 |
| Fr Paolo dall’Oglio SJ lived as a Christian
and worshipped among Muslims within the indigenous Syriac monastic tradition |
26 April 2014, BBC Magazine
A Dutch Catholic priest was shot dead in the Syrian city of Homs earlier this month, but who was he, and what was he doing there? Bethlehem-based writer Daniel Silas Adamson pays tribute to a
Jesuit who practised yoga, ran a farm and welcomed people of all faiths on mountain hikes.
No-one who knew Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch Jesuit priest murdered in Syria, was surprised by his refusal to leave the besieged city of Homs. He had spent almost 50 years in Syria and had been in Homs since the siege began more
than two years ago.
The last European left inside the Old City, he was sought out by journalists and became a spokesman for the trapped and starving civilian population. “I have learned about the generosity of the Syrian people,” he told a reporter earlier this year. “If these people are suffering now I want to be in solidarity with them. As I was with these people in their good times, I am with them in their pain.”
 |
| Fr Frans also lived as a Christian and worshipped among Muslims:
among people with disabilities, providing a place of meditation and encounter and through running a farm for all the community, Christian and Muslim, able and disabled. |
A few years ago, I met Frans at the residence in Homs where, on 7 April, he was taken into the garden by a masked gunman and shot in
the head. We were introduced by Paolo dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who also spent his life in Syria and has not been seen or heard of since he was kidnapped by Islamist rebels in Raqqa in July 2013.
In many ways the two men were similar. Both were Jesuits. Both spoke fluent Arabic and considered Syria home. Both had been shaped by the ideals of internationalism and social justice that influenced the Catholic Church in the 1960s. In Syria, far from the rigid hierarchies of the Vatican, Frans and Paolo each found the freedom to pursue an unorthodox vision of what it meant to be a Catholic priest.
Read the full article, with pictures and video here: