Tag: Misunderstandings

Respect

Respect vt. [from the Latin respectus, past participle of respicere, to look at, look back on, respect] 1. a) to feel or show honor or esteem for; hold in high regard. b) to consider or treat with deference or dutiful regard. 2. to show consideration for; avoid intruding upon or interfering with. 3. to concern; relate to.

As a young priest, I spent two summers on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, learning conversational Spanish and Puerto Rican and Hispanic culture. Weekends, I would help out in various parishes on the island, including the hearing of confessions.
At home, in New York, I was used to children confessing, for example, that “I disobeyed my mother ten times. I disobeyed my father five times. I disobeyed my teacher three times.”
However, in Puerto Rico, the children — in Spanish of course — often confessed, “I didn’t respect my mother ten times. I didn’t respect my father five times. I didn’t respect my teacher three times.
What a difference! In Puerto Rican culture, respect is a basic and important value — and the lack of respect or, worse, disrespect is a serious offense.
Respect is a value throughout the entire Hispanic and Latin worlds. Not surprisingly, in view of the long Moorish presence in Spain that helped mold that country’s culture, it is an equally important value throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Even American Rap music offered a backhanded endorsement of the value when it popularized the slang term “dis.”
Upon careful analysis, there is a theological basis for respect. It is rooted in the innate dignity of every human person as a creature made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
That is why to seriously disrespect another person can even be a sin.

For a large percentage of the human race, respect is such an important value that often death is preferable to dishonor. Shame can be unendurable, whether the shame falls upon an individual person or upon his or her family, clan, tribe, caste, nation or culture.
In many languages, before addressing another person, one has to be aware of the degree of respect that is due — for, unlike in modern English, the speaker has to choose from more than one form for “you.”
Long-lasting feuds have been triggered by disrespectful words. Wars have started over real or perceived insults. The demands of honor often lead to death and destruction.
According to the nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Maybe they should not, but, as a matter of fact, they often do.
An important part of the art of diplomacy is skill in choosing the words that are spoken and the deportment that is displayed.
Every culture has it norms of politeness and its unwritten rules governing social interactions and personal behavior. A stranger who does not know and understand them can never effectively communicate, even if he speaks the language well.
It is not hypocrisy to be concerned about things like “saving face” or “bella figura.” Although they can be exaggerated, they stem from respect for the other’s dignity.
Minimally, it is pragmatic and practical to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And, if we truly are followers of Jesus who teaches us to love our enemies, the least we can do is respect them.
Perhaps St. Francis would have prayed, “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be respected as to respect.”


(Published in
one, 35:4, July 2009)

See — Saw

Animals do it.
Educated people do it.
Spouses do it.
Priests and bishops do it
Politicians do it.
What do they do? When they look they see what they want to see — what they hope to see — what they fear to see — what they think they see — what they expect to see.
My dog has a sweet disposition. She rarely barks, except when she sees someone with a cane, a stick, or an umbrella. Then, she gets very nervous and defensive. Someone probably hit her with a stick when she was a small puppy. Now, whenever she sees someone with a stick-like object, she sees a threat.
A friend of mine has several children. For her, one of the kids is always wrong — he’s rebellious, he’s moody, he’s uncooperative, he’s lazy. He’s no kid anymore; he’s a successful young man. But, his mother still persists in seeing him as he once may have been.
Have you ever met a pathological liar? I have. I remember one friend. He’s a genial, friendly person — all smiles, quick to respond, kind, and helpful. He’s the kind of person who seems reliable and trustworthy. And, allowing for the fact that he hardly ever can tell the truth, he may well be.
Remember those optical illusions that always intrigued us when we first saw them as kids? For instance, look at the outline of a box; see it one way and you saw a box from below; look at it another way and you saw a box from above.
Which was the right way to see it? Was there a right way?

