Church Under Attack In Holy Land

Christian clergy examine Church property destroyed

by Jerusalem Municipality

The municipality of Jerusalem has launched an attack on Arab held property in the “Old City” of Jerusalem including property held by the Roman Catholic Church.  According to reports, this past Monday bulldozers came and razed a house owned by the Latin Patriarchate and inhabited by an Arab Catholic family.  Patriarch Fuad Tawwal, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Jerusalem, came to inspect the ruins of the house and told journalists: "This act is against the law, against justice and against humanity, against any ideology upon which peace can be built and increases segregation and hate."  The Israeli government spokesperson claimed that the house had been built illegally without proper permits but Archbishop Tawwal pointed out that, in fact, the house had been built prior to the 1967 invasion of the Old City when control of the area passed from Jordan to Israel.  Archbishop Tawwal said that both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipal officials knew that the house belonged to the Church and that this demolition was an attack on the Church and its property. 
Many Americans are very naïve as to the complexities of the Palestinian situation.  Before the 1948 creation of the State of Israel, when the Holy Land was in the British Protectorate of Palestine—and even before that when it was part of the Ottoman Empire—the Palestinian population was approximately evenly divided between Christians and Muslims.  The Christians were Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, or Roman Catholic.  (The Melkite Church is a Byzantine Rite Church in Union with the Holy See.)  Christians tended to be merchants and professional people living in the cities and towns; Muslims tended to be more farmers living in the rural areas.  After 1948 the State of Israel made living conditions very difficult for the Palestinian population, giving them disproportionately low representation in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), as well as funneling government money for urban development, schools, recreational areas, and hospitals to the Jewish settlements and mostly ignoring the Palestinians.  Former President Jimmy Carter compared the treatment of Palestinians in Israel to the situation of Africans in South Africa under apartheid.  One could not even call the Palestinians “second-class” citizens as they were excluded from the tremendous economic development the Israelis have been able to achieve.  Water was cut off from their lands to irrigate the orchards and fields of Israeli farmers; schools were ramshackle affairs without books or the basic educational needs, children had no place to play or exercise but in the streets. 
The Israelis were Jews who had in the late nineteenth century begun to migrate back to Palestine from the Russian, Austrian, and German empires where they often suffered discrimination at best and too often bloody pogroms aiming for their elimination.  The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust convinced the world that the Jews needed a “homeland” where they could be secure from further attempts to wipe them out and in the years after the Second World War, the British protectorate of Palestine was flooded with Jewish refugees who came as settlers.  They had to fight a dual war to establish their homeland—a war against the British for independence and a war against the Palestinian peoples for control of the land.  
The Palestinian people, while called “Arabs,” are not the descendent of the Arab invaders who conquered the Holy Land from the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century, but are descendants of the ancient Syrian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Greek and Roman people who inhabited the land from antiquity.  At the time of the Islamic conquest, these people were Christian and a significant number of the population, approximately half, remained Christian until the mid-twentieth century.  As their life deteriorated under Israeli government, many opted to emigrate to the United States, to Canada, Australia and other nations.  It was easier for the urban population—mostly Christian—to sell homes and shops and to leave than it was for those who livelihood was on the land—mostly Muslim.  Today less than 10% of the Palestinian people who remain are Christians, but the Church is still a significant presence in the Holy Land as Christians—and Catholics in particular—support hospitals, schools, and even a University in the Palestinian territories. 
Political pressure on the Israeli government from religious extremists in the ultra-Orthodox factions of society has caused the government to continue to harass the Palestinian people in hopes of forcing them to leave Israel.  The ultra-Orthodox want the land entirely for Jews and believe that this is God’s destiny for this ancient land which God “gave” their ancestors.  The Catholic Church (along with the Orthodox) is very concerned about the future of an Israel without the historic presence of its Christian peoples.  There is fear for the survival of the shrines connected with the life of Our Lord, but there is also a concern for the people themselves to maintain their culture and faith in this hostile environment.  For political reasons in our own country, the United States, news about the plight of Palestinians, and in particular Palestinian Christians, is often embargoed.  If American Christians knew the truth about the injustices foisted on the Palestinians and the infringement on the religious freedom of Christians in the Holy Land, the political pressure on our government to review its Israel policy would be to Israel’s grave disadvantage. 

I would suggest you might look to the Holy Land Ecumenical Foundation (http://www.hcef.org/) for more information about the plight of Palestinian Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox. 

 

Of Nuns, Tourism, and the Paschal Mystery

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem

Let’s move off from Pope Francis for a few days—it being Holy Week—and look to, well, Holy Week.  We can come back to Francis after Easter, and I have not forgotten my series on the Church of England that we had begun before Pope Benedict threw the Catholic world into an uproar with his historic resignation.   But there is time for all that later.  Holy Week
needs to take some precedence. 
When we look at the history of Holy Week—which is what we are about to do—we depend on the writings of a fourth-century nun, Aegeria Sylvia, (sometimes spelt Egeria, sometimes Etheria, and sometimes just called Sylvia.  Aegeria Sylvia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early 380’s and wrote an account of it to send back to her sisters.  It is not clear where her monastery was located nor is her own nationality known with certainty other than being from the Gallic regions of what today would be South-western France or North-western Spain.  We first hear about her from Valerio of Bierzo, a seventh century Galician monk (Galicia is the north-west corner of Spain) and so refer to Aegeria as “Spanish” but “Spanish is an anachronism and the three hundred years between Aegeria and Valerio is a monitum against presuming her to be known to Valerio because they were from the same locale.  She wrote in a declining Latin that is already showing some signs of breaking down into one or another of the today’s romance languages.   And it gives us one of the earliest instances of a woman engaging in the production of literature.
Aegeria’s account does not today survive in full—at least in any known manuscript.  The surviving portion of her account opens with her visiting Mount Sinai, continues through the Holy Places of Syria-Palestine, and concludes with her visit to Constantinople.  She visits extensively throughout the mid-east, going as far as what is today Iraq to visit shrines at Edessa and Haran. 
Aegeria gives a very thorough account of the liturgical customs of the Jerusalem Church.  it is obvious that she stayed in Jerusalem a considerable period of time and was there for the feast of the Epiphany, as well as Lent and Holy Week. 
Many of our Catholic liturgical traditions originate in the Jerusalem Church of the fourth century rather than from the Roman Church.  In other words, Rome borrowed Jerusalem customs—as did the Churches of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria.  The  “liturgical year” originated at Jerusalem as the Bishop of Jerusalem, his clergy and his people would gather at the various sites mentioned in the Gospel—Bethlehem, Bethany, Mount Zion, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives, etc. to relive the experience of Christ and his disciples by reading the appropriate gospel stories, offering prayers, hymns, and psalms, and celebrating the Eucharist on the various spots.  Pilgrimage groups in Jerusalem and the Holy Land do the same today.  Their faith was a living and vibrant appropriation of the Gospel—a walking through the Gospels as it were—that made them examine themselves for faithfulness to the life and teaching of Jesus.   
As we go through the ceremonies of Holy Week we need to ask ourselves if they are mere rituals or if they are experiences of touching for ourselves the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of the One whom we recognize to be the Christ of God.