Monks, nuns, and tourists in Bethlehem yesterday prayed at the Church of the Nativity, which stands on the site traditionally believed to be where Jesus was born. Many fewer Christians are making the familiar Christmas pilgrimage this year. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
West Bank town's economy suffers without tourists
By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent | December 24, 2006
BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- Victor Batarseh, the mayor of Bethlehem, looked around the famous piazza outside the Church of the Nativity and sighed. The hordes of Christmas pilgrims who used to flock to the birthplace of Jesus at this time of year were nowhere to be seen.
"This is the saddest Christmas," Batarseh said. "As you see, Manger Square is empty."
The worsening times have inspired some creative measures: The Catholic Church has built housing in Bethlehem to keep Christian residents from fleeing, and a local businessman turns into a secret Santa each Christmas to spread cheer to poor families.
Before the intifadah, or Palestinian uprising, 50 buses a day used to make the 3-mile drive from nearby Jerusalem, bringing thousands of tourists who thronged the church, the souvenir shops, and the restaurants at peak periods. The dollars from the religious pilgrims fueled a thriving trade in religious figures, Nativity scenes, pendants, and jewelry .
But after six years of the uprising and Israeli military incursions, the tourists have disappeared and Bethlehem's economy is in ruins.
The town is now almost encircled by Israel's separation barrier, which Israel says is needed to stem the flood of Palestinian suicide bombers in the country. Palestinians say it has strangled Bethlehem's livelihood, cutting off the town from Jerusalem and deterring all but the most determined visitors.
A fragile cease-fire last year encouraged some tourists to return to the town, but last summer's war in Lebanon drove most of them away, and the eruption of deadly clashes between Fatah and Hamas further discouraged visitors. As the tourist trade has dwindled, so too has the Christian population of the town. Fifty years ago, 80 percent of Bethlehem residents were Christians. Now, Christians make up less than 25 percent out of a population of about 30,000.
Emigration has soared in recent years, fueled by the continuing violence and economic crisis, and the feeling among many Christians that the Muslim majority in Bethlehem does not regard them as equals.
Five years ago, Carlos Satara was ready to leave Bethlehem. Recently married, he had no job, very little money, and a visa for Canada that seemed like a ticket to freedom.
But he stayed, thanks to a subsidized housing project built by the Catholic Church and a cash loan provided by a sympathetic local businessman.
"Now, it's still difficult but it's better than before," said Satara, 32, as he showed a visitor around the modern three-bedroom apartment where he lives with his wife and two small children.
His apartment complex, The Child Jesus, is one of several constructed in recent years by the Franciscan Fathers and Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem to give affordable housing to Christian families with no land of their own and little or no money, and help them stay in the country.
"We are living in a situation of struggle, occupation, and chaos," said Father Shawki Baterian, general administrator of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which has spent more than $10 million on housing projects in the West Bank. "We have no proper government. Sometimes the church takes the role of the government itself."
Hanna Siniora, a prominent Palestinian Christian and co-CEO of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, said the church's effort was vital.
"I hope it's not too late," Siniora said. "It's very much needed. It will help Palestinian Christians to stay in the Holy Land. We don't want to see our churches end as museums."
The church is not the only one helping residents in Bethlehem.
Last week, schoolgirl Myrna Siryani, 13, answered the phone at home and was surprised to find herself speaking to "Santa Claus."
"He spoke to me in Arabic!" the delighted teenager said. "He asked me what present I would like, and I said I wanted clothes, because I am too old now for toys. He's coming to our house. I'm looking forward to meeting him."
Over the weekend, dozens of Bethlehem's poorest children will receive the gifts they requested from the man in the white beard and red suit. But few people know the real identity of the Secret Santa of Bethlehem.
The effort is the closely guarded secret of a local businessman who in the past six years of acute economic distress has given away tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and loans to the most impoverished Christian families in town, according to recipients.
Santa's only regret, he said -- on condition of anonymity -- is that his own business affairs are so bad that this year he will be able to deliver presents to only about 60 children instead of the 150 he has helped in previous years.
In addition to his Christmas operations, the same anonymous benefactor has stepped in numerous times in recent years to assist Christians who have fallen on hard times.
"I believe that if a man needs food you don't give him fish, you give him a fishing rod and teach him how to use it," he said.
In pursuit of that philosophy, he has given out numerous loans to individuals to start businesses -- including a restaurant, a taxi company, a mobile phone outlet, and a clothing shop, according to people he has helped.
Carlos Satara says he and his family were among those who received a helping hand from the same man. Now they run a successful fast-food restaurant that has managed to stay afloat despite the town's economic woes.
