The Ark

They trace their lineage to the ancient Phoenicians & comprise the only Eastern Catholic Church with unbroken ties to Rome. They are Maronite Catholics.

Transcript

THEME

Rachael Kohn: They recognise the Pope as the head of the church, but the Maronite Catholics are from Lebanon.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and you're listening to The Ark on ABC Radio National.

Maronites in Australia are celebrating a unique event. The relics of three Maronite saints are making the rounds of this growing community of churches, which serve about 150,000 practising Maronite Catholics. I went to the church in Sydney to meet Father Peter Joseph and historian Peter el Khouri.

STREET SOUNDS, CROWDS

Well St Joseph's Maronite church here in Croydon in Sydney is all decked out. It's hosting the relics of three Lebanese Catholic saints, Maronite Catholic saints, and there are a number of people here coming to see the relics. The church is all decked out, there are banners, I think depicting the three saints, and of course the flag of Lebanon is flying in the wind as well as the flag of Australia. Let's go in.

Well this is a wonderful church. It's very bright and light and hanging right in the centre of it are three banners. Are they these three saints whose relics are here?

Fr Peter Joseph: We have St Charbel, St Charbil Makhlouf. He was a Lebanese Maronite monk. Opposite him is St Nemetallah Al-Hardini, who was a Lebanese Maronite monk who taught St Charbel for two or three years, and in the middle is St Rafka, which is the Lebanese form of the name Rebecca, who was a Maronite nun. And they all lived in the 1800s but St Rafqa lived also into the 20th century up till 1914.

Rachael Kohn: I think I read that St Charbel was the first Lebanese Catholic canonised.

Fr Peter Joseph: Right. Canonisation is proclamation of a saint by a Pope. The first one took place by a Pope in the year 1000, so say St Charbel was the first Eastern saint to be canonised by a pope. In 1977 St Charbel became the first to be so-called, so proclaimed by a pope, Pope Paul VI in St Peter's in Rome.

Rachael Kohn: And is it usual to have the relics of these three saints presented together like this?

Fr Peter Joseph: No, this is a unique occasion for Australia and for the world to have relics of all three saints placed together in the one casket and that's a unique casket because the casket is really a Phoenician boat. There's three boxes with bones of each of the saints within the Phoenician boat, and maybe Peter El Khouri could explain why we chose a Phoenician boat to symbolise the container for our Lebanese saints.

Rachael Kohn: Well Peter, that's your cue.

Peter El Khouri: Thank you. There is a Maronite heritage, a racial heritage, linked to the ancient land of Phoenicia. There are other heritages that Maronites have. We understand that the major one would be the Phoenician heritage. The Phoenicians had a grand maritime fleet, they basically in effect ruled the Mediterranean and so the relics come to us in a Phoenician replica boat, and we think it's very appropriate.

And might I also add this would be probably in my readings, probably the only occasion, and I stand to be corrected, that an Eastern saint - let alone the three saints we have here - an Eastern Catholic saint has toured Western land. We have St Nicholas, better known as Santa Claus, who was taken forcibly I suppose, about 1,000 years ago to Bari in Italy and whose relics remain there, and we have St Mark in Venice whose relics were taken from Alexandria in Egypt. So there has been a history of Western Christians taking the relics of Eastern saints. So this is a very, very special occasion of once in two millennia.

Rachael Kohn: Undoubtedly that's why there are so many people here. Now tell me about St Maroun, who the Maronites are named after. I believe his relics, or his relic, is also to be found actually in Italy.

Peter El Khouri: That is correct. St Maroun died in about 410 and was a hermit living in the open air in what is modern day northern Syria. He was the first religious person basically to live in the open air.

Prior to St Maroun, we had St Anthony the Great, but he lived in a cave in a cell. And when the Crusaders arrived in Lebanon, the Maronites were in their haven in the mountains, and there's a history behind that. Many hundreds of years of escape from Islamic persecution. And when the Crusaders arrived, the Maronites came down and congratulated them and showed them the way to Jerusalem.

Now the Crusaders did not believe that there were any Catholics left in the East, and the Maronites can lay claim to be the only Eastern church which has unbroken loyalty to Rome.

Rachael Kohn: How did they manage to maintain that? Because I believe there was some few hundred years of separation to some extent.

Peter El Khouri: Yes, well when the Crusaders arrived, they didn't accept that the Maronites were Catholic. They refused to believe it. It took a process of about 100 years from 1098 to about 1182 before Rome acknowledged that yes, the Maronites are now Catholic, and it's quite complex. But in 1132 the Maronites gave the only surviving relic of St Maroun to the Crusaders, who then took them back, an Italian abbot took them back to an area in Umbria and his remains have been there since.

Fr Peter Joseph: In Fuligno.

Peter El Khouri: No, well he didn't take them back to Fuligno, but they're there in Fuligno now, and there are two towns in Italy which have St Maroun as their patron saint. In the year 2000, a part of the relics of St Maroun were given back to the Maronite church in Lebanon.

Rachael Kohn: Father Peter, the Latin rite is the rite we associate with Rome of course. What language is the liturgy of the Maronite church in?

Fr Peter Joseph: Traditionally the language of the Maronite liturgy has been Syriac or Syro-Aramaic, and many people who saw , the film, heard Aramaic, probably for the first time in their lives. And that's the language that Jesus himself spoke, and that's the language which is always retained in the Maronite liturgy at the two approaches to the altar that the priest makes when he chants as he approaches the altar, when he says the trisagion, a prayer to the thrice-holy God asking for mercy. And the words of consecration, the consecration of the bread and the wine, are always chanted in Syriac.

