Homily Notes (Fr Jean-Marie Van Cangh)
1. The importance of the oriental Christians (in whom Solidarité-Orient is interested) comes from the cardinal fact that it is they who passed on to us the Christian Faith. We must never forget that Jesus is a Jew of Israel, and that the Apostles were Jews of Galilee and of all Palestine, who preached the Good News to the Near East before they spread it in the West. It was the first Churches of Jerusalem and of Syrian Antioch, where they spoke Aramean, the language of Jesus, which passed on the faith to the West. The Apostle Paul who evangelised Asia Minor , Greece and Rome, received his first christian formation at Damascus and at Antioch of Syria, where they spoke a bit of Greek and a lot of Aramean, and where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 9,20-30; 11,22-26).
2. Solidarité-Orient carries on the former "Work for the Orient" set up by the Cardinal Lavigerie at Algiers towards 1860 at the same time as the Congregation of White Fathers. Its aim is to come to the aid of poor Christians in the Oriental Churches both in Asia and in North Africa. It is at the service of both Catholics and Orthodox, the latter being the more numerous in the Churches of Middle East. Our Work has been active in Belgium since the 1920s, thanks to Père Dumont (Benedictine), Mgr Edouard Beauduin, nephew of Dom Lambert Beauduin, the founder of Chevetogne, Père Serge Descy, ordained priest in the Greek Melkite Church, and Monsieur Christian Cannuyer, professor at the Catholic Faculty of Lille and director of our review.
3. Concretely we give help each year to an orphanage at Saïda in South Lebanon; the Syriac Christians at Mossoul in Iraq and at Qatna in Syria; the St Vincent de Paul Society in Jerusalem; a medical centre at Kerala in India; a coptic bishop in Egypt for irrigation works and a school; and we also try to respond the urgent needs as they arise, coming to us as 'SOS' calls. The work to which I am personally attached is the formation of young priests of the Oriental Churches at the Theology Faculty and at the Oriental Institute of Louvain-la-Neuve. Several priests of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, India and Russia have presented their licentiate or their doctorate in Theology or in Oriental Studies at Louvain in the course of the last 5 years . They will be able to develop their rich cultural and religious heritage to advantage in their own countries , where they will become seminary or university teachers. The religious culture of oriental Churches is immensely riche and still awaits a number of researchers to reveal it to the Western world which has such a need of spirituality and mysticism.
4. A word about history. The orthodox Church which we support includes both the Christians of the eastern Europe (Greece an Russia) who derive from the great schism of the East of 1054 (Michael Cerulaire) and also, particularly, all the Churches called pre-chalcedonian or ante-chalcedonian, from the Christological Council of 451 which defined the unity of the Person of Christ and the duality of his natures (human and divine). At Chalcedon , two theological schools each developed a different christology :
- The School of Alexandria with Eutyches, who is called monophysite (a single divine nature in Christ) which carries the risk of saying that the human nature of Christ is absorbed by the grandeur of his Divinity. Jesus would then be a God who did not entirely share the weakness and sufferings of mankind. To this tendency belong the Syrian Orthodox, often called Jacobites, the Copts of Egypt, the Ethiopians and the Armenians.
- The School of Antioch under the leadership of Nestorius, which insists so much on the human nature of Christ that it comes to deny certain prerogatives of his divinity. For example, Mary would no longer be Theotokos, the Mother of God but the mother of the man Jesus. The Passion of Jesus would have been experienced only by the man Jesus and the Son of God could not have truly suffered. This is the tendency of the Assyrian Church which developed in Persia and Mesopotamia (present-day Iran and Iraq) and which also has a catholic branch, the Chaldean Church.
The Christians of India, the "St Thomas Church", divided into two branches, the Syro-Malankar and the Syro-Malabar, historically belong to the (Nestorian) Assyrian Church, but for reasons to do with Portuguese colonisation, they were attached in 1653 either to the catholic Church with a syrian ritual (Syro- Malabar) or to the Syrian Jacobites who are monophysites (Syro-Malankar). In fact, nine denominations of church are coexisting in the South India today !
This short historical sketch is just to make the point
that it is time to end the quarrels of the past and recognise that
today we share the same faith in Christ, God and Man. In any case, we
must recognise that the Christians of the Middle East are our best
representatives if there is to be a constructive dialogue with Islam.
But what do we see happening ? Many Christians are fleeing their
homelands in search of better living conditions. At Jerusalem in 20
years the number of Christians has gone from 50,000 to 10,000 ! Unless
we give our energetic support to our Oriental brothers, they will have
disappeared and there will be no true dialogue with Islam and with the
Muslim world which is expending so vigorously.
5. If we are to love our brothers of the East , we have first to get to know them. I'd ask you first to subscribe to our review "Solidarité-Orient", 4 numbers a year for 10 EUROS. It's a gift ! Cheaper than a restaurant ! Once a quarter you will be told about a particular church of the East. The information is first-hand, thanks to the remarkable work of Professor Christian Cannuyer.
