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Interview with the patriarch of Antioch Grégoire III Laham
We are the Church
of Islam
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Islam is our milieu,
the context in which
we live and with which
we are historically associated. We have lived 1,400 years
in the middle of them.
We understand Islam from the inside.
When I hear a verse
of the Koran, it’s not something foreign
to me. It’s an expression of the civilization to which
I belong |
Interview with the patriarch of Antioch Grégoire III Laham by Gianni Valente
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 | | Grégoire III Laham, Patriarch of Antioch of the Greek-Melchites | | |
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Grégoire III Laham, Patriarch of Antioch of the
Greek-Melchites since November 2000, certainly doesn’t lack the
energetic impetuosity that is the distinguishing feature of many patriarchs
and bishops of the Church to which he belongs. The kind shown by his
predecessor Maximos IV Saigh, who set the Vatican II Council alight with
his invective against “papolatry” on behalf of the
“Eastern cause” within the Catholic Church. The words of
Grégoire III at the Synod of bishops on the Eucharist, especially
during the hour of free discussion, did not pass unremarked.
Your speech to the Synod was exceptional. You spoke on
behalf of the «Church of the Arabs».
GRÉGOIRE III LAHAM: The Melchite bishop Edelby,
who was a leading figure at the Vatican II Council, would always repeat: we
are Arabs not Moslems, Eastern not Orthodox, Catholics not Latins. I add:
we are the Church of Islam.
That’s the same expression you used in your
speech. Did you want to scandalize someone?
GRÉGOIRE III: Islam is our milieu, the context
in which we live and with which we are historically associated. We have
lived 1,400 years in the middle of them. We understand Islam from the
inside. When I hear a verse of the Koran, it’s not something foreign
to me. It’s an expression of the civilization to which I belong.
Why did you bring it up at a Synod on the Eucharist?
GRÉGOIRE III: According to me, after 11
September, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities from
the Arabic world.
And why?
GRÉGOIRE III: Our simple existence ruins the
equations whereby Arabs can’t be other than Moslems, and Christians
but be westerners.
And who is that supposed to worry?
GRÉGOIRE III: If the Chaldeans, the Assyrians,
the Orthodox, the Latin Catholics leave, if the Middle East is cleansed of
all the Arabic Christians, the Moslem Arab world and a so-called Christian
Western world will be left face to face. It will be easier to provoke a
clash and justify it with religion. That is why I wrote a letter in July to
all the Arab rulers, to explain how important it is that this small
presence, 15 million Arab Christian scattered among 260 million Moslems,
not be swept away.
But the attacks and the harassment of the Christians
come from Islamic fundamentalists.
GRÉGOIRE III: The war in Iraq and the situation
in the Holy Land are mortal blows for the Christians in the Middle East.
Willing or unwilling, we end up being branded as a fifth column of the
West. But the strength of fundamentalism lies in the weakness of the
so-called Christian West. Fundamentalism is a sickness that gets loose and
takes root because of the void of the Western modernity, that uses
Christianity only as ideological cover. If Islam were really faced by a
true Christianity, welcoming, limpid, strong, capable of giving witness, if
the West were indeed animated by Christian spiritual strength, the
relationship with Islam would be one of interaction, of dialogue, fair
co-existence.
In short, according to you Islam is not the new empire
of evil.
GRÉGOIRE III: In what is happening in the Middle
East, beginning with Iraq, many things remain obscure. There are forces at
work seeking to sink us all in the apocalypse. Pope Benedict did well in
Cologne when he said that Christians and Moslems must be together in the
face of these violent groups that conceive and program terrorism to poison
our relations.
Let’s return to the Synod. When Cardinal Scola
said that priestly celibacy has a theological basis, you retorted.
GRÉGOIRE III: Priestly celibacy has an
extraordinary spiritual value that nobody puts in doubt. It expresses a
perfect giving to the Lord and has produced formidable fruits in the East
as in the West. I’ll say more: I’m not persuaded by the
argument of those who are asking for its abolition on the pretext of the
scarcity of priests. Even in the East, with married priests, we are
suffering from the same shortage of clergy. That said, I continue to
believe that the ecclesiastical celibacy is a question of discipline and
not of dogma.
But do you think that the hypothesis of ordaining
married men as priests in the Latin Church should also be taken into
consideration?
GRÉGOIRE III: According to me all the time
necessary should be taken to weigh the pros and cons. But the question
can’t be set aside a priori. And consideration should be given to a
new possibility of service in the Church, avoiding measuring the figure of
the married priest by the yardstick of the celibate priest, and without
bringing in the shortage of vocations. This way of doing has given fruit in
the East. One needs to look whether there is any benefit in proposing it
today in the West.
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 | | The dispute on the Sacrament, Raphael, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Museums | | |
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Cardinal Husar has proposed devoting the next Synod to
the Eastern Catholic Churches. Do you agree?
GRÉGOIRE III: It would be a good opportunity for
dealing from a new perspective with many important matters, such as child
communion, or the primacy itself. And for checking whether our traditions
can represent a wealth of solutions for the Latin Church also.
For example?
GRÉGOIRE III: For example, some people in the
West also would like the local Churches to be more involved in the choice
of bishops. It could be checked whether in our traditional practices there
are elements adaptable to the socio-cultural structure of the Latin Church.
But the Eastern Churches themselves are sometimes
troubled as regards the nominations of bishops.
GRÉGOIRE III: For a hundred and fifty years we
have elected our bishops without interferences from Rome, though nobody has
ever denied Rome the right to intervene, and to us the right to apply to
Rome. Simply, Rome doesn’t intervene de
facto. For all that time we have elected good
bishops. I don’t understand why we can’t do it now.
And when did all this change?
GRÉGOIRE III: The practice was changed by
Vatican II. It’s very strange. It’s strange that after Vatican
II, instead of there being more freedom and autonomy for the Eastern
Churches, the space has narrowed.
You once said: «With all respect for the
Petrine office, the patriarchal office is equal to it».
GRÉGOIRE III: Really I always say: I am cum Petro but not sub Petro. If I were sub Petro, I would be in
submission, and I couldn’t have a true frank, sincere, strong and
free communion with the Pope. When you embrace a friend, you are not
“below”. You embrace him from the same height, if not it
wouldn’t be a true embrace. Unita manent, united things last.
But do you mean to say that the link with the
Church of Rome is a bit tight on you?
GRÉGOIRE III: On the contrary! The papacy, since
John XXIII, is the most open authority in the world. In no other Church is
there such openness and such democratic praxis as in the Church of Rome.
But then there are those who want to appear as the super-Catholics, and
they then insist and always only on the sub
Petro and sub Roma. And so, according to me, they contradict the true sense of
the papacy itself, its office to confirm the brethren in the faith. We have
suffered for our communion with Rome. For a hundred and fifty years we have
said mass in the catacombs, in Damascus, because we were forbidden do it in
public because of our communion with the bishop of Rome. We’re more
Roman than the Romans! That’s why we want to benefit from this
communion as from a treasure, a gift, a help for our faith. As Saint John
says, our faith is our sole victory.
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