The other parts of the liturgy we will do in Arabic or in English or in whatever is the local language where the Maronites are. So in Australia we use a lot of English, probably half of our masses are conducted mainly in English, the other half mainly in Arabic, with those Syriac parts.

Rachael Kohn: There are other differences. I think the one that springs to mind is that Maronite priests can be married, is that the norm?

Fr Peter Joseph: In Lebanon, about half the priests are married, and that means, and it always means that they're married before they become priests. Once a man is ordained a deacon and a priest, he cannot marry, but a married man is eligible to become a priest, and this has been the Maronite tradition from the first centuries as far as I am aware.

Peter El Khouri: In the whole Eastern tradition, the Eastern church tradition.

Fr Peter Joseph: In Australia the number of married priests among the Maronites is very low. It certainly works much more easily in the villages where people live and die spending their entire lives in the same one village. In my own home town, my grandparents' village in Lebanon, there's about nine priests, eight of whom are married, so there's nine priests in the one village, and I think they rotate month by month as to who runs the parish. But in the Eastern tradition, it's true, you've always had the tradition of celibate priests alongside married priests, but bishops have always been celibate priests, and generally for that reason they picked monks to become bishops.

Rachael Kohn: I think the Maronite church is referred to as a monastic church? What does that mean?

Fr Peter Joseph: I suppose Peter could explain better how the Maronite church grew up more around monasteries and the original monastery of Beit Maroun, Maroun House, is I think the place after which the Maronites got their name.

Peter El Khouri: Shortly after St Maroun's death, because he was well known for his miracles, the Byzantine Emperor, Marcian, in 452, built a large monastery in the name of St Maroun, and this monastery then became a headquarters for all other monasteries in the region of northern Syria and probably extending to Lebanon and down to Arabia 200 years prior to the birth of Muhamad, and they held, Beit Maroun the headquarters, held firm to Catholic doctrine. And so with the schisms that were taking place in the Eastern churches, Beit Maroun held to the orthodox Roman way and therefore the Maronite church was not a deliberate act that happened to be the only ones left, who they say, were united with Rome, and that's how the Maronite church evolved, not deliberately or intentionally.

Rachael Kohn: Father Peter, what's this music that we're hearing?

Fr Peter Joseph: This hymn is known as, O Mother of God. It's an ancient hymn, written I think originally in Aramaic, and it's a very popular hymn to the blessed virgin Mary often sung at the end of mass at funerals or at Marian devotions.

Rachael Kohn: Relics are associated with miracles, certainly these three individuals became saints, probably because there were miracles associated with them. Are people coming here in the hope of experiencing a miracle in their life?

Fr Peter Joseph: I think some people certainly who have great needs for themselves or their own family members would be praying for a miracle, especially for people with disabilities or sicknesses.

I saw at one of our churches at St Charbel's a young boy with leukaemia whose parents brought him to pray before the relics, certainly to pray for a cure. Just this morning an Indian woman visited here, my cousin was telling me, and she had gone past the church wondering what was going on, said a prayer to the saints, because her husband desperately needed work and five minutes later she was back again because her telephone had rung as soon as she got in the car and was driving away to say that her husband had received a job.

So sometimes people receive little favours and things which may or may not be miraculous, but certainly answers to prayer. And I suppose the Catholics look upon the saints as God's friends who pray to God on their behalf, just as you go to a mediator or a representative or an intercessor to put in a word for you when you're going for a job or when you're asking for a favour, and that's the way we see the saints. They're our friends as well as being our heroes in the faith because they went the full hog, you might say, the love of God, the love of neighbour to a heroic degree.

But these three saints in particular have all been known for their miracles. St Charbel himself appeared in a photograph in 1950 in the middle of a photograph of a group of monks at the monastery where he lived and died, there he was in the middle of the photographs 52 years after he had died. And that photograph is often reproduced in books. St Rafqa, through her many people have been healed, even of blindness, and St Nemetallah, there was even a young baby boy who had died, who was placed on his tomb, who came back to life, and if I'm not mistaken it was a Druze woman who had placed this dead son of hers on the tomb of St Nemetallah and he had come back to life.

And St Charbel often performs miracles for Muslims. And we're happy to have these performing miracles for anybody, but as long as he doesn't forget us.

Rachael Kohn: Well where else will these relics be travelling in Australia?

Fr Peter Joseph: They'll go to all of our parishes. We have five parishes in Sydney and they'll also go to the church of Our Lady of Lebanon in Melbourne, the church of St Maroun in Adelaide, and the church of St Maroun in Brisbane, and the church of Our Lady of Lebanon in Wollongong. So all the 10 or 11 parishes we have will be visited, and in each place the relics are staying for three days.

Rachael Kohn: Father Peter Joseph and Peter El Khouri there at St Joseph's Maronite Church in Croydon, Sydney.

Next week on The Ark, the Angel of Mons, the ghostly protector of the British in the First World War. That's on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

SINGING

Further Information

Maronite Eparchy of Australia
A detailed website for the Maronite Diocese of Australia.

Visit of the Maronite Saints' Relics to Australia
You can find a calendar of events up until 13 November, the last day of the official visit in Australia, and details about the Relics.

Maronites Worldwide Online

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood