Search

THE PATRIARCHATE OF MAXIMOS MAZLOUM In the early nineteenth century the major problem facing the Catholic Melkite church was to find a way of dealing with the factions created by the activities of Germanos Adam. Patriarch Agapios II believed that a first, sure step would be better education for the clergy. A synodal decision of 1811 established a seminary approximately fifteen miles south of Beirut at Ἀyn Traz where a secular clergy might be formed. All parties in the church agreed that the seminary constituted a useful step, but the appointment of its rector renewed old conflicts, for Patriarch Agapios selected Bishop Maximos Mazloum for the post. Maximos Mazloum had been one of the protégés of Germanos Adam, who had ordained him, associated him with his family of clerics in Aleppo, and brought him as his personal secretary to the synod of Karkafeh where Germanos won his most important victory. When Germanos died in 1809, a majority on the Melkite episcopal synod chose Maximos Mazloum to succeed him, but the minority opposed to Germanos and led by Ignatios Sarruf of Beirut immediately challenged the election and appealed to Rome over the head of the patriarch. Their remonstrance won over a majority of the Catholic Melkites in Aleppo so that Maximos was unable to take possession of his see. The contest over Maximos' election occurred while Rome was in turmoil and the pope a prisoner of Napoleon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MARONITES DURING MAHMUT II'S SULTANATE For twenty-eight years of Mahmut's reign, from 1804 to 1832, Lebanese affairs were dominated by one man, Emir Bashir II Shehab, an adroit politician, able to maintain himself in power so long because he could combine political alliances with both the mountain chieftains and the Ottoman government. Though he professed himself a Druze he was suspected of being, secretly, a Christian. Bashir's political longevity stands in sharp contrast to the short-lived tenures of the Maronite patriarchs. Of these latter, Yusuf Tian, elevanted in 1796, resigned his office in 1809. He was followed by Yuhanna el-Helou, who was elected while Pius VII was still a prisoner of Napoleon and, though confirmed in the patriarchate, had to wait until 1814 before the pope could send him the pallium. By the time it came, Yuhanna had returned to the monastery of Qannubin, once the traditional residence of the patriarchate, which had been abandoned for several decades. As well as re-establishing the ancient residence, Yuhanna was of a mind to enforce the legislation against double monasteries which had been agreed upon at the 1736 council of al-Luwayzah; with Roman encouragement, he called a synod for 1818, and there the bishops once again agreed that men's and women's monasteries could not be placed side by side. Rome, of course, was delighted with the results and hastened to confirm a decision which reflected an almost-century-old church law. Any person not agreeing to the separation was subject to excommunication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ALBANIANS Ali Paşa's revolt against the central government in Istanbul was suppressed by the army of Mahmut II, and had little effect on the Catholic Albanians since Ali's power base was in the south, but when the last of the Bushatlis surrendered to the Ottoman army in 1831 all Albanian Catholics were returned to Ottoman political sovereignty. Most of the tribal chieftains continued to hold the loyalty of their subjects, but the clergy had more difficulty. The Englishman, William Hobhouse, passing through the northern mountainous area at this time, noted the growth of anti-clericalism among the people. This resulted from their fierce individualism, which caused them to resist clerical attempts to require exact fulfilment of church disciplinary laws. Hobhouse also observed that the only men in the country who did not carry rifles were the clergy, an omission quite unthinkable to Albanian men, who were always armed. Albania had an archbishop in Durrës and bishops in Lezhë, Shkodër and Pulaj. Lezhë was a town of five thousand served by a convent of Franciscans who believed the improbable tradition that St Francis himself had founded their community. Their convent was a site for pilgrimages and had been given the prerogative of ringing its bells. Certain northern Albanian tribes, the Clementi, the Doda, and the Mirdites, on whose mountain not a single Muslim lived, were still completely Catholic. Here stood the monastery of St Alexander, its abbot a man of great influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE STATUS OF THE CATHOLICS IN ISTANBUL In 1807, the year of Mahmut II's accession to the sultanate, Giovanni Battista Fonto was vicar of the patriarchate, with his residence at the Holy Trinity cathedral. In 1808 Bishop Fonto took a census of Ottoman Catholics in his jurisdiction and found a total of thirty-two thousand people: of these eighteen hundred were Catholics of European background and five hundred were Latin Arabs from Aleppo. The Catholic Armenians made up the bulk of the total, approximately thirty thousand in number. In his vicariate, forty-two Latin priests, almost all from religious orders, and fifty Armenian priests served the congregations. In 1814 Vincenzo Corresi, a native of Chios and formerly the archbishop of Naxos, became coadjutor to Bishop Fonto and in 1816 he succeeded to the office of vicar, which he held until 1833. After 1815 and the Congress of Vienna, the Catholic church enjoyed a more stable condition. Once more a French Bourbon ruled in Paris and his ambassador could return to Istanbul and represent, not revolutionary nor Napoleonic, but Catholic France. The first of these Bourbon ambassadors, the Marquis de Rivière, was instructed by Louis XVIII that: ‘He should especially take under his protection the Holy Places and all the Latin-rite institutions of the Levant.