Category: Ecumenical, interreligious, and other relationships

Misplaced Pride

When I started school at P.S. 33 in the Bronx, I had a tough time responding to the question, “What are you?” The answer expected was my “nationality.” (It was unacceptable, by the way, to say “American.”)
My parents were born in Manhattan, my mother of Irish descent (and Catholic), my father of German descent (and Jewish). I did not have a simple answer.
As a priest, when I used to visit my Spanish-speaking Salvadoran compadres and their families in New York City, my three-year-old godson was the only one who spoke to me in English! Early on, he was choosing his identity.
Pastoral work with inner-city Hispanic youth surely taught me how important it is to know who you are and to take pride in your roots.
Now, here’s the rub! How much pride in one’s roots is good? It’s the Goldilocks problem. Too little pride is bad; it starves self-confidence and cripples our lives. Too much pride is bad; it exaggerates our importance and can destroy our well-being and our neighbor’s too.
In the world CNEWA serves, balance in national or religious pride is part of the solution of many problems.
Eritreans are proud of their identity and heritage, as are the other peoples of Ethiopia; but the war for independence and rights went on for 30 years.
The peoples of the former Soviet Union are proud of their ethnic roots, but the union has dissolved into several republics, and many have internal conflicts among their peoples. Even when nationality is the same, e.g. Ukrainian, religious differences trigger division.

India is organized into national states. In Kerala, the Malayalam people are Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. The Christians are divided into Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. The Catholics are separated into Malabar, Malankara, and Latin.
The Iraqi Kurds want to form a separate country. Armenians and Azeris fight each other in Azerbaijan. Palestinians want sovereignty and resist Israeli occupation. Lebanon is a patchwork of feuding Christian, Muslim, and Druze clans.
Sometimes what’s wrong is not too much or too little pride in one’s roots; it is that the pride is too superficial and shallow. We do not really know our roots profoundly. If we go down deeper, below the levels of political division, law, language, customs, and all the other obstacles that cause dissension, we reach common ground.
St. Paul put it to the Galatian Christians this way (Gal 3:26-28):

For through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus . . . There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

What a world it would be, if only all peoples, whether Christian or not, could be fiercely proud of being made in the image and likeness of the one God, of being sons and daughters, of being brothers and sisters.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 18:3, July 1992)

On Egg Shells in Jerusalem

The Holy Sepulchre — what a curious name to occupy such a central place in our religious vocabulary! This designation for the burial place of Jesus echoes through our traditions, especially since the days of the Crusades.
From the beginning it was a holy place. The emperor Constantine built the first great church in Jerusalem that enshrined the tomb. For over 1,600 years that church has been repeatedly destroyed and repaired, but it still stands — a focus of Christian faith, a symbol of the victory of life over death.
That’s why the native Christians of Jerusalem don’t call it the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They look beyond the empty tomb; for them, it is the Church of the Resurrection.
Catholics are so Rome-centered that they sometimes forget that Jerusalem is their true spiritual capital. The mother church of all Christians is the church of Jerusalem. Rome may be where the Church’s head is — Jerusalem holds her heart.
Ironically and sadly, Jerusalem is also a place of division. For centuries Christians there have bitterly contended for power and position. Thanks be to God, that day is past. Symbolically it began to be over that day in 1965 when Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I embraced each other as brothers on the Mount of Olives, not far from where tradition says Jesus looked at Jerusalem and wept.
New divisions still mar the peace of Jerusalem, not only the great ones between Israeli and Palestinian, but, alas, now between Christians and Jews.

While the small square outside the Holy Sepulchre was jammed with pilgrims during Holy Week, around the corner a militant group of Jewish settlers ostentatiously moved into a large hospice belonging to the Greek Orthodox church, but leased to an Armenian businessman.
Apart from the dubious legality of the deal — by which the settlers bought the lease from the Armenian through a Panamanian front corporation with the assistance of the Israeli Housing Ministry — it broke all the unwritten rules.
Life in the old city of Jerusalem is like walking on egg shells — it’s a very delicate matter. Jerusalem has four quarters: Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim. Only Jews may live in the Jewish quarter; customarily the characters of the others are respected
Jews, as Christians, are not all of one mind. The Jewish settlers in the Christian quarter were making a statement. They espouse a minority opinion that Jerusalem — and all Israel/Palestine — is a Jewish land for Jews only.
Naturally Christians are alarmed by the implications of this move. So are most Jews. Jerusalem is too near and too dear to Muslim, Christian, and Jewish hearts to be exclusively anyone’s. It’s name is said to mean “Dwelling of Peace”. May it be so!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 16:3, July 1990)

