FIRST BLOG 26th September
In November 2015 at a conference in Rome, Patriarch Ignatius Yousseff III the Patriarch of Antioch for the Syriac Catholic Church stated “Middle Eastern Christians have been forgotten, abandoned, even betrayed by the Western countries.” There is nothing new historically in this attitude to Eastern churches by Western politicians and church leaders. Not only have the western politicians often made decisions and adopted policies that work directly against the interest of the eastern churches, but many of the politicians seemed surprised to discover that there are Christians in the Middle East at all.
Many in the West both today and historically seemed ignorant of the fact that of the five great historic Patriarchates of Christianity (The Pentarchy from the Greek for “Rule of Five”), the major centres of Christianity, only one was in the west, that of Rome; the others, Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem were in the East and for centuries have been located in countries that subsequently became Musli
m. Even as late as the 13th century the majority of the world’s Christians lived in the East, mostly under Islamic domination but in fact the Eastern churches had spread well beyond the limits of the Roman/Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate even as far as China.
For a thousand years Antioch (formerly in Syria until it was incorporated into Turkey in the 1930s) was a western city, ruled by the Greeks, then the Roman/Byzantine Empire until its capture by the forces of Islam in AD637. Antioch was the place, we read in Acts 11:26 that followers of Jesus were first called Christians. When I stayed in the Catholic Convent in Antioch with the amazingly dynamic, hospitable and inspiring Catholic priest, Father Domenico Bertogli in October 2015, there were less than 100 Roman Catholics and less than 1000 Orthodox Christians left in Antioch, a city once known as the Cradle of Christianity.
Not only have politicians in the west (with the notable exception of WE Gladstone the former British prime minster – more of him and his defence of Armenian Christians in a later blog) been ignorant or careless of the well-being of their brother and sister Christians in the east. Western church leaders have also often ignored the well-being of the eastern Christians; leaders of many of the reformed or newer protestant churches have often dismissed the eastern Christian churches as less than fully Christian; the worship traditions of the eastern churches are demeaned and their foundation stories are often dismissed as fanciful. Indeed, while I was working in Jerusalem this summer two important visiting evangelical protestants, having visited some of the ancient sites of Christian worship in the Holy Land, dismissed what they had seen as idolatrous “worship of the Golden Calf” as though the eastern churches were somehow rebarbative, morally defective in their faith. Yet these eastern churches were in many cases founded by tradition by Jesus’ Apostles five centuries before the See of Canterbury. They have been in existence for a millennium before the foundation of the Lutheran Churches, Southern Baptists, the Evangelical Alliance &c and have had to survive brutal persecution and sometime genocidal massacres the like of which we in the west have no experience save sadly for the Jewish people of Western Europe. The Armenian Church alone between 1915 and 1922 was subject to the genocidal massacre of over one and a half million of their people. Yet they, like other eastern Christian Churches (for example over half a million members of the Syriac church were massacred in 1915) have remained faithful to the traditions of their ancient churches.
At first my interest in the orthodox and other eastern churches was confined to reading. However, after reading William Dalrymple’s wonderful book From the Holy Mountain in 1997 and an encounter with an inspiring guide during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2005 I decided I needed to visit some of these ancient Christian churches and their historic sites, to learn something of their foundation traditions and meet their present members. I have been fortunate enough since then to make a further seven visits to the Middle East either on pilgrimage or Sabbatical and even to work as a locum priest.
James Robertson, a Church of Scotland divine wrote in 1864 “There may be too much hardness in rejecting traditions, as well as too great easiness in receiving them. Where it is found that a church existed, and that it referred its origins to a certain person, the mere fact that the person in question was as likely as any other to have been the founder, or perhaps more likely than any other, can surely be no good reason denying the claim.” This was an enlightened statement by a northern European protestant divine and advice I decided to take seriously in my encounters with the Eastern Churches that I came across and take seriously too their traditions about their apostolic foundations. I was always received with great hospitality, courtesy and encouragement by the bishops, priests and peoples of the eastern churches. One thing has remained clear to me, the Antioch Syriac Catholic Patriarch’s comments in 2015 that the earliest Christian churches continue to be ignored, abandoned or even betrayed by the Western countries and their leaders, both political and even religious in many cases, continues to be true.
The photograph shows Fr Domenico Bertogli, the heroic Catholic priest in his chapel at Antioch (in green stole) I am on far right
Wahabibi 