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE MARONITES At the close of the seventeenth century the Maronites numbered about seventy thousand people governed by a patriarch and a synod of seven bishops. French protection was provided by the consuls in Saida and Beirut who intervened on the Maronites' behalf with the Ottoman governor or the Druze chieftains. The major event in Maronite history at this time had been monastic reform instituted by three Maronites of Aleppo – ‘Abdallah Kar̔ali, Jibra'il Hawa and Yusuf El-Betn – in 1695. Their congregation, influenced by the Aleppan Jesuits, departed considerably from Maronite monastic tradition, and began to suffer from divisive argument over the extent to which Western models should be followed. The more nationalistic members under Kar̔ali left the monastery and established a new community, St Elija, where they became popularly known as the order of Maronite Aleppans. In 1700, the Aleppans received grudging recognition from the Maronite bishops. In 1705 the synod elected Ya̔lkub Ἀwad to the patriarchate – an unpopular choice. Many people, lay and clergy alike, found the new patriarch's leadership lacklustre. Eventually the faction opposing him gained the support of some Latin missionaries on Mt Lebanon, but Rome did not become aware of the patriarch's unpopularity until the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith received word that a synod of Maronite bishops had accused Ἀwad of several crimes, convicted and deposed him. The synod then chose an administrator, Yusuf Mobarak, to govern the church until a permanent replacement could be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE HABSBURG ADVANCE INTO THE BALKANS The Habsburg advance into the Balkans during the War of the Holy League precipitated several significant changes in the lives of Christians living there. Agents of the Austrian armies were anxious to get help from both Catholics and Orthodox, and when Belgrade fell to the Habsburgs, the Orthodox Serbs committed themselves to battle against the Turks only to discover that the Austrians could not occupy the region permanently. So, rather than face the wrath of the Turks, the Serbian patriarch, Arsenije III, and forty thousand families retreated with the Western armies into Croatia and southern Hungary. Arsenije, no friend of the Catholics, requested the Emperor Leopold to grant him jurisdiction over all Serbs in Habsburg lands. This, of course, brought him into conflict with the Catholic Serbian bishops and the Latin bishop of Zagreb. He gained a partial victory: the Serbs in Sirmium returned to Orthodoxy but those in Croatia remained Catholic. In Dubrovnik, where the citizens had struggled painfully to dissociate themselves from the war, Karlowitz was greeted with a sigh of relief. During the negotiations, Dubrovnik asked that a strip of Turkish-held land should separate it from any Venetian possession, and, to demonstrate loyalty to the sultan, the city at once resumed payment of tribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE FRENCH AND THE CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES At the close of the seventeenth century the Ottomans were at war with the Holy League led by the Austrian Habsburgs. On the Danube frontier the Turkish army suffered severe reverses; after 145 years of occupation Hungary was regained by Christian forces. The Habsburg armies moved southward, taking Belgrade on 8 September 1688, and in the following year penetrated as far as Niš, encouraging many of the Balkan Christians to rise against the Turks. While Louis XIV might consider himself the champion of Catholicism in the Orient, his wars against the Habsburgs did irreparable harm to that cause elsewhere, and even now troops had to be detached from Habsburg armies and sent to Western Europe to meet his menaces against Austrian possessions there. As a result, in 1690, a successful Ottoman counterattack led by the Köprülü, Fazil Mustafa, reestablished Turkish control of Belgrade and restored the lands south of the Danube to Sultan Süleyman II's control. Since only Fazil Mustafa's leadership had been the cause of Ottoman victories after 1689, his premature death brought an end to Ottoman gains. Both Habsburgs and Ottomans skirmished along the Danube during the four years of Ahmet II's reign, and his successor Mustafa II personally took to the field in campaigns meant to bring an end to Austrian possession of the northern shore of the Danube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PALESTINE IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY The Franciscans' position in the Holy Land in the early seventeenth century was a difficult one. The friars, as Father Custodian Francesco Manerba complained to Clement VIII, suffered constantly from ‘injuries and affronts, lies and beatings’ and from ‘the haughty attitude’ of both Arabs and Turks. Journeying abