Editor’s note: Marylynn G. Hewitt was one of ten journalists from the United States and Canada participated in a tour of the Holy Land sponsored by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and it’s operating agency in the Middle East, Pontifical Mission, in conjunction with the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. The tour was in advance of the Synod of Bishops of the Middle East, Oct. 10-24, in Rome. The following is a log kept to document the trip.


By Marylynn G. Hewitt, SFO
Special to The Michigan Catholic

Holy Land -- We are welcomed, time and again, with warm smiles and the demitasse cups of sweet tea or darkly roasted Arabic coffee laced with cardamom. The custom is extended even when our group of 10 journalists from the United States and Canada – and all our gear -- seem to overwhelm small school offices and convent parlors. Tradition lives strong here and the stranger is still embraced with the customs dating back to Jesus’ time: a place to rest, a bite to eat, and something to quench the thirst.



We are here to listen to stories, to see the work of the Christians and the role of the Church in the Holy Land. This land is where our own faith is rooted. Christians now number less than 2 percent in the Palestinian territories and less than 3 percent in Jordan.

Part of the reason for our visit was to give a voice to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Here then is a glimpse into the lives of those we met and who shared their struggles, their lives and their faith.

Saturday, Sept. 18

We start out early in Amman, Jordan, meeting with Sr. Wardeh, a Franciscan Missionary of Mary. The convent courtyard rings with the laughter of children participating in an art project. Adults line a long outdoor hallway socializing. The sisters’ ministry of religious education expanded in 1996 with the arrival of Iraqi refugees. These days they offer Bible camps for children and a place for adults to socialize. Unlike Palestinian refugees, Iraqis only have “guest” status in Jordan, meaning they cannot establish residency, are not allowed to legally work, and do not qualify for any social services, including public education. The four sisters work hard to try to get children into private schools when they hear of an opening.

Thamera Hana, 46, left Iraq nine months ago with her husband and five children after “militants” tried to kidnap her husband. She said word got out that her brother worked as a translator for the U.S. Army and then the whole family was threatened. The sisters, she said through a translator, helped get most of her children into a school. The others will forgo an education.

The fact there is now “one generation with no reading or writing abilities” worries Fr. Raymond Moussali, a Chaldean (Iraqi Catholic) priest who founded Sacred Heart Parish in Amman in 2002. It’s just one of the problems those who flee their homeland face, says the pastor of 5,000. The families he pastors have faced kidnapping, assassination, extortion and bombed churches. They how have psychology troubles with families separated, divorce, lack of health insurance along with limited access to education. “I like to be the pastor of refugees,” he says. “It is important in this way as the people leave everything and find a new way. Remember Abraham? He lost everything. We lost everything.” He says he hopes the synod “will open eyes” of those in other countries to the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

At dinner we meet with Bishop Selim Sayegh, Latin Patriarchial vicar, and Archbishop Yaser Al-Ayash, Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop of Petra, Philadephia and all Transjordan. As talk turns to the synod, Bishop Sayegh says a very important issue will be “How to help people live their faith and to bear witness of Jesus Christ in their society.” The numbers of Christians are not diminishing, he says, but percentages are. He gives the example that in the 1940s, the 30,000 Christians in Jordan were 10-12 percent of the population. Now, “we are almost or less than 3 percent, but we are between 160,000 to 180,000.” What’s happened? “I will give you an example,” he says, “In the family book (for the Muslims) they put a place for 18 children and four wives. Meanwhile, Christian people now have two, three, maybe four or five children.”

Sunday, Sept. 19

In Smakieh, a rural area outside Amman, referred to Moab in the Bible, we gather for the Divine Liturgy at SS. Peter and Paul (Melkite) Church, in this Bedouin (shepherd) village. At one point during the celebration, a woman walks to the front with her 40-day-old baby who is presented to Archbishop Al-Ayash in a custom dating back to Jesus’ presentation in the temple. After gathering around the altar table, we move into the hall for a traditional mansaf meal of goat, rice and toasted slivered almonds – eaten by hand while standing around the table. It is noted that we are guests of honor since the head of the goat is placed in the center of the platter.

After a quick visit to St. Joseph Church in Ader, we travel up into Kerak to the 38-bed Italian Hospital, operated by the Comboni Missionary Sisters. Sr. Alesandra, 47, is the administrator and hopes that someday soon they can increase their dialysis center from four chairs to 15. Kidney disease is a “big problem here because of the dirty water.” Enlarging the maternity area, in which 1,000 babies are born a year, is also something needed, she says. As in many parts of the Middle East, members of the Church minister based on need, not creed. Here is one such place, where many of those who visit the hospital are Muslim. Dr. Fawaz Sawadbeh, a Christian, points out that “minimum family here is seven to eight children” per woman. Sr. Madelin Vergis, CMS, hospital matron, says there are “many times” where different wives of a man give birth on the same day. There have also been times, she says, where a mother and daughter give birth on the same day. “They start here very, very young – maybe 14.”