AMID all the useless bloodshed of the Crusades, there is one story that suggests an extended clash of civilizations between Islam and the West was not preordained. It concerns the early 13th-century friar Francis of Assisi, who joined the Fifth Crusade not as a warrior but as a peacemaker.
Francis was no good at organization or strategy and he knew it. He accepted the men and women who presented themselves as followers, befriended them and shared the Gospel with them. But he gave them little else. He expected them to live like him: rejecting distinctions of class, forgoing honors of church or king or commune, taking the words of Jesus literally, owning nothing, suffering for God’s sake, befriending every outcast — leper, heretic, highwayman — thrust in their path.
Francis was not impressed by the Crusaders, whose sacrilegious brutality horrified him. They were entirely too fond of taunting and abusing their prisoners of war, who were often returned to their families minus nose, lips, ears or eyes.
In Francis’ view, judgment was the exclusive province of the all-merciful God; it was none of a Christian’s concern. True Christians were to befriend all yet condemn no one. Give to others, and it shall be given to you, forgive and you shall be forgiven, was Francis’ constant preaching. “May the Lord give you peace” was the best greeting one could give to all one met. It compromised no one’s dignity and embraced every good; it was a blessing to be bestowed indiscriminately. Francis bestowed it on people named George and Jacques and on people named Osama and Saddam. Such an approach, in an age when the most visible signs of the Christian religion were the wars and atrocities of the red-crossed crusaders, was shockingly otherworldly and slyly effective.
Symbolic gesture, Francis’ natural language, was a profound source he called on throughout his life. In one of its most poignant expressions, Francis sailed across the Mediterranean to the Egyptian court of al-Malik al-Kamil, nephew of the great Saladin who had defeated the forces of the hapless Third Crusade. Francis was admitted to the august presence of the sultan himself and spoke to him of Christ, who was, after all, Francis’ only subject.
Trying to proselytize a Muslim was cause for on-the-spot decapitation, but Kamil was a wise and moderate man, who was deeply impressed by Francis’ courage and sincerity and invited him to stay for a week of serious conversation. Francis, in turn, was deeply impressed by the religious devotion of the Muslims, especially by their five daily calls to prayer; it is quite possible that the thrice-daily recitation of the Angelus that became current in Europe after this visit was precipitated by the impression made on Francis by the call of the muezzin (just as the quintessential Catholic devotion of the rosary derives from Muslim prayer beads).
It is a tragedy of history that Kamil and Francis were unable to talk longer, to coordinate their strengths and form an alliance. Had they been able to do so, the phrase “clash of civilizations” might be unknown to our world.
Francis went back to the Crusader camp on the Egyptian shore and desperately tried to convince Cardinal Pelagius Galvani, whom Pope Honorius III had put in charge of the Crusade, that he should make peace with the sultan, who, despite far greater force on his side, was all too ready to do so. But the cardinal had dreams of military glory and would not listen. His eventual failure, amid terrible loss of life, brought the age of the crusades to its inglorious end.
Donald Spoto, one of Francis of Assisi’s most recent biographers, rightly calls Francis “the first person from the West to travel to another continent with the revolutionary idea of peacemaking.” As a result of his inability to convince Cardinal Pelagius, however, Francis saw himself as a failure. Like his model, Jesus of Nazareth, Francis was an extremist. But his failure is still capable of bearing new fruit.
Islamic society and Christian society have been generally bad neighbors now for nearly 14 centuries, eager to misunderstand each other, often borrowing culturally and intellectually from each other without ever bestowing proper credit. But as Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, has written, almost as if he was thinking of Kamil and Francis, “Those who are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faiths of others. ... There are, surely, many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit and each faith may need to find its own.” We stand in desperate need of contemporary figures like Kamil and Francis of Assisi to create an innovative dialogue. To build a future better than our past, we need, as Rabbi Sacks has put it, “the confidence to recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference.”
May the Lord give you peace.
Thomas Cahill is the author of “Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art From the Cults of Catholic Europe.”
Virginia church representatives at a Dec. 17 meeting on their split from the Episcopal Church included Richard Crocker, left, of Truro Church. Chris Greenberg/Associated Press
Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, right, internationally known for his harsh stance against homosexuality, with bishops in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2005. George Osodi/Associated Press
By LYDIA POLGREEN and LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: December 25, 2006
ABUJA, Nigeria, Dec. 20 — The way he tells the story, the first and only time Archbishop Peter J. Akinola knowingly shook a gay person’s hand, he sprang backward the moment he realized what he had done.
Archbishop Akinola, the conservative leader of Nigeria’s Anglican Church who has emerged at the center of a schism over homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion, re-enacted the scene from behind his desk Tuesday, shaking his head in wonder and horror.
“This man came up to me after a service, in New York I think, and said, ‘Oh, good to see you bishop, this is my partner of many years,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh!’ I jumped back.”
