factor of unity and identity in the face of the exodus of Christians

In September 2012, the Pope emeritus made an apostolic trip to the country of cedars, the last abroad of his pontificate before his historic resignation. The exhortation, fruit of the synod on the Middle East, which he offered to the Eastern Catholic Churches. Today the challenge is the silent invasion of modernity, coupled with extremist violence.

Beirut () – The immense capacity for synthesis of this intellectual giant that was Pope Benedict XVI was certainly necessary to understand and integrate the enormous diversity of the Catholic world in that portion of the people of God who live in the Holy Land and throughout the East Medium. When he came to Lebanon on September 12, 2012, the last foreign trip of his pontificate, the recently deceased Pope Emeritus actually came to the entire region, and delivered to the six Eastern Catholic Churches the apostolic exhortation fruit of the Synod for the Middle East that had been held two years earlier: “The Catholic Church in the Middle East: communion and witness” (October 10-24, 2010).

He had come with a handicap, the memory of the warm welcome his predecessor John Paul II had received in 1997. Would it be possible to relive those days? Actually, his clarity and his sweet and kind way of expressing himself, so different from the previous Pope, would cause a similar astonishment.

The civil and religious authorities who received him upon his arrival at the presidential palace gave him a warm welcome. Addressing the pontiff to greet him, Mufti Mohammad Rashid Kabbani had no doubts: “Our privileged relations – he said – are also the message we give to the world”. In reality, he went to that country to continue what John Paul II had begun with the Synod on Lebanon (1995) and which Francis methodically continues today, above all with the Abu Dhabi Declaration (2019): spiritually mapping the “cradle” of Christianity and “gather together the scattered children of God” (John 11:52). This is “the only Church of Christ [que] is expressed in the diversity of the liturgical, spiritual, cultural Traditions and in the discipline of the six venerable sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches, as well as in the Latin Tradition”, as he stated at the opening mass of the synod that was held in Rome in 2010.

That trip to the land of cedars was not the first to the Middle East. “It is the same internal criterion – he would emphasize later in the solemn Eucharistic celebration for the opening of the synod – that has guided me in my apostolic trips to Turkey, the Holy Land [Jordania, Israel y Palestina] and Cyprus, where I was able to get to know the joys and concerns of the Christian communities up close.” Benedict XVI approached the Middle East through Lebanon, a democratic and pluralistic exception in a world characterized by autocracies. Furthermore, we like to think that it was to help the Lebanese of all denominations, beginning with the Christians, to fairly appreciate the synthesis of the Islamic-Christian civilization that we like to define as “living in common” and that John Paul II had offered as a model to the world western and eastern.

With this perspective, he had gone to breathe new life into the “religious roots” of the Maronite Christian community, the majority in Lebanon, which John Paul II had remembered as “the source of his national identity.” A revitalization that was essential to take charge of a history that had been complicated since the creation of “Greater Lebanon” (1920) and the decolonization movement after World War II.

Addressing the thousands of young people who came to listen to him in the large square set up in front of the Maronite patriarchal headquarters of Bkerké, Benedict XVI reminded them of the “honor” of living in a land where the feet of Christ trodden on and added: “Now I would like to greet the young Muslims who are with us tonight. I thank you for your presence, which is so important. Together with young Christians you are the future of this wonderful country and of the entire Middle East. Try to build it together! And when you are adults, continue to live harmony in unity with Christians. Because the beauty of Lebanon is found in this beautiful symbiosis. Looking at them, the entire Middle East needs to understand that Muslims and Christians, Islam and Christianity, can live together without hatred, respecting each other’s creed, to build together a free and humane society.”

The late Pope emeritus also did not forget on that occasion the young people from other Arab countries who were able to attend the meeting: “I also heard – he added – that there are among us young people who have come from Syria. I want to tell you how much I admire your courage. Tell your homes, your families and friends that the Pope does not forget you”. He was speaking to them when Syria was still the center of attention, not without suffering, due to the riots in the streets related to the Arab Spring, before being devastated by the violence of war.

The Pope was “enthusiastic” by the “exuberant” reception that the young people had given him, recalls Mons. Paul Sayah, at the time Maronite Patriarchal Vicar. And precisely because of this reception, two Lebanese were entrusted with writing the meditations on the Via Crucis. However, Benedict XVI’s trip to Lebanon was also the last of his pontificate and it did not bear all the desired results. So much so that today the Lebanese communities anxiously await a new papal visit and feel the need to be reconfirmed in their historic vocation.

Ten years later, the external panorama has changed enormously and what Benedict XVI and many others like him feared has come true: the calls for dialogue have come too late. The ill-fated US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 completely shook the country. The darkness of Daesh [acrónimo árabe del Estado Islámico] covered the Nineveh Plain (2014-2019). Syria and Iraq itself have been emptied of the Christian presence, an exodus difficult to reverse, at the same time that the Palestinian drama has radicalized.

For Lebanon, deprived of the most educated generations of its youth, the war is taking place on an economic and anthropological level. Economically, the country is unable to free itself from the clutches of those who have plundered its resources and wealth. Anthropologically, modernity understood as a silent invader -and at other times very noisy- has infiltrated everywhere, posing to the Church and the faithful the formidable challenge of ethical relativism that, in some cases, has also infiltrated within them. institutions.

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