Monday, Sept. 20

We arrive early at the Mother of Mercy Clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp inside the city of Zerqa where the population approaches 1 million. The Iraqi-based Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena serve approximately 30,000 women and children annually, 99.99 percent of whom are Muslim. The prenatal and neonatal clinic is located on in the grounds of St. Pius X parish, which also boasts a Catholic school.

This is the first day at the clinic for Sr. Maryan Khume, 30, who has just left Fraser after living with the Adrian Dominicans for 2 1/2 years and working with people with no insurance at Henry Ford Hospital. As women and children line the halls awaiting vaccinations and learning about the prevalence of asthma, Sr. Khume takes a moment to talk about life as a sister in her native Iraq. “They bombed our motherhouse in Mosul,” she says and remembers running out screaming. “I don’t want to remember.”

We then travel to Madaba, south of Amman, to a site where many pilgrims stop to see the 6th century Byzantine mosaic map in St. George (Greek Orthodox) Church showing Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. Madaba is also the hometown of Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal of Jerusalem.

Suha Kahwaji, principal of St. George School, explains that even though it is a Christian school, “In Jordan we have to teach the Muslim curriculum (for religion) for Muslims only.” Three days a week, the 1,300 students (K-12) are separated by faith to learn about their own religion. “We see them as leaders for the next generation and so this is why we work with everybody,” she says. While the “weekend” in Jordan is Friday and Saturday, since this is a Christian private school, students are off on Fridays and Sundays, making Saturday a school day.

In the waning hours of the afternoon we pass a roadside caravan of camel, goats and a donkey as we approach the King Hussein /Allenby Bridge, leaving Jordan and traveling to Jerusalem. Here, life is more complicated as Palestinians live in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, much of it sectioned off by the Israeli security wall, and where travel between checkpoints adds to the daily struggle.

Tuesday, Sept. 21

The Franciscan friars established Terra Sancta School in 1645 and offering an education these days comes with it’s own hardships say Franciscan Fr. Simon Hero, the director, and Yousef Nasrawi, educational counselor.

There are 400 boys at this school, 70 percent Christian, 30 percent Muslim. Terra Sancta School for girls, run by the St. Joseph Sisters, also has 400 students, 80-82 percent Christian and 18-20 percent Muslims. Combined classes meet for the final two years of high school.

Nawrawi says attempts to add a floor to expand have been turned down by the Jewish municipality saying it would “disturb the view. But in the Jewish quarter, they can build seven stories.” He says they have been told they could get the license to build outside the Old City, but “We don’t want to evacuate the Old City from its Christians.” Getting textbooks, which are printed in Ramallah, is another problem since they are often not permitted through the Israeli-run checkpoints. As a result, they resort to smuggling them in small cars.

“It’s politics from both sides,” says Nasrawi who notes a Jewish settler family taking up residence the end of the school yard, clearly in the Christian Quarter. “The Palestinians, frankly, they want an Islamic state, which will put us as Christians in a very embarrassing situation. And Moamar Khadafi once said about Lebanon when Lebanon was in a civil war, he said it’s better for Christian Lebanese to become Muslims and they will live peacefully. And this is the same. The fanatics want an Islamic state, not a Democratic one. The Israelis want a Jewish state.”

“As a religious,” says Fr. Herro, “we should always have hope. And hope comes from God.”

We walk deeper into the Old City, nearing Holy Sepulcher, to visit the Good Samaritan Elderly Center. Raja Salameh started the center in the Christian Quarter in 2001 as a gathering place for the elderly to play cards, work on projects and get medical attention. The center serves 450 of the elderly who live rent-free in the small one-room apartments owned by the Catholic Church. While many families have moved outside the Old City for larger apartments, those who have lived here for decades want to stay in their homes. The center is open six days a week and provides lunch to those who visit as well as the homebound. Rizekallah Bahbah, 70, is playing cards with three friends and says he stays in the Old City because “I was born here.”

A few blocks away, we meet with Bishop Munib Younan, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land and newly elected president of the Lutheran World Federation, who speaks about the plight of Christians in the Holy Land and the hope for ongoing peace talks. “I believe and I pray that politicians would now see that if they don’t get an agreement in these days, in the next year, we are afraid that we moderates would have no more role in the Middle East. We are afraid that the Middle East would be hostage to extremism, fundamentalism, fanatics.” He says, “those of us who are speaking on dialogue, speaking moderately, they nowadays seem to be a minority in our societies.” As a Christian, he says, he knows “peace is possible, justice is possible, reconciliation is possible.”