Archbishop Akinola, a man whose international reputation has largely been built on his tough stance against homosexuality, has become the spiritual head of 21 conservative churches in the United States. They opted to leave the Episcopal Church over its decision to consecrate an openly gay bishop and allow churches to bless same-sex unions. Among the eight Virginia churches to announce they had joined the archbishop’s fold last week are The Falls Church and Truro Church, two large, historic and wealthy parishes.
In a move attacked by some church leaders as a violation of geographical boundaries, Archbishop Akinola has created an offshoot of his Nigerian church in North America for the discontented Americans. In doing so, he has made himself the kingpin of a remarkable alliance between theological conservatives in North America and the developing world that could tip the power to conservatives in the Anglican Communion, a 77-million member confederation of national churches that trace their roots to the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“He sees himself as the spokesperson for a new Anglicanism, and thus is a direct challenge to the historic authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” said the Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.
The 62-year-old son of an illiterate widow, Archbishop Akinola now heads not only Nigeria — the most populous province, or region, in the Anglican Communion, with at least 17 million members — but also the organizations representing the leaders of Anglican provinces in Africa and the developing world. He has also become the most visible advocate for a literal interpretation of Scripture, challenging the traditional Anglican approach of embracing diverse theological viewpoints.
“Why didn’t God make a lion to be a man’s companion?” Archbishop Akinola said at his office here in Abuja. “Why didn’t he make a tree to be a man’s companion? Or better still, why didn’t he make another man to be man’s companion? So even from the creation story, you can see that the mind of God, God’s intention, is for man and woman to be together.”
Archbishop Akinola’s views on homosexuality — that it is an abomination akin to bestiality and pedophilia — are fairly mainstream here. Nigeria is a deeply religious country, evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and attitudes toward homosexuality, women’s rights and marriage are dictated largely by scripture and enforced by deep social taboos.
Archbishop Akinola spoke forcefully about his unswerving convictions against homosexuality, the ordination of women and the rise of what he called “the liberal agenda,” which he said had “infiltrated our seminaries” in the Anglican Communion.
This view emanating from the developing world is hardly unique to the Anglican church. More and more, churches of many denominations in what many Christian leaders call the “global south,” encompassing Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, which share these views, are surging as church attendance lags in developed countries.
Bishop Martyn Minns, the rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, Va., who was consecrated by Archbishop Akinola this year to serve as his missionary bishop in North America, said Archbishop Akinola was motivated by a conviction that the Anglican Communion must change its colonial-era leadership structure and mentality.
“He doesn’t want to be the man; he just no longer wants to be the boy,” Bishop Minns said. “He wants to be treated as an equal leader, with equal respect.”
Even among Anglican conservatives, Archbishop Akinola is not universally beloved. In November 2005, he published a letter purporting to be from the leaders, known as primates, of provinces in the global south. It called Europe a “spiritual desert” and criticized the Church of England. Three of the bishops who supposedly signed it later denied adding their names. Some bishops in southern Africa have also challenged his fixation with homosexuality, when AIDS and poverty are a crisis for the continent.
He has been chastised more recently for creating a missionary branch of the Nigerian church in the United States, called the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, despite Anglican rules and traditions prohibiting bishops from taking control of churches or priests not in their territory.
“There are primates who are very, very concerned about it,” said Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the primate of the West Indies, because “it introduces more fragmentation.”
Other conservative American churches that have split from the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion, have aligned themselves with other archbishops, in Rwanda, Uganda and several provinces in Latin America — often because they already had ties to these provinces through mission work.
Archbishop Gomez said he understood Archbishop Akinola’s actions because the American conservatives felt an urgent need to leave the Episcopal Church and were unwilling to wait for a new covenant being written for the Anglican Communion. The new covenant is a lengthy and uncertain process led by Archbishop Gomez that some conservatives hope will eventually end the impasse over homosexuality.
One of Archbishop Akinola’s principal arguments, often heard from other conservatives as well, is that Christianity in Nigeria, a country where religious violence has killed tens of thousands in the past decade, must guard its flank lest Islam overtake it. “The church is in the midst of Islam,” he said. “Should the church in this country begin to teach that it is appropriate, that it is right to have same sex unions and all that, the church will simply die.”
He supports a bill in Nigeria’s legislature that would make homosexual sex and any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in prison.
The bill ostensibly aims to ban gay marriage, but it includes measures so extreme that the State Department warned that they would violate basic human rights. Strictly interpreted, the bill would ban two gay people from going out to dinner or seeing a movie together.
It could also lead to the arrest and imprisonment of members of organizations providing all manner of services, particularly those helping people with AIDS.
