Pope Francis To Visit Endangered Holy Land Christians – The Daily Beast

Jamie Dettmer, of The Daily Beast, writes:

The Vatican announced last week that Pope Francis will visit the Middle East in May, 50 years after Paul VI’s historic visit—but will any Christians be left in Syria to celebrate his arrival?

“Syria, Iraq, Egypt and other areas of the Holy Land sometimes overflow with tears,” Pope Francis said at a meeting last November at the Vatican with leaders from Eastern rite churches that have links with the Roman Catholic Church. In May, the Pontiff will have a chance to witness those tears firsthand in Jordan, Israel and the West Bank when he becomes the fourth pope since Biblical times to visit the Holy Land.

Pope Francis’s trip to Amman, Jerusalem and Bethlehem was announced last week and will mark the 50th anniversary of a historic trip to the region by Pope Paul VI. It was during that visit that Paul met with the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras to end officially the 900-year-long Great Schism between the churches of the East and West. But no one expects Pope Francis to pull off any historic reconciliation between Muslims and Christians—or even to be able to do much to bridge the vicious gap between Israelis and Palestinians. As the Pope has no divisions to field, all he will be able to do is to bear witness and to try to highlight the plight of Christianity in many of the Arab Spring states.

The announcement of Pope Francis’s Holy Land visit coincided with a depressing report from Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide. The group’s annual survey noted that the number of Christians killed for their faith doubled in 2013 from the year before, with Syria accounting for half of the documented 2,123 “martyr” killings.

The group acknowledged their count is “very minimal” and based on what they have been able to confirm. Other Christian groups put the annual figure in 2013 as high as 8,000 deaths with most coming in turbulent Middle East or African states where the majority religion is Islam.  Michel Varton, head of Open Doors France, told journalists in Strasbourg that failing states with civil wars or violent internal tensions were the most dangerous for Christians, citing Syria as the worst example.

“In Syria, another war is thriving in the shadow of the civil war—the war against the church,” he said. “Islamist extremism is the worst persecutor of the worldwide church.” That persecution in the shadow of civil war has seen a mass Christian exodus with Christian refugees retreading the steps of their persecuted forebears and fleeing into southern Turkey for sanctuary. The civil war has seen half-a-million flee—nearly a quarter of Syria’s Christians—with more arriving in Turkey and Lebanon each day.

And fears are mounting that the sectarian conflict to oust President Bashar al-Assad could spell the doom of Syrian Christianity, in much the same way as Christianity has been severely damaged in Iraq, where after the fall of Saddam Hussein, sectarian killings, persecution of Christians and an increasingly Islamist political culture propelled more than half of the Iraqi Christian population to flee.

Before the civil war, Syria had an estimated Christian population of 2.5 million with the Greek Orthodox Church accounting for the largest share. The country also contained Catholics and Syriac Christians as well as Protestants and adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East.

Christian refugees in southern Turkey tell of rapes, forced conversions to Islam and the desecration of churches. Several clergy have been abducted, including two bishops. One of the worst atrocities was reported in the autumn with the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Homs, Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh, accusing jihadists of killing more than 40 Christians during their occupation of the town of Sadad, north of Damascus.

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Pope Francis To Visit Endangered Holy Land Christians – The Daily Beast