THE
P RTAL
April 2017
Page 6
“Talitha, qum” he said
Fr Mark Woodruff traces important links in Aleppo
I n 2004,
the Christians of Aleppo in Syria, 60 miles east of Antioch, were asked
to devise the services for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Their different
Christianities have lived together for two millennia, the descendants of the first to
receive the Gospel from the apostles’ activity out of the nearby metropolis. Here to this day are the heirs of
the once Greek-speaking ruling class, the descendants of the Aramaic-speaking populace, the Armenians
who projected the Roman Empire’s trade – and the Church - north into their heartlands in modern Turkey
and east to the Caucasus. Although their Churches later endured rivalries and estrangement, first in the
fifth century over belief about Christ’s humanity and divinity, and in the 17-18th centuries over allegiance
to which Church – Constantinople, Rome or others – offered the best prospect for survival in the midst of
fifteen centuries of Islamic subjugation, they held onto an insight that western Christianity learned only in
the twentieth century: what unites the Christians is greater than what divides us.
Those collaborating in 2004 included the two
Byzantine-rite Churches: the Melkites in communion
with Rome, and the Antiochian Orthodox Church. They
are co-descendants of the Greek-speakers for whom St
Mark’s and St Luke’s gospels were set down. Nowadays
both are bearers of a distinctively Arabic Byzantine
musical, artistic and intellectual patrimony. Also taking
part were the long-established Armenians, whose
distinctive rite belongs to a Catholic and an Oriental
Orthodox Church. There were Chaldean Catholics, too,
whose Catholicos-Patriarch of Babylon is centred in
Baghdad in Iraq, but whose people are scattered across
the world, like the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of
India, which belongs to the same “East Syrian” liturgical
tradition. Joining them were their non-Catholic fellow-
inheritors from the Church of the East, sometimes
known as Assyrian, and wrongly described as Nestorian.
There were also the Churches with apostolic roots but
also representing historical “West Syrian” monastic
renewal with monasteries still across Lebanon, Syria and
Iraq: the Maronite Catholic Church, the Syriac Catholic
Church of Antioch in communion with Rome (related
to the Syro-Malankara Church in India), and the Syriac
Orthodox Church of Antioch (which is in union with the
Coptic, Ethiopian, and Armenian Orthodox Churches).
This Christian solidarity, despite centuries of deep-
rooted differences, has been vital to endurance during
the ordeals of civil war and Islamist persecution.
Nine years after the 2004 Week of Prayer drew on
Christianity’s oldest wells, Ma’loula, one of only three
villages left where they speak Western Neo-Aramaic,
which is related to Christ’s own language, was overrun
by terrorists. Twelve Antiochian Orthodox nuns of
Mar Taqla (the ancient monastery of St Thecla), who
had stayed on to aid the dispossessed, were kidnapped;
three Greek Catholic men were martyred and a
large image of Our Lady was destroyed. The Melkite
patriarch, Gregorios III, set up an Aramaic school for
those fleeing south to Damascus, so that the ancient
culture with a direct link to the first century would not
be lost in the twenty-first. Father John Salter tells the
story of being on a bus in Damascus, and hearing an
Aramaic father telling his daughter to stand up and
give her seat to the priest: “Talitha, qum,” he said (Mark
5.41). In 2014 the nuns were released, and Mar Taqla,
and the Melkite monastery of Mar Sarkis (SS Sergius
& Bacchus, older than the Council of Nicaea in 325),
welcomed back the people to rebuild their community.
A new image of Our Lady of Peace was erected by
Catholic Melkites, Orthodox and Muslims together.
The Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo, Paul
Yazigi, and the Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan, Yohanna
Ibrahim, were also abducted in 2013, on a joint visit
to release hostages in Turkey. Metropolitan Paul’s
deacon was martyred and there has been no sign of the
archbishops since, although they are believed to be alive.
Truly, Pope Francis, following Pope Benedict and St John
Paul, observed that in the moment of martyrdom the
divided Christians are one: it is the ecumenism of blood.
In England, we have spoken much of an Anglican
patrimony to be cherished in the Catholic Church.
That Catholics and Anglicans share it now is a fruit
of four centuries of martyrdom, oppression and
estrangement: so it ought to be seen as a means of
contact and mutual pride, a bond, not a boundary. The
link between Church, rite, patrimony and communion
is something the East understands as a fact of life.
Their wisdom is the tradition from which we have
received. Next month in Eastertide we will look into
the beautiful West Syriac monastic and liturgical
tradition – shared by Orthodox and Eastern Catholics
alike – whose b