We meet with Bishop William Shomali, Latin Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem, in the Latin Patriarchate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The fate of this city is a “very crucial point” in Palestinian and Israeli negotiations, he says. “If they find a solution for all the problems between Palestinians and Israelis and Jerusalem remains outside any solution, it means everything will fall down and negotiations will be a failure.

“According to the ideology that Israelis have, Jerusalem and all the Holy Land is the land of Israel. For this reason, Israelis don’t believe they occupy any territory belonging to others,” he says. The position of the Holy See is this, “First of all, Jerusalem should be an open city to all believers and faithful of the world to be able to come and pray here. Jerusalem should have for this reason a particular status since it is holy for the three monotheistic religions. Jerusalem should enjoy an international guarantee so that no one can handle the sort and the destiny of the city according to his own interest.”

Fewer Christians remain in the holy city, he says, noting that a 1922 British census showed one-fifth of the residents of Jerusalem were Christian. Today “we are only 2 percent” with Muslims accounting for 33 percent and the rest is Jewish.

Bishop Shomali notes that the first goal of the synod “is to strengthen the faith and the hope of the Christian community in the Middle East so that they find new reasons to remain where they are and not to leave out of fear of the country where they live.”

He proudly notes that the Church is in the process of building housing for 80 families to help keep a Christian presence in the holy city.

Wednesday, Sept. 22

It’s a rare rainy morning as we make our way through the checkpoint and enter Bethlehem. Our first visit is to the Ephpheta Institute, established by Pope Paul VI and operated by the Sisters of St. Dorothy. Mark 7 tells the story of Jesus healing a man who was deaf by putting His fingers into the man’s ears, spitting and touching the man’s tongue and then saying “Ephphet,” which means “be opened.” Sr. Pierluigina Carpenado, director, through an interpreter, tells of their work teaching children who are deaf and hearing impaired to speak and to learn lip reading. There are currently 148 children in the program, all of whom are Mulsim. Twenty-two of the girls board at the school, which teaches children from 1 year to 17. Deafness is a growing problem among the Muslim Palestinians, Sr. Carpenado says, because of intermarriage. The security wall has only increased the problem “because people can’t go out so they have to stay here and get married.”



In the shadow of the Church of the Nativity, the birthplace of Jesus, we visit Sr. Sophie Boueri, a Daughter of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, at the Creche, an orphanage and daycare center. She and her volunteers work with police to take in abandoned babies and she also works to help let women know about the problem of spousal abuse. Unless there is documentation otherwise, any abandoned baby is assumed by the government to be Muslim. “In Islam, there isn’t anything like adoption like in European countries,” she says through an interpreter as the Muslim call to prayer rings out from a nearby mosque. Without adoption, children can live in situations similar to foster care and the family “has the right whenever they want to send the child back.” There are 48 babies living at the Creche with 65 more coming daily for child care. Sr. Sophie mourns those children she can’t help because of the checkpoints and separation wall. “Little babies (abandoned) lose their lives because we can’t reach them,” she cries.

At lunch at Bethlehem University, operated by the De La Salle Brothers, we are paired with students to hear their stories. Najib Kasbary, 19, says growing up Palestinian in the West Bank means he never experienced a “normal childhood.” The sophomore studying business administration says “when I was younger I remember the curfews, checkpoints, Israeli soldiers shooting. When you are 10, 12 you don’t think about getting a new bicycle or getting a new video game.” How does he know that other children around the world would think about bikes or video games? “From the TV.”

We meet with Diana Muburak, a social worker, at the Ala’iya Schol for the Blind in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. She speaks about her years working in social ministry and says, “We feel we are prisoners in our city. No place is open for us.” She says immigration is “the most serious problem that faces the Christian here.” And the impact if Christians leave? ”First of all it’s not good for Palestine to be Palestine without the Christians. … The value of Palestine is Jesus. But these buildings, these churches, these holy lands without the Christian, without the people, how much can it be worth? I don’t know. … So the Christians must keep the land here, must stay here, not to be stranger in another country. This is his family, his life, his future.”

At dinner that night, Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh, a medical doctor, talks about the impact of immigration on the Christian population. Before 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, 92 percent of those who lived in Bethlehem were Christians. “Now we are 35 to 40 percent. This is due to the occupation, due to the wars, due to the frustration of living under occupation. This is what our Christian brothers and sisters on the outside should know. We as Christians, we are the living stones in the holy places.” Bethlehem is one of 10 cities in Palestine where the mayor is to always be a Christian. Nazareth, Taybeh and Beit Jala are among the others.

