For a reconciled land

The Christians of Europe together with the Christians of the Middle East: the Churches of the European continent have promoted solidarity and support initiatives for the Christian communities in the Middle East and North Africa in this delicate transition period. In the past days father Duarte da Cunha, General Secretary of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE), was in the Holy Land with the Coordination of Episcopal Conferences of North America and the EU, a body that since 1998 has been holding annual visits to the Holy Land with the purpose of supporting and encouraging local Christian communities. SIR Europe, present through its correspondent, devotes ample coverage to the visit. Also COMECE (the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community) has promoted a number of initiatives to this regard: the last in order of time is a conference held in Lebanon with a group of MEPs. On this event follows the contribution by Msgr. Piotr Mazurkiewicz, COMECE General Secretary.On 18 and 19 November 2011, a group of MEPs from different European Parliament party groups organised the first top-level parliamentary conference on the theme “The future of Christians in the Middle East”. This was held on the premises of the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (Lebanon) under the joint patronage of the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch His Beatitude Beshara al-Rai, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, together with their counterparts in the Parliaments of Lebanon and other Middle East countries, with the support of COMECE and the eastern Churches. Lebanon had been chosen as the host country for this debate because – in the words of His Holiness Pope John-Paul II – “Lebanon is more than a country: it is a message of freedom and an example of pluralism for East and West”. In the conference discussions, participants from Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq repeatedly expressed their concerns that the “Arab Spring” might end up one day as an “Arab Winter”. In his opening speech, Mgr Beshara al-Rai said, “We fear that these changes may lead to confessional conflicts, the rise of even harsher regimes and a confessional division of the region”. To avoid this risk, “Christians, with all their friends here and elsewhere, must resist all attempts to define our nations and societies in terms of religious identity. We must clearly oppose Islamic exclusivity in the identity of our countries as much as Israel’s Jewishness”. That’s why Christians in the Middle East support the idea of a civil state as a solution for their region. “The Civil State, which establishes a separation between religious and political institutions without marginalising the former in public life, seems to provide the framework best suited to the circumstances in our countries”. What the Middle East Christians do not have is security, basic freedoms or recognition of diversity. Bloody attacks against Christians persist, and freedom of conscience “that is to say, freedom to believe or not to believe, to practice a faith alone or in public without any obstacle, and also the freedom to change faiths is still – except in Lebanon – far from guaranteed in our societies and is sometimes forbidden by law”. The number of Christian members of parliament is also very low. In these turbulent times, it is absolutely vital that Christians should be the missionaries of an exemplary society reconciled with its plurality, one which shoulders the duty of combating all forms of fundamentalism, fanaticism and xenophobia. Christians in the East are native-born nationals and thus constitute “an inseparable part of the cultural identity of Muslims. The same goes for Muslims in the East, who form an inseparable part of the cultural identity of Christians”.What does the future hold for Christians in the Middle East? Of course, two days of conference were not long enough to cover this question completely, but they did pro- vide opportunities for participants from both shores of the Mediterranean to forge connections. The reopening of the cathedral in Baghdad, where 58 people had been killed the year before, and the plans for Pope Benedict XVI to visit Lebanon, give further signs of hope to usher in the year 2012.