In his Lenten message, announced today, the Patriarch Sabbah then dwelt on the subject of love: "There are many poor people among us. We are a poor Church, which receives, but we must not forget that we can also love and give. Our Jerusalem’s Caritas should become that of a Church which knows how to organise the love of its devotees, both rich and poor, to enable them to give". A re-education which, according to Sabbah, "teaches Christians how to live, even in need and poverty, the communion of the first Church of Jerusalem". But, to do this, warns the patriarch, "we must defeat individualism, move over personal views, to embrace the whole parish community. No one, within it, must remain in poverty and loneliness". "Love he concludes will ensure that our faith and our life of communion will not turn into forms of aggressive confessionalism or fanaticism".