Magic tricks beat optical illusions hands down. Did you ever see a good magician perform? We all know that part of the secret of her success is distraction and sleight of hand, but even so we’re usually sure that we saw exactly what she did — even though we were wrong!
When the Israelis withdrew from south Lebanon, many of the Lebanese militia collaborating with them left too. Israelis saw them as Christian allies in danger of death from Lebanese Muslims; Lebanese saw them as misguided traitors who needed some punishment, but most of whom would be pardoned and accepted back into Lebanon. How different things look depending on whether you stand north or south of the border.
Read the papers. Watch the news. How do we see public figures? He’s a conservative; she’s a liberal; he’s a hawk; she’s a dove. Remember what he did ten years ago? You can’t trust him.
It even works like that when we look to God. Do we see whom we want to see? whom we hope to see? whom we fear to see? Jesus told us that God is our good father, that God is love. Alas, often we see the judge and dread the sentence or think that we are lost to his sight.
When Jesus asked the blind man in Jericho “What do you want me to do for you?” He responded “Lord, I want to see.” Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight.”
Me, too, Lord.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 26:4, July 2000)

Family Reunions Are Challenging

“My son is dead,” the father said, though the son was actually very much alive. The young man was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. From the moment he decided to embrace Christianity, his father never looked on his face or spoke to him again.
What pain for both. What a price to be paid by each for fidelity to his religious convictions. The father saw his son as not only abandoning the traditions that were the father’s very lifeblood but also as rejecting the commandments and very truth of God. The son saw his father as so locked into his customs and practices that they overrode his understanding and love.
Throughout the centuries, Christians too have often read whole Christian communities out of the Church and acted as though they no longer existed. In effect, this is what the first ecumenical councils of the Church — its “family reunions” — did to confront controversies.
Arians were condemned at Nicaea in324; the followers of Macedonius, at Constantinople in 381; and Nestorians, at Ephesus in 431. This led to the estrangement of the Assyrian Church of the East from the rest of the Church.
The decrees of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 were rejected by many of the subject Christian peoples of the Byzantine Empire. As a result the Universal Church no longer counted the churches of Armenia, Egypt and Syria as part of the world-wide Christian communion.
In 553 and 680 at Constantinople and in 787 at Nicaea, councils still wrestled with problems of orthodoxy.

A sad result of the council held in Constantinople in 869 was the condemnation of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius. This aggravated the growing estrangement between the East and West. By 1054, the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople solemnly read each other out of full communion with the Church.
Councils were convoked by the Catholic Church in 1123, 1139, 1179, and 1215 (Rome); in 1245 and 1274 ( Lyons); in 1311-12 (Vienne); in 1414-18 (Constance); in 1431-42 (Basel-Ferrara-Florence); in 1512-17 (Rome): in 1545-63 (Trent): and in 1869-70 and 1962-65 (Vatican).
At the councils of Lyons and Basel-Ferrara-Florence there were short-lived attempts at dialogue and reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, but even so the schism between the East and West continued unabated.
A great change of heart came about with the Second Vatican Council in 1962. The Catholic Church invited all the Christian churches of the world to send observers to the council. It recognized them as still-living parts of the one Church of Christ, even though not in full communion with Rome.
For the first time in centuries, in spite of existing important differences, all Christians were considered as one great family, and bold steps were taken towards achieving a complete family reunion.


(Published as “Family Reunions”
in Catholic Near East, 25:6, November 1999)

