Title: The Cradle of
Christianity Faces a Diminishing Flock
Author: Rebecca Trounson,
Times Staff Writer
Publication: Los Angeles
Times
Date: March 22, 2000
Religion: Followers are
increasingly leaving Holy Land, drawn by the promise of better lives, jobs
abroad.
JERUSALEM--Sammy Kirreh
wistfully recalls a time when several hundred Palestinian congregants filled
the hard-backed wooden chairs of this city's Anglican cathedral each Sunday
morning. These days, in a scene reflected in parish after parish across
the Holy Land, barely 50 people--at least half of them tourists--attend
the weekly services, their voices echoing through a large, mostly empty
church.
"It's lonely for Christians
here now," said Kirreh, 39, who was baptized and married in St. George's
Cathedral, the Jerusalem church he still attends with his wife and two
young sons. "So many have left."
Two thousand years after
Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, Christians are a dwindling population in the
land known as the cradle of their faith. Although Christians have never
been a majority in the Holy Land, their exodus lately is so marked that
some churches here, once the heart of thriving communities, are in danger
of becoming Christian "museums," their elders predict glumly.
The weeklong Holy Land
pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II, who arrived in Israel as dusk fell Tuesday,
is intended in part to encourage and spotlight the local Christian communities.
But the visit will also underscore their diminishing strength: On Friday,
for instance, when John Paul is scheduled to celebrate Mass with 100,000
young people gathered on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee, at
least half of them will have flown in from other countries.
"When we have to bring
Christians in to hold such a Mass, it tells you why we worry that Christians
may eventually disappear from the Holy Land," said Bernard Sabella, a sociologist
at Bethlehem University who studies emigration trends among Christian and
Muslim Palestinians.
Sabella and other experts
fear that, within a generation or two, some small communities that number
only a few dozen families each--Syrian Catholics and Armenian and Syrian
Orthodox--will fade to insignificance here. But even the larger communities,
including Greek Orthodox and Greek and Roman Catholic, are watching anxiously
as young Christians steadily leave the land of their forefathers with the
promise of better lives, and jobs, abroad.
"We are very concerned
about the emigration of the Christian community," Latin Patriarch Michel
Sabbah, the leading Roman Catholic official here, said at a recent news
conference in Jerusalem's Old City. "We hope that one day, once we will
have peace, the emigration, if [it does] not stop, will at least be shortened."
Sabbah said he hopes
John Paul's presence will fortify the Christian community and affirm its
"role in the land." But many others say that not even the pope's visit
seems likely to stem the tide of departures.
That Christians are on
tenuous ground in the territory that now makes up Israel and the Palestinian
areas is attributable largely to the same factors that have made life difficult
here for Palestinian Muslims, various analysts say: decades of conflict,
political turmoil and economic uncertainty. Even now, a sputtering peace
process keeps the future unpredictable and job prospects limited.
Christian emigration
began around the turn of the century, in the waning days of the Ottoman
Empire, says sociologist Sabella, a Roman Catholic. It increased dramatically
with the birth of Israel in 1948 and the upheaval that followed, when thousands
of Christian and Muslim Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes.
The 1967 Middle East War and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip spurred more departures.
But the rate of emigration
among Christians is nearly twice as high as that for Muslims, Sabella says.
Christians have had more opportunity than their neighbors to leave and
have used their education in Western languages and their family connections
abroad as springboards for departure to the United States and Canada, South
America and Europe. Their exodus is also more evident, Sabella notes, because
of the relatively small size of their communities compared with the Muslim
majority.
Once they depart, very
few return.
"Every year I hear them
leave, [and] promise to come back, and they never do," said Father Thomas
Stransky, 70, the former rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for
Theological Studies in Jerusalem. "What does an engineer do here? What
does a chemist do here? I can't in good conscience tell them to go. But
in good conscience I can't tell them to stay either."
Around the turn of the
century, Christians accounted for about 13% of the population of what was
then called Palestine. Today, they make up slightly more than 2% of the
population of Israel and the Palestinian territories, according to Sabella.
And while today's Christian population of about 180,000 is 25% larger than
it was in the British-ruled Palestine of 1948, Sabella calculates that
about 234,000 Arab Christians have left since the creation of Israel later
that year.
Christian roots stretch
deep into the soil here, with many Palestinian Christians able to trace
their family trees back at least 400 years. Historians say some Christian
names, like that of the Siniora clan, a prominent East Jerusalem family,
can be traced to the Crusaders, European invaders who first arrived in
the 11th century.
But the years of instability
have taken their toll, giving rise to a community that is both shrinking
and aging. The average age of Arab Christians, about 32, is nearly twice
that of Palestinians generally, which is about 17.
"We go to many more funerals
than weddings or baptisms," said Cedar Duaybis, 64, a retired teacher whose
late husband served as the Anglican pastor of the West Bank city of Nablus.
Duaybis decries the departures of Christians, saying that each one makes
it harder for those who remain, but she acknowledges that two of her own
children have felt a need to emigrate. One son lives in Los Angeles and
another in Canada, she says.
In Bethlehem, which had
a large Christian majority until the century's midpoint, only about a third
of the population of 35,000 today is Christian. The city's private Christian
schools, including Catholic-run Bethlehem University, which was founded
in 1973 in an effort to stop the flight of young Christians abroad, have
a majority of Muslim students.
Nazareth, the northern
Israeli city where Jesus is believed to have spent his childhood, also
is now about 70% Muslim. Tensions over a mosque that Muslims want to build
beside the massive Basilica of the Annunciation in the center of Nazareth
have divided the two religious communities and frightened some tourists
away. Last Christmas, as the dispute simmered, only a handful of Nazareth's
Christians attended traditional holiday services at the city's churches.
A few Christians say
the tensions in Nazareth, along with an increase in Islamic fundamentalism
throughout the Middle East, have fueled anxieties among remaining community
members about staying put.
But most say their situation,
although difficult, is neither better nor worse than that of Muslims, either
in Israel or in the territories under the control of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian
Authority. Both Christians and Muslim Arabs face a variety of economic
and social problems in the Jewish state, where they hold citizenship and
vote but are ineligible for a host of benefits and jobs available to Jewish
citizens.
In the West Bank, Christians,
along with their Muslim neighbors, face high unemployment and other problems,
many of which are associated with Israel's continuing occupation of about
60% of the territory. Arafat's self-rule government is hardly democratic,
but Christians fare no worse under it than Muslims, most say. Many of those
close to the Palestinian leader are Christians, including his wife, Suha;
the director of his office, Ramzi Khoury; and his chief spokesman, Nabil
abu Rudaineh.
"There is no difference
in the problems we face here as Palestinians, either Christian or Muslim,"
said Manuel Hassassian, an Armenian Catholic who is vice president of Bethlehem
University. "These problems are political and economic, not religious.
But still, we hope the pope can help."
