A Nation Destroyed?

THIS SUMMER'S WAR in Lebanon brought death and destruction, but also took a massive toll on Christianity in the country.
One of the most complex and divided nations in the Middle East, the small mountainous country is no stranger to conflict, and it became the scene of renewed and deadly fighting in July.
The fighting started when Israel launched a major military campaign against the militant Shia group Hezbollah, in retaliation for the movement's capture of two Israeli soldiers. A 34-day offensive followed that claimed around 1,000 mostly civilian Lebanese lives. Israel's relentless air and sea bombardment had a devastating impact on the country's infrastructure, particularly in the capital Beirut and areas in the south. The war came as Lebanon was finally turning itself around after a 16-year vicious civil war that left the economy in tatters and its people divided.
The country's population is a mixture of Christian denominations, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze and others, having long been a refuge for the region's persecuted minorities. Since the end of Lebanon's civil war in 1991, Maronite Christians - members of an Eastern-rite Church in communion with Rome who trace their descent from the ancient Phoenicians - have steadily lost power to Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

A dwindling community

The CIA estimates the nation's population of 3.8 million is roughly 60 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian. There are some 1.2 million Maronites in Lebanon and even before this summer's war the Church was concerned about its dwindling community. Its greatest fear and threat is emigration, and to such an extent that Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir - the archbishop of Beirut and head of the Maronite Church, who is as much a spokesman for his people as he is their spiritual leader - fears that 'if this situation continues, there will be no Christians left'. And with the first Israeli bomb, the situation became even more depressing.
With an unsteady ceasefire in place, in August the country's Maronite bishops wasted no time in appealing for international help in rebuilding Lebanon. They called for help in re-opening schools for the new academic year and delivering medicines and other critical supplies before winter begins. The patriarch and bishops have also expressed great concern over the delays in emergency aid being distributed to those making their way home over the rubble. Despite a pledge from the international community of $940million in aid, they fear the slow pace of reconstruction might push many Lebanese, especially Christians, to emigrate.
In a survey published by Beirut's L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper, 54 percent of Christians believed their future was abroad. Msgr. Guy-Paul Noujaim, the Maronite patriarchal vicar for the diocese of Sarba, expressed his concerns in an interview with AsiaNews service. 'These days a great number of Christians are joining the exodus,' he said. 'They feel abandoned'.
Archbishop Paul Matar of Beirut agreed, saying his people 'wanted to leave the country not out of fear, but out of uncertainty for its future'. But Archbishop Georges Bakouni, who heads the Melkite Catholic community in Tyre, has urged his people to stay in Lebanon, and asked those who fled the fighting to 'come home and show that Lebanon will not die'.
By mid-September, an expanded multinational UN peacekeeping force was being deployed to police the volatile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, with 15,000 troops arriving from China, France, Germany, Italy and Bangladesh, among others. The Vatican has issued its support for the ceasefire, and the UN mission to enforce it. Cardinal Georges Cottier, the theologian to the pontifical household, said the peacekeeping mission is 'difficult, dangerous, but necessary'.

The Maronite tradition

Sadly, the Lebanese people are no strangers to the sort of conflict they endured this Summer. Persecution is part of the Maronite tradition. The founder of the Maronite faith, St. Maroun, lived on a mountaintop near Antioch at the end of the 4th century. His success in converting the previously pagan communities of the Lebanese mountains produced a Catholic bastion in an area where the enemies of Catholicism had flourished. Consequently the Maronites found themselves an isolated minority, subject to persecution by their Christian neighbours as well as by the forces of Islam who emerged within two centuries after St. Maroun's death.
In 451, after the Maronites opted to accept the Council of Chalcedon, they were pursued by Jacobites. According to an eyewitness, 350 were slaughtered at their altars, their monasteries burnt, and their churches looted. This was the first of a series of atrocities that would test their religious integrity over the next 1,500 years.
The Maronites remained loyal to Rome, and in 1584 a Maronite College was established in the city. In the next century Capuchin, Carmelite, and Jesuit missionaries penetrated Lebanon and, working alongside the Maronite clergy, they established schools that raised the level of education and propelled the Maronites to the foreground of the Arab cultural renaissance. But the arrival of the Western missionary priests proved to be a mixed blessing for the Maronite community. The educated class which emerged was Westernised and Latinised; and lines of separation appeared between the educated elite and the poor, more distinctly Arabic people.