Doggone It

The new puppy in our house was driving me crazy! I mean, I love her when she’s cute and cuddly. It’s fun when she leaps on my bed in the morning to lick my nose. But, how do I stop her from leaping all over everybody who comes into the house? And, how do I teach her that there are certain things she must do outside, not inside?
I’m a little out of practice — I haven’t had a dog around in years. I bought a book. I bought another. I tried to follow the instructions about how to teach her what to do. Nothing! No results at all! Dumb dog? or, dumb me?
A friend of mine who is a dog trainer came to give the puppy some lessons. They were really lessons for both of us. In fact, they were mostly lessons for me! He had to teach me how to teach the dog.
It was like magic. Somehow, he told her what to do, and in just a few minutes she was doing it! He really knew how to communicate with her in a way she could understand.
It took him longer to tell me what to do. Besides needing more time, he certainly needed more words!
What I’ve learned from my puppy is this: If I think I’m telling her what to do and she doesn’t do it, then it’s probably not her fault — it’s probably mine for not knowing how to communicate effectively with her.
I guess we all do similar things far more often than we realize. We think we’re explaining something very clearly or telling someone what to do, and we’re disappointed when they don’t seem to understand or seem not to follow our instructions.

That dog trainer and my puppy may be helping me to become a better priest too. If I’m trying to teach or preach the word of God and it doesn’t seem to come across — well, maybe that’s not the fault of my hearers or a lack of God’s grace. I just may be speaking a language they don’t understand.
The Church is spread through many lands and many peoples. The one message has to be articulated and uttered in a thousand different ways. The gestures and the words, the ceremonies and the traditions that speak movingly to one people may mean little to another.
A message that touches the hearts and will of one generation may hardly be noticed by the next.
What’s the use of eloquence of words and elegance of traditions if they’re not intelligible to the people who hear and experience them?
Is there something wrong nowadays? Is something lacking in this generation? Is there less generosity, less concern, less faith, less care, and less love than there used to be? Why don’t they understand?
Maybe I should loan you my puppy to help you out. She’d challenge you to learn to speak in a way that can be understood.
I bet St. Paul would have gotten along well with her. He knew all about communicating effectively. His motto was: I have become all things to all.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 25:5, September 1999)

Standing in the Other Believer’s Shoes

In 1990, the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome published an interesting yet unassuming book by Father Robert Caspar and a group of Christians living in Tunisia. Entitled, Trying to Answer Questions, it offered a novel approach to responding to certain questions Muslims raise about aspects of Christian faith and life. The following is based in part upon the very creative work of that book.

Understanding God

In the countries of the Middle East, when Christians make the sign of the cross, before saying “Amen,” they always add the words “one God.” They do this to make clear to the Muslims among whom they live that Christians truly believe in one God.
At the heart of Islam is the frequent and public profession of monotheism, or belief in one God. “There is no god but God” begins almost every Muslim prayer. Most Muslims misunderstand Christian references to God as Father, Son, and Spirit as a profession of polytheism; they seriously question if Christians are really believers.
Muslims are used to using the words “father” and “son” in their primary meaning as describing human relationships flowing from sexual love and procreation – they have no tradition of using them analogously, with spiritual meanings, as Christians do.
Although Muslims prayerfully recite many names and attributes for the one God, “Father” is not one of them. What Christians call “The Lord’s Prayer” is truly that – a distinctive way of talking to and thinking about God that was taught to us by Jesus.
The holy book of Islam, the Qur’an, blames Christians for speaking of three in connection with God and in some places seems to consider the three to be God, Jesus, and Mary. Perhaps this reflects the Muslims’ rejection of some early and obscure Christian heresy.
Christians reassure Muslims of their own monotheism when they recite the Nicean Creed, which begins, “We believe in one God…,” and when they add the words “one God” to the sign of the cross.
When Christians try to explain what they mean by the Trinity, they usually employ the ancient Greek philosophical vocabulary of “person”, “substance”, and “nature” – the words used in the dogmatic definitions of the Trinity. Muslim religious culture, unlike Christian, has not grown historically out of the Greco-Roman world; for Muslims these words have no clear meaning. Another difficulty is that these technical theological terms have radically different ordinary meanings in modern-day usage.
In the past Baghdad’s Christian Arabs searched for metaphors that would explain the Trinity to Muslims. One metaphor often used was “fire”. Fire is one substance, yet at the same time it is heat, flame, and light.
All words and images are inadequate to convey the mystery of God, but we still have to try as best we can.

