Aid to the Church in Need: Lebanon: Pressure mounts on last bastion of hope for Christianity

Lebanon: Pressure mounts on last bastion of hope for Christianity

Posted by Press Release on 1/5/2008, 10:29 am
Message modified by board administrator 7/8/2008, 1:31 pm

ACN News, Thursday, 1st May 2008 – LEBANON
With pictures – see below

Lebanon’s lament

Pressure mounts on last bastion of hope for Christianity in the Middle East
By John Pontifex

POLITICAL conflict and economic collapse are driving Christians from Lebanon in a crisis which spells disaster for the future of the Church, not only in the Levant but all across the Middle East.

Such is the verdict of Aid to the Church in Need project co-ordinators who, on a project assessment trip to Lebanon last week, were shocked by the haemorrhaging numbers of faithful and the desire of many Christians to flee to the West.

(Bishop Chucrallah Nabil Hage, Maronite Bishop of Tyre, South Lebanon celebrating Mass in Klaya)

Numbers of Christians have dropped dramatically in the last 30 years. Towns and villages which until the 1970s were 30 percent Christian have now dropped to barely three percent.

But, despite finding many Christian villages almost emptied of faithful, ACN’s Regina Lynch and Marie-Ange Siebrecht said they were “heartened” by some communities where people were determined to stay and “keep the faith” in the land where Jesus worked many miracles.

And yet they found that the overall decline of Christianity in Lebanon was so severe it had “profound ramifications” because historically the country has always been seen as the last bastion of hope for the future of Christianity all over the Middle East.

With traditionally harmonious relations between Christian and Muslim communities of roughly equal size, Lebanon has for generations been held up as an example for other Middle East countries to follow, especially concerning religious tolerance.

Miss Lynch said: “Lebanon has been an example of how people – both Muslims and Christians – can work and live together. It was a success story for the Church in the Middle East. Now all this is in danger of disappearing.”

One of the main problems, they said, was the increasingly polarisation between Sunni and Shiite Muslim political groups and a climate of tension, which was leading Christians to lose confidence in their future.

(Young Syrian Catholic monks at prayer in Charfet, Beirut)

Much hangs on finding a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Their comments come after Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a speech at London’s Westminster Cathedral last week in which he warned of the exodus of Christians from the Middle East caused by persecution and the West’s policies in the region.

He said: “There is a quiet but numerically huge exodus of Christians, especially but not exclusively educated Christians, from the whole region. The remaining Christian communities are left exposed to violence or extremism in many countries…”

Miss Lynch and Mrs Siebrecht said that in Lebanon the pressures of finding a job and the gradual Islamisation of society were forcing the Christians to leave as well as the continuing instability in the region and the ever-present threat of war with Israel.

Marie-Ange Siebrecht, ACN Middle East projects coordinator, said that the decline in the number of Christians in Lebanon meant the Church was increasingly unable to play its role as an essential “bridge” healing the tensions between Muslims.

She said: “Christians are the ones able to build bridges between the Sunnis and the Shiites. Muslims want the Christians to stay. Without the Christians, it is very difficult for the country to be stable.”

Mrs Siebrecht said the priority for ACN in Lebanon was to support the Church in its efforts to strengthen the Christian communities in the country.

She stressed the number of church communities still in ruins after the violence which broke out in the 1970s, and which continued periodically until as recently as 2006 with the war with Israel.

Both Miss Lynch and Mrs Siebrecht said ACN wanted to help rebuild churches, presbyteries and parish halls.

“The Christians in Lebanon are still very strong in their faith,” she said. “The number of vocations remains very high and there is an urgent need for formation programmes and self-reliance projects.”

Mrs Siebrecht said that many people from the villages now spent much of their time in the towns and cities in search of better work and good education for their children.

The Church was the only thing stopping them from moving away to the cities permanently.

She said: “People would never come back to their villages unless there is a Church to support them. It is the Church which calls them back.”

Both ACN project coordinators said that the clergy, sisters and lay they met “count on the prayers and solidarity of Christians worldwide”.

Miss Lynch said: “The Christians repeated again and again to us the need not to forget them in prayer. They sometimes feel very isolated and forgotten.”

She went on to say that bishops thanked the benefactors of ACN for their support and solidarity over many years.

In 2007, ACN gave over $700,000 concentrating on rebuilding churches damaged in the war, formation help for future priests and sisters, teaching religion in schools, media projects and support for poor priests (Mass offerings).

ACN helped a TV and a radio station with repairs following damage done during the 2006 war.

(Blessing of van used by Tele Lumiere by Bishop Abou Jaoude, Maronite Bishop responsible for media – supported with ACN funding)

Editor’s Notes:

Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action.

Founded in 1947 by Fr Werenfried van Straaten, whom Pope John Paul II named “An Outstanding Apostle of Charity”, the organisation is now at work in about 145 countries throughout the world.

The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, 45 million Aid to the Church in Need Child’s Bibles have been distributed worldwide.

For more information, please contact the Sydney office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148. Web:www.aidtochurch.org

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Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148 ABN: 62 418 911 594
Ph/Fax (02) 9679-1929 e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org web: www.aidtochurch.org