“They are very loose, those provisions,” said Dorothy Aken ’Ova of the International Center for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a charity that works with rape victims, AIDS patients and gay rights groups. “It could target just about anyone, based on any form of perception from anybody.”
Archbishop Akinola said he supported any law that limited marriage to heterosexuals, but declined to say whether he supported the specific provisions criminalizing gay associations. “No bishop in this church will go out and say, ‘This man is gay, put him in jail,’ ” the archbishop said. But, he added, Nigeria has the right to pass such a law if it reflects the country’s values.
“Does Nigeria tell America what laws to make?” he said. “Does Nigeria tell England what laws to make? This arrogance, this imperial tendency, should stop for God’s sake.”
Though he insisted that he was not seeking power or influence, he is clearly relishing the curious role reversal of African archbishops sending missionaries to a Western society he sees as increasingly godless.
Asked whether his installing a bishop in the United States violated the church’s longstanding rules, he responded heatedly that he was simply doing what Western churches had done for centuries, sending a bishop to serve Anglicans where there is no church to provide one.
Archbishop Akinola argues that the Convocation, his group in the United States, was established last year to serve Nigerian Anglicans unhappy with the direction of the Episcopal Church, and eventually began to attract non-Nigerians who shared their views. Other church officials and experts say Archbishop Akinola’s intention for the Convocation was to attract Americans and become a rival to the Episcopal Church.
“Self-seeking, self-glory, that is not me,” he said. “No. Many people say I embarrass them with my humility.”
Anyone who criticizes him as power-seeking is simply trying to undermine his message, he said. “The more they demonize, the stronger the works of God,” he said.
Lydia Polgreen reported from Abuja, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company (emphasis added)
The Spirit of Christmas: Bush banned from birthplace of Jesus Christ
Global Research December 26, 2006
"Their entry into the church will tarnish it as [Bush's] hands are covered in the blood of the innocent..."
The Spirit of Christmas consists in spreading Peace and Justice.
The Spirit of Christmas is when War Criminals are banned from the Birthplace of Jesus Christ.
In April 2003 at the height of the military campaign directed against Iraq, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem decided to ban President Bush and Prime Minister Blair from the birthplace of Jesus Christ.
"They are war criminals and murderers of children. Therefore the Church of Nativity decided to ban them access into the holy shrine for ever,"
"Their entry into the church will tarnish it as [Bush's] hands are covered in the blood of the innocent,”
The Church of the Nativity is under the authority of the Greek Orthodox church.
Of utmost significance, the US News media has not reported this story.
Spread the word to Church parishes in the US and around the World.
Unseat the War criminals.
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BETHLEHEM, April 01, 2003 (Online): The Church of Nativity, widely believed to be the birth-place of Jesus Christ, decided to ban entry each of the US President George Bush, his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw the privilege of visiting this sacred place, which is one of the holiest Christian shrines.
The move came in protest of "the aggressive war these leaders have waged against Iraq," top Clergy of the church said.
The Church Parishioner Father Panaritius made the decision public at a massive protest demonstration organized by Orthodox institutions in front of the Church of Nativity. "They are war criminals and murderers of children. Therefore the Church of Nativity decided to ban them access into the holy shrine for ever," the parishioner said.
- - - - - - - - - -
AMMAN, Wednesday, April 2, 2003 —
Parish Priest of the Greek Orthodox community in Amman, Economos Constantine Karmash, said Tuesday he fully supports the Church of the Nativity decision to ban a number of top coalition leaders from entering the house of worship.
The Bethlehem sanctuary issued a ringing reprisal Sunday of the coalition attack, going as far as barring US President George W. Bush, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw from entering church grounds, due to their “aggressive war on Iraq.”
“The priest in the Church of the Nativity has every right to ban Bush and his supporters since they have marred the teachings of Christ. Their entry into the church will tarnish it as [Bush's] hands are covered in the blood of the innocent,” Karmash told The Jordan Times.
The local priest went on to say that he felt the punishment was not enough. “We need a tougher one to eradicate evil at its very root,” he exclaimed.
The Nativity Church's parishioner, Father Panaritius, said during a rally organised Sunday by the Greek Orthodox community in Bethlehem that Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and Straw are “war criminals and children killers that will be banned from entering the church forever!”
Karmash explained that the banning was different from an official church ban, or “excommunication,” which requires a supreme church power. If this is done, the excommunicated are no longer considered members of the church and will not be provided any church services such as a marriage or funeral.
Bush and his supporters are not members of the Greek Orthodox Church, said Karmash, hence they cannot be subjected to an official church ban.
“We hope that their respective churches, which condemn the current war, will strip Bush and his supporters from their church rights so that they become ostracised from their church as they have become ostracised by the humanitarian and international community,” pointed out the priest.
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