Understanding Jesus

The first major sanctuary built by Islam, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, has an elaborate, formal inscription in classical Arabic set in mosaic around its inner walls. It says in part “O you People of the Book, overstep not bounds in your religion, and of God speak only the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed into Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from him. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not Three. It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from his glory that he should have a son.”
Clearly this is also a charge to the devout Muslim not to accept the distinctive teachings of Christians about God and Jesus. Yet, ironically, it refers to Jesus as the Messiah (the Christ) and as the Word of God.
Islam holds Jesus in high esteem, but does not see Jesus as Christianity does. The Qur’an has many references to Jesus. Many accord with Christian belief – that Jesus was foretold by John the Baptist, was born of a virgin, Mary, worked miracles, was rejected by his own people and will come again at the end of time.
Other references to Jesus in the Qur’an are not accepted by Christians – that Jesus was not killed but miraculously spared by God, that Jesus announced the coming of Muhammad and that Jesus denied that he ever called himself God.
For Muslims, Jesus has an outstanding place among the prophets, second only to that of Muhammad. But, unlike Mary, Jesus does not have a great role to play in the religious and devotional life of Muslims.
Perhaps this is because, from the Muslim point of view, the followers of Jesus have exaggerated his life, committed blasphemy by divinizing him, and done terrible things to Muslims over the centuries under the banner of Jesus’ cross.
Since the absolute transcendence of God is a core belief and teaching of Islam, the Christian assertion that Jesus is both true man and true God is contradictory, unintelligible, and repugnant to Muslims.
Here too, Christians are so used to professing their faith that Jesus is “true God and true man” that they don’t realize how baffling the juxtaposition of these words may sound to those who do not share their faith.
Historically, the followers of Jesus came to this insight of faith with the aid of the Holy Spirit. After Jesus’ resurrection his disciples understood that the Jesus whom they had known and loved was Savior and Lord.
Muslims err if they think that Christians profess faith in the deification of a man, Jesus; Christians believe that God himself became man out of love. This is the mystery of the Incarnation.
Some early Christian Arabs used an analogy to explain Jesus. Muslims believe that the Word of God is eternal in God and was revealed in scripture – the holy Qur’an. Christians believe that the Word of God is eternal in God and was revealed in a human being – Jesus the Christ. The Eternal Word became not a book, but a man.

Understanding the Cross

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul boldly proclaimed: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God . . . we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Of course these words were written about 600 years before the birth of Islam, but they apply to Muslims, for whom Christ crucified is indeed a stumbling block and foolishness.
It is inconceivable for them that God would allow one of his prophets to be killed. All the stories of the prophets, in the Islamic tradition, follow the same pattern: the prophet is sent to a nation and is rejected by it, except for a few; people want to kill the prophet, but he is miraculously saved by God.
The Qur’an itself formally denies that Jesus was really crucified; it states “They [the Jews] did not kill him; they did not crucify him; but they had the impression of doing so.” Muslim tradition is not clear as to how this was achieved, but it firmly holds that God took Jesus up to heaven out of the reach of his enemies and that he will come again at the end of time.
The good Muslim is somewhat like one of the downcast disciples on the road to Emmaus, except that the Muslim is so overwhelmed by the notion of the death of Jesus that he rejects the very fact of it.
The faith of Jesus’ disciples was restored by a recollection of the words of the Hebrew scriptures and the powerful presence of the Lord. The followers of Jesus, strengthened by the resurrection, found rich and varied ways to interpret the meaning of his death on the cross.
The New Testament depicts Jesus as the suffering servant spoken of by the prophet Isaiah; Jesus is the paschal lamb offered in sacrifice for our salvation; Jesus’ blood seals the new covenant between God and the new Israel; Jesus makes the great sin-offering of his life in atonement for his people.
Later Christian theology advanced the notions of Jesus’ paying the penalty of sin to redeem us and Jesus substituting himself in punishment for sinful humankind.
All of this tradition is relatively unknown to devout Muslims. Unless they have the opportunity to learn more about the Jesus not only of the Qur’an but of the Gospels, unless they come to a deep understanding of the dynamics of obedience and love that prompted the Lord to give even his life for his friends, unless they are guided by the Spirit into an understanding of the mystery of the resurrection, their very faith in the power and providence of the one God cannot help but prompt them to recoil from the Christian proclamation of the cross.


