An icon of St. Maron. The Maronite Church and the Holy See, 1600 years of ties
The installation of a statue of St. Maron on a facade of St. Peter's Basilica Rome, Wednesday February 23, spends the inextricable links between the Maronite Church and the Holy See.
The old ties that unite the Maronite Church to the Church of Rome will focus on Feb. 23 by the installation of a statue of St. Maron on one façade of the Basilica of St. Peter. The ceremony will be presided over by Pope Benedict XVI who, in so doing, gave precedence to a Maronite coveted by many. A Mass will follow, that will celebrate the Maronite Patriarch, Mgr Nasrallah Sfeir, in the presence of the Head of State, Michel Sleiman, and thousands of Lebanese that the world will converge on this occasion. The members of the Maronite Foundation in the world will, of course, at the forefront. The sculpture, installed on the road one takes to get to the dome of the basilica, will be around a statue of St. Gregory the Illuminator, the father of the Armenian Church. The Maronite Church has been described by the Orientalists as "a rose among thorns." The installation of the statue will crown a relationship which has some 1 600 years old. The relations between the Maronite Church and the Apostolic Roman are three dimensions, each covering a distinct historical epoch, says Abbot Boulos Naaman, a former senior Lebanese Maronite Order, one of the leading specialists in the history of the Maronites.
A foundation stage
The first step is the founder of the reports, but only on the dogmatic. It goes back to the Council of Chalcedon (451), which takes about 30 years after the death of St. Maron. This council was held to decide a controversy arose at the time on the nature of Christ. He maintained that Christ had two natures, one human and one divine, without confusion or division. A paradoxical definition including Jacques Maritain said, in The Peasant of the Garonne, it is "in aenigmate" and even "disproportionate to the reality it reaches, without limiting or understand." The definition still valid, was difficult to understand and some churches do not received. Others opposed it. Others defended it. This was the case of the Maronites - it was called "the people of Beit Maroun" the hermit - under an agreement reached between the dogmatic Pope Leo the Great and the fathers of the Antiochian Qorosh region (now in Syria ) who had attended the council, whose bishop, Théodoritos is also the only chronicler of the life of St. Maron. Therefore, and during the two centuries of theological and political wrangling that followed, the Maronite Church forged their own personality in the unreserved to the dogma of Chalcedon, in spite of the residues which their liturgy is then refined to the point that loyalty to Rome became their " hallmark, "their" golden rule ". These are links church, provides the abbot Naaman, which prevented the Maronites to freeze and allowed them dogmatically, instead, to open up to progress further theological, as in the cultural evolution of Western civilization. With the advent of Islam and the Arab expansion (634 to 640), quarrels and dogmatic policies disrupted the links between the Maronites and Rome. The Christian Arab tribes, Monophysite belief, Islam welcomed with open arms and s'aidèrent Persians against the yoke of the Byzantine Empire. They were, for centuries, as power struggles and infighting. It was then that starts the migration towards the Maronite Lebanese mountains. History will forget and do not quote more than the tenth century when a columnist, al-Massoudi, evokes the destruction of the great monastery of St. Maron, whom Pope Leo the Great had authorized the construction, and about three hundred shrines that around him. This destruction is the joint work of the Bedouin Arabs and the Byzantine Empire. Around 956, he left Syria a few scattered groups of Maronites. The bulk of this community is now in Lebanon. A historical ends, another begins with the early crusades first (1099), the Mamluk, perhaps the blackest of life of the Maronites and the establishment of the Ottoman Empire (1516) .
The building of the person
from this period dates the second dimension of relations between the Holy See and the Maronites. Father Naaman defined as those of the individual building. With the increasing visits of envoys from the Vatican to the Maronites, in particular those of John Eliano Hiéronimos Dandini, there is indeed an extraordinary scientific and social rebirth. It dates from this period to establish a true "bridge" between East and West, that the Maronites are the only first to cross, thus passing the "Middle Ages" to modernity. It was then that goes back, especially in the Lebanese mountains, the transition from the age of scribes to that of printing. In 1584, the printing of the Convent of St. Anthony in Kozhaya in the valley saint, starts working. Both schools of Ain Warka (Lebanon) and Aleppo are emerging. They swarm in every village and in every oak.
From 1584 date as the foundation of the Maronite College in Rome. Italy, France, Spain, to say scholar, it says "as a Maronite scholar." It is indisputable that the Maronites played at that time, an important role as a bridge between West and East, the abbot ensures Naaman because the trade was in both directions. While some thought it excessive borrowing of the Latin Church Maronite, but the encounter of civilizations made possible by this church will be singular decisive. By this time he provides, not without this project on the past, the Maronites learn a valuable lesson of all: that of making loans freely to Western modernity. Whenever they did, they were winners, "he said. And every time they accepted that the West makes choices for them, they were losers.
The construction of the Lebanon-message
The third dimension of the relationship between the Church of Rome and the Holy See is that of building the post-Lebanon, says the abbot Naman. This dimension, we owe to the genius ecclesial and human John Paul II, who helped the Maronites, and through them all Lebanese, to understand, to grasp their social relationships and even their political relations, so tumultuous, as the value of civilization. In so doing, John Paul II helped to open the Lebanese to their compatriots, they faced a doubtful fight the crime skirted too close to self-defense.
John Paul II was not the first to attract the attention of the Maronites on this point. Before him, John XXIII had also contributed to this awareness, but the great Pope was to crystallize the idea of perfection, this appeal to the Maronite church to see themselves as the guardian of the values of Lebanon as a "message of freedom and pluralism, not only for the East, but also for the West." And as a message of holiness. It was at John Paul II's canonization that has several large Maronite saints, whose statue of St. Maron, enshrined in the Basilica of St. Peter, is now the symbol par excellence. Since, in the light of this extraordinary momentum that has impressed him the Synod on Lebanon, the Maronite Church has seen its better anchor Arabic and Syriac Eastern roots. Towards the "message" released by John Paul II and Benedict XVI which is obviously true, a "new evangelization "Remains to be done. As stated so well a Pentecostal minister, David Duplessis: "God has no grand-son. "Faith is not a" legacy ", but appropriation. The effort of fidelity to Christ must be taken over by each generation
Fady NOUN
hilda.barhoum @ wanadoo.fr
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