Vatican II Reminiscences

Just before Christmas I was warmly welcomed to his residence in Damascus by His Holiness Moran Mar Ignatius Zakka I, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and all the East.
During the visit, the patriarch reminisced about his experiences, when a young priest, as the official observer of the Syrian Orthodox Church at the Second Vatican Council.
After attending two sessions of the council, he was named a bishop and assumed new duties. Pope Paul VI wrote him a personal note of congratulations, a gesture which touched Patriarch Zakka deeply.
I told the patriarch how I, too, as a young priest, had attended two sessions of Vatican II. While in Rome pursuing doctoral studies in Canon Law, I served on the council staff and was privileged to attend its daily sessions.
During the first session of the council in 1962, three draft documents dealing with Christian unity were placed before the Council Fathers: The Commission for the Eastern Churches had prepared a text on unity; the Theological Commission, on Protestants; and the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, on general ecumenical principles.
The bishops voted to have the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity draft one decree on ecumenism, incorporating all these ideas.
I remember when the preliminary vote was taken on the new draft in 1963. The council decided to accept the first three chapters about relations with the Orthodox and Protestant Churches as a basis for discussion.

During the general debate in the 1964 session, more than 1,000 amendments were proposed by the Council Fathers. Item by item and chapter by chapter the revised draft decree was debated and approved.
On November 19th, the day before the final vote, we were given an unusual document to distribute to the bishops. Usually draft materials were nicely printed and bound; this was a mimeographed paper proposing nineteen changes in the text “on higher authority.”
There was consternation among the bishops: Why these last-minute changes? Who had made them? What was to be done?
It turned out that Pope Paul VI, burning the midnight oil, had personally revised the final text. The upset of the Council Fathers was calmed, and the next day the Decree on Ecumenism was overwhelmingly approved.
With a stroke of the Holy Father’s pen, the old vocabulary of “schismatic” and “heretic” was wiped away. Now Catholics began to speak of “separated brethren,” fellow members of the one Church of Christ.
Let us “go forward without obstructing the way of divine providence and without prejudging the future inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” the pope and his fellow bishops prayed.
Amen!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 16:2, April 1990)

Armenia, Tried and True

When the tragic news of December’s great earthquake in the Soviet Union was flashed around the world, groups and organizations everywhere began to organize emergency assistance.
For Catholic Near East Welfare Association, this was a moment for coming full circle. Our association was formed by the Holy See from the union of several existing Catholic organizations in the 1920s. One of our earliest humanitarian works was the relief of famine victims in Russia.
This December, through the generosity of our benefactors we were able immediately to place $100,000 in the hands of the Holy Father to assist the afflicted there. We also set up a special fund for reconstruction, a modest contribution compared to the massive amounts of governmental aid from around the world, but a real sign of the Church’s, your and our, concern.
The area of the Soviet Union devastated by the earthquake was Armenia. Armenia is no longer a separate political entity, but it remains a nation. Geographically it embraces the area where Iran, the Soviet Union, and Turkey meet. As a nation, Armenia is Christian, in fact the first nation to embrace Christianity. Its faith goes back to before Constantine and the conversion of the Roman empire.
In 1915 the Armenians suffered their bitterest hour when, expelled from eastern Turkey, about 1,000,000 men, women, and children were massacred or died of hunger and disease. Their sufferings became a byword. One of my earliest memories as a child was hearing sadly of “starving Armenians.”

Armenian Christians are mostly members of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Their spiritual head is the Catholicos Vasken I, whose residence is in the holy city of Etchmiadzin in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Oriental Orthodox Armenians are grouped in four jurisdictions: the Catholicosate of Etchmiadzin, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Catholicosate of Cilicia.
Catholic Armenians are under the leadership of Patriarch Jean Pierre XVIII Kasparian. His title is that of Patriarch of Cilicia of the Armenians, but he resides in Beirut. There is an exarchate or diocese for Catholic Armenians living in Canada and the United States.
As all families, Armenians may have their own internal disagreements, but they are united in facing their trials. As their brothers and sisters in Christ, we are with them.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 15:1, Spring 1989)