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 24:5, September 1998)

The Insanity of War

Insanity [from the Latin insanus, from the Latin in, not, + sanus, whole] 1. The state of being insane; mental derangement or unsoundness; lunacy; madness; dementia. 2. A defect or weakness of mind that makes a person incapable of understanding the nature of particular acts or legal actions. 3. Extreme folly

I first visited Eritrea in 1989 during its 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia. At that time I could visit only the Eritrean capitol of Asmara. The Ethiopians held the city, and it wasn’t possible to go outside it into the rebel-held areas.
The long civil war ended in 1991 with the overthrow of the Ethiopian Marxist dictatorship by joint revolutionary forces in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Two years later Eritrea received its independence.
This May, I finally was able to see more of Eritrea than the city of Asmara. We traveled by jeep down from the cool highlands, first northwest to Keren, then southwest to Agordat and Barentu, and finally south to the hot and dusty lowland town of Dukambia.
Most of the few narrow and bumpy paved roads date from the Italian colonial period. Only part of our journey was on asphalt; most of the trip was over rough, washboard-surfaced dirt roads or tracks in the countryside.
Some areas are remote from the capitol not only in space but in time. Many of these rural folk live and work as their ancestors did centuries ago.
How strange it was to see poor farmers scratching a living from their dusty, semi-arid land alongside rusting hulks of tanks, heavy trucks and field weapons, wrecked and abandoned along the margins of the road.

What madness to have deployed these massive and expensive instruments of war among simple people whose lives were so remote from the issues of the conflict.
Thanks be to God, I thought, at last there is peace, reconstruction, and development in this shattered, weakened land.
A few days after we crossed into Ethiopia, however, the border was closed and a new war broke out.
Unbelievable! Until then the leaders of the two governments seemed to have had a cordial relationship. What were the reasons for renewing war? Ostensibly an old dispute about the exact position of the frontier. Actually, nobody knows.
Within days bombs were falling in both countries, sometimes seemingly at random. Small children died at school in Mekele a few weeks after our visit there.
What an insane game is sometimes played by the wielders of political power. They move their powerful and deadly toys across the board of life, casually wiping out living, breathing human pieces like the pawns they have become.
How long and hard we work to build lives child by child, family by family. How easily and quickly they are destroyed.
From the insanity, lunacy, madness, and folly of war, deliver us, O Lord!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 24:4, July 1998)

Full Circle

In his book, The Phenomenon of Man, Father Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., observed that “Nothing is so delicate and fugitive by its very nature as a beginning . . . Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility, and one that should be taken to heart by all who occupy themselves with history.”
As much as we would like to know more about the beginnings of the ancient Church of India, we have only the immemorial tradition that it was founded by St. Thomas the Apostle
Although early historical references are few, it seems clear that the descendants of the converts of St. Thomas were joined over the centuries by various groups of Christian immigrants from the lands of the old Persian Empire.
When the Portuguese arrived in India at the end of the 15th century, they found this ancient Church of India undivided, though not without its internal differences. By then it was thoroughly integrated into the fabric of South Indian society and Chaldean in its religious life and traditions.
Whether due to misunderstanding or indifference, the regulations and demands of the Portuguese authorities, both civil and religious, provoked a deep polarization and, ultimately, a division of this Indian Christian community.
The fragmentation of the Indian Church continued through the beginning of the 20th century until, providentially, a new movement seeking reunion arose.
Its founder was a priest of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, Father P.T. Geevargheese. In 1919, he had started a religious community, the Bethany congregation, seeking to combine Oriental monastic traditions with Indian spirituality.