Thursday, Sept. 23

Schoolyard soccer games are in full swing when we reach the Latin Patriarchate School in Reineh in Galilee. The school was founded in 1878 during the Ottoman-Turkish occupation and now hosts 1,100 K-12 students. Fr. Elias Odeh, the parish priest, says Christian schools, even with a Muslim majority, are a benefit “because of education and this contact with the parents, the families, the teachers. The tension is not so strong as a place where there is no Christian school. We can live peaceful” because of the shared life of the school. Not only is the school shared, but for 25 years, Fr. Odeh was the pastor of the Latin Rite as well as the Greek Melkite parish, “with the permission of the bishops.” When he arrived in this village in 1970, there were 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom were Christian. Now the population is 18,000 and the Christian population is less than 20 percent. He says, Christians and Muslims in Israel “share the same difficulties because officially we are all Arabs and Arabs suffer from discrimination.”

On our way to Haifa to meet with Greek Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour, we stop at Mar Elias College in Ibillein, which he founded.

Archbishop Chacour greets us in his office, which is just beyond the Mediterranean Sea, and makes sure we’ve been served coffee before he sit down. He talks about the upcoming synod saying it is important that the “voice of the Church will be able to go beyond the borders of Galilee or the Middle East, but to reach the large Catholic church. So far we are the ignored Church minority in the world.” He is the author of “Blood Brothers,” the story of his own family’s plight during and following the 1948 War.

Archbishop Chacour said he hopes to convey this message during the synod: “There are Jews here, but Israel is also Palestinian. And Palestinians are not only Muslims, they are also Christians.” He says that while we there needs to be respect of the holy sites such as Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem or the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, “we have to be aware that the least among the Christians here is much more important than all the holy shrines together.”

He adds, “I will just cry in the presence of the international Catholic church (to) please be aware that if there is any Christian left in the Holy Land, it’s not because of nationalism or because of land or because of power. Our homes have been destroyed. Our lands confiscated. The story of my village is very well known. The reason why I stay here is because we have a mission and a responsibility. A mission to speak out clearly, without any ambivilance, the story of our Jesus, the man from Galilee. He has been tortured, He died and He has risen!”

We end the evening with a tour of the House of Grace run by Jamal Shahade’s family. Just after his parents were married 28 years ago, they started taking in those who were eligible for early release from prison. These days, they have seven former prisoners living in the family home who perform community service. The family also offers education programs and open their doors after school to the youth.

Friday, Sept. 24

After a meeting in with members of the PLO negotiations support unit at Holy Family Parish in Ramallah, we head to Taybeh, the last Christian village in Palestine. This is the village known as Ephraim in the Bible (John 11:54) and the place were Jesus withdrew to pray just before the Jewish Passover before He was handed over to be crucified.

David Khoury, who lived in Boston for more than 30 years and returned with his wife Maria in 1995, was elected the mayor of Taybeh in 2005 and is working at bringing tourism to the area. Unlike other once-Christian villages, he says Taybeh was able to stay Christian because our great-grandfathers held the land “and I feel this is something we should treasure.” Renovation of the old city and a roads project are now under way. He also helped put Taybeh on the map when his family established – Taybeh Brewing – the first microbrewery in the Middle East. We take a tour – and of course must sample the product.

We travel back to Jerusalem for our final dinner and are joined by Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, director of ecumenical and foreign relations for the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate, and Fr. Antonios Al-Orshaleme, general secretary of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchiate. We eat in the Armenian Quarter (the other quarters are Jewish, Muslim and Christian) and Archbishop Shirvanian reminds us we that the area we are in is the top of Mount Zion. The Armenians have had a presence here since the 4th century. Archbishop Shirvanian says that in 301 Armenia became “the first nation that accepted Jesus Christ as our savior.”

Today, he says, there are a number of ways the 13 denominations of Christian churches in Jerusalem are working together. “Whenever we have problems common to all the denominations, the leaders of the churches get together to discuss the problems and to take steps. For instance, in the last intifada, a number of times our church leaders issued statements condemning violence on both sides, the Israeli and the Palestinian side.”

Archbishop Shirvanian also spoke about an interfaith project with the leaders of the three monotheistic religions – Christian, Muslim and Jewish. A council is working on revamping text books “with the hostile references to be taken out of the books so the children will not be brainwashed by incitement, but rather by they should think of a peaceful coexistence together.” He adds, that is “another important example of what Christian churches are doing in this country quietly. The politicians may make a big noise about negotiations, but we are working quietly to seek peace.”