Unity in diversity

There have been several occasions throughout history where the disparate religious groups of Lebanon have acted in solidarity. Such unity ultimately led to independence in 1943, after Christian priests and Muslims sheikhs stood side-by-side in demonstrations and sat side-by-side in prisons, in mutual defiance of the Ottoman Turks, and later the French mandate.
But the Lebanese only enjoyed their hard-won independent status for five years before the establishment of Israel created a wound in the region that is still far from healed. As Palestinian refugees fled into Lebanon, bereft of their homes and possessions, and the Arab world began to tear itself apart, Lebanon became an unwilling battlefield. Sectarianism flourished. Christians now took arms against Muslims, whose grandparents had stood beside theirs only half a century earlier. Syrian troops surged in from the north, Israeli tanks from the south. Lebanon was ripped apart in one of the bloodiest and most destructive episodes of the Middle East conflict. The Christian community dwindled, as those who had the means to do so fled to a more stable life elsewhere - away from the tanks and guns that had rendered their homeland almost uninhabitable.

Voice of the people

Patriarch Sfeir is the 76th Patriarch of Antioch and all the East, and the third to have been made a cardinal, since his appointment to that office in 1994. He believes that he must speak out or face the destruction of his Maronite community, arguing that Christians were leaving Lebanon in droves as a direct consequence of the Syrian occupation that ended last year. Although the Maronite community still represents the largest proportion of Christians in the Middle East, over the last fifteen years they have ceased to be the majority in a country where Christianity has thrived ever since St. Maroun started preaching to the pagan Phoenicians more than 15 centuries ago. There are now more Maronites in Brazil, and nearly as many in the United States, as there are in Lebanon.
Although Syria withdrew its troops in 2005, ending a 29-year military presence, it still exerts considerable political clout in Lebanon. The pull-out was triggered by the assassination in Beirut of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, with Lebanese opposition groups accusing Syria of involvement. Nonetheless, Patriarch Sfeir believes that unless Syria stops interfering in the day-to-day running of Lebanese affairs, the country may be drained of all its indigenous Christians within a generation. His goal of preserving the Christian presence can be achieved, he argues, by bringing an end to the country's current economic crisis. If living standards improve, he reasons, families will stay.
Ideally, the Patriarch envisages a Lebanon 'at peace, arranging its own affairs, and maintaining good relations with its neighbours - Syria in particular'. Although he regards himself as 'a pastor, not a political man,' he notes that the Maronite patriarch has always played a vital role as a spokesman for Christian concerns in particular, and for the people of Lebanon in general. There can be no lasting peace in Lebanon, Patriarch Sfeir strongly believes, without a wider sense of security in the region. The basis for such security would be the establishment of a Palestinian state, which he believes would ease tensions in the region on the whole. He states his position in simple terms, 'The current position is not just, and without justice there will be no peace'. He is sympathetic to the Palestinians, but ambiguous about the presence of a half million Palestinian refugees inside Lebanon's borders. On the one hand, he believes the presence of such a high number of Palestinians has fostered a strong rapport between these two long-suffering peoples. On the other hand, he questions whether the Lebanese government can deal effectively with the drain on resources caused by such a high number of refugees.

Stemming the exodus

Patriarch Sfeir sees education as the bedrock for the successful future of Lebanese society. 'Better education would increase the capacity for harmonious coexistence,' he says. Muslims, he claims, are adopting the culture of their Christian neighbours, having only one wife, for instance. Their children are now being educated at Christian universities and will soon go to work alongside Christians, thus increasing the potential for mutual understanding.
He believes the different religious communities active today in Lebanon 'came here to find an atmosphere of liberty in which to practice their own doctrines,' and this common cause can bring them together despite all differences. But without security in the wider region, it is doubtful that anything can stop the haemorrhaging of Lebanese Christians from the country.