The new community flourished and was a great spiritual leaven within the Orthodox Christian community.
In 1925, Father Geevargheese was consecrated a bishop with the new name of Mar Ivanios. He still dreamed and worked for the unity of the Thomas Christians of India.
In 1926, he and four other bishops of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church began to explore the possibility of reconciliation with the Church of Rome.
On 20 September 1930, Mar Ivanios and his suffragan bishop, Mar Theophilos, entered into full communion with the Holy See. Two years later Pope Pius XI appointed him as Archbishop of Trivandrum and a new Eastern Catholic Church was born, the Syro-Malankara.
By the time of the death of Mar Ivanios in 1953, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church had grown rapidly and consisted of two dioceses, Trivandrum and Tiruvalla
His successor, Mar Gregorios, provided dynamic and creative guidance to the Malankara Church for the next 40 years.
In 1978, a third Malankara diocese was created, Battery. Its founding bishop, Cyril Mar Baselios, just promoted to Archbishop of Trivandrum, assumes the mantle of leadership of this youngest, yet ancient, Eastern Catholic Church.
May God grant him much success in continuing the great work of reuniting all of Thomas’s children!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 22:1, January 1996)

We Believe in One God . . .

What does the believing Christian think about the believing Muslim?
The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration, Nostra Aetate, taught:

The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own. Although not acknowledging him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his virgin Mother they also honor, and even at times devoutly invoke. Further, they await the day of judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting.
Over the centuries many quarrels and dissensions have arisen between Christians and Muslims. The sacred Council now pleads with all to forget the past, and urges that a sincere effort be made to achieve mutual understanding.

Reading history, it is clear that the message of Islam often was accompanied by political conquest — as happened with the message of Christianity. When the Byzantines and other Christian nations resisted, there was open warfare, but not always. For example, the introduction and penetration of Islam into Christian Egypt took place gradually over a period of several centuries.

Through the years, Christians in Muslim lands adopted a defensive cast of mind and retreated within themselves. Until recently, the Christian and Muslim worlds had remained very separate with little mutual comprehension.
How should the believing Christian approach the believing Muslim?
The first challenge is to find a common ground and vocabulary. There are many aspects of Christian faith that Muslims share but many they do not understand and reject. It is difficult to say whether they reject them having fully understood them or whether they reject them because of their misunderstanding. The reverse also holds true.
Take prophets, for example. A prophet is one who speaks the word of God. Christians may not accept that Muhammad is “the Seal of the Prophets” as Muslims believe. But, if almost one billion people in the modern world are striving to find their way to God and live a life of prayer, fasting, and sacrifice because of the teachings of Muhammad, can not and should not Christians consider Muhammad as a prophet, as one whom God uses to bring his word to many of humankind?
Once John said to Jesus, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow in our company.” Jesus said to him, “Do not prevent him, for whoever is not against you is for you.”


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 20:5, September 1994)

Getting Ahead

An ecclesiastical Cinderella story just came to its happy ending on 29 January. On that day, the good news was published that the Holy Father had raised the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church to the rank of a major archiepiscopal church.
“To a what?,” you may be thinking, “What’s so significant about that?”
According to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, an Eastern Catholic church is headed by a patriarch or a major archbishop. However when the code went into effect on 1 October 1991, of all the apostolic Eastern churches, only the Syro-Malabar Church did not have a head.
Of course, the situation was not always like that, and therein hangs the tale:
In 52 A.D. the apostle Thomas came to Kodungallur on the Malabar (Kerala) coast. After 20 years of preaching the gospel in southern India, he was martyred at Mailapur, near Madras.
The families converted by Thomas in Kerala formed seven churches or villages. For centuries their descendants were in full communion with the Eastern Syrian patriarch, who named a “Metropolitan of All India” for their pastoral care.
This metropolitan and other bishops visited Kerala from time to time, but the permanent administrative head of the church in Kerala, proxy for the metropolitan, was an archdeacon.
The Portuguese came in 1498 and found this ancient Christian community, isolated from Rome for centuries but never out of communion with it.
Misunderstanding its legitimacy, the Portuguese bishops began to “Latinize” this venerable church, changing its liturgy, vesture, customs, and laws.

