is the doorway that leads to eternal life. Life is preferable to martyrdom. For this reason, Christianity condemns begging for martyrdom at any price and considers it suicide.

When martyrdom comes, it must be accepted. To a person to be martyred for faith and not deny it even when he is subjected to the most horrible tortures is immeasurably more virtuous. This is confirmed by the lives of the holy martyrs throughout the history of the Church.

Martyrdom is a duty if it comes. However, if it is possible to avoid it, then it must be avoided. After warning the disciples of coming persecution and calling them to stand firm until the end, Christ commanded them, "When they persecute you in a city, flee to another" (Matthew 10:23). According to Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in this verse Christ is not teaching His disciples "to be cowards, but rather not to throw themselves into dangers and perish so as to keep those who have yet to benefit from their teaching from losing it."

In the very same context, Saint Jerome states that when the Lord said to His disciples "Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans" (Matthew 10:5), He said it "not because they were afraid of persecution but so that they would avoid it."

However, in the event that it happens, martyrdom becomes an obligation. Christ Himself encouraged His disciples toward martyrdom when He said, "do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10: 28). The essence of man is not the body, because the body passes out of existence and suffers corruption. He who kills the body is only killing that which naturally is passing out of existence, but he cannot touch a person's essence and the morals and values in which he believes. He can tear apart flesh and spill blood, but he will not be able to kill the heart, God's dwelling-place. He can kill a person's exterior, but he will not be able to kill God who dwells within that person.

No power in the world can kill a single person's soul, unless someone kills his own soul and remains alive in his body. There is a single way to kill the soul, which is sin in its various forms. In times of hardship, this sin takes the form of disbelief, compromising the faith and abandoning faith's requirements for the sake of self-preservation.

Christianity believes that the body is holy. The Son of God took a body and became man. The body contributes to human holiness, so in the body a person is baptized, receives the holy things, is sealed with chrism, is anointed with oil, bows down to God, makes the sign of the cross... So the body must be preserved until it naturally returns to the earth. But if a person is forced to choose between his body and his faith, then the Christian choice is clear.

Christianity, in a word, is the constant call to bear the cross. The cross is an instrument of life, not of death. It is better for a person to die for his faith and live forever than to live for the sake of worldly concerns and die forever. Christ died for humankind of His own will, despite the fact that, according to the Christian faith, He was incapable of dying. So then how much more so, will we, His friends, not die for the sake of what we have inherited from the saints?