By 1587, when the last Eastern Syrian metropolitan died, the Malabar church was totally ruled by Portuguese bishops.
The growing frustration and discontent of priests and people with the bishops culminated in the rejection of their authority in 1653. The pope sent Carmelite friars to seek a reconciliation.
Most of the Malabar Christians returned to full communion with Rome under Latin-rite Carmelite bishops. Others broke away and later became affiliated with the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.
Not until 1887 were special Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdictions created for the Syro-Malabar faithful, as they were now called, under their own Syro-Malabar bishops.
In 1923 Pope Pius XI instituted a Syro-Malabar hierarchy with an archdiocese and three suffragan dioceses. The church continued to grow, and in 1956 a second archdiocese was created.
Now this ancient and apostolic Indian church is finally recognized for what it is and restored to its full dignity. Its new head is Antony Cardinal Padiyara, Major Archbishop of Ernakulam-Angamaly.
Temporarily, the Holy Father has reserved its pastoral governance to himself, appointing a special Pontifical Delegate, Archbishop Abraham Kattumana, to exercise his authority.
“I invite you to join us in giving thanks to Almighty God for his great mercies for this Church,” writes Cardinal Padiyara. Amen!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 19:2, March 1993)

Travel, Truth, and Trust

The old man gently told the story:

Abraham refused the idolater the hospitality of his tent because the idolater refused to accept Abraham’s God . . . But, his God rebuked Abraham: “All these years I have given this man life, health, and my loving care. And you will not offer him food and shelter for even one night!”

The simple tale of the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheik Ahmad Kaftaro, seems a fitting parable for the Middle East.
During July, I had the privilege of guiding Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and Archbishop William Keeler of Baltimore on their fact-finding mission to Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt. Their task: together with Cardinal John O’Connor, to draft a new policy statement on the Middle East for U.S. bishops.
The most painful aspect of the trip was to listen to so many sincere and concerned people — simple village folk, educators and professionals, patriarchs and bishops, presidents and government ministers — and at the same time to encounter such profound distrust and misunderstanding. How often, deliberately or unwittingly, each would demand that the other accept his god, his absolute, alone.
For some, the larger conflicts had intimate, personal dimensions.
– In the Palestinian village of Nahalin, the young widow tried to find seats for each of us in her tiny, bare living room. Two little girls clung to her skirt, while, with her small deaf son in her lap, she told how her husband was killed by Israeli soldiers on his way to work.

– In the Israeli West Bank settlement of Alfey Menashe, Mayor Shlomo Kitani proudly showed us his gleaming, new little town. At the monument commemorating the tragic event, a young Jewish widower told us without rancor how his pregnant young wife and child were burnt to death when an Arab hurled a petrol bomb at his car.
We dropped into a clinic in Gaza where a seventeen year old was being treated for a bullet wound in his leg. With a spontaneous eloquence he spoke of being willing to die for his people’s freedom.
Prime Minister Shamir told us of how negotiations for peace must be conducted, President Mubarak spoke optimistically of the possibilities of peace, PLO leaders stressed the sincerity of their quest for a peaceful settlement.
So many different ideas, so many contradictory plans, so many hopes, so many fears…and, running through them all, so much misunderstanding and so much distrust.
There are no easy answers.
In fact, the greatest temptation is to say there can be no answers at all. Much of the area we visited was once the kingdom of Solomon. But, it takes a greater than Solomon to find a way to bring peace to the Middle East.
Please God, he will!


(Published in
Catholic Near East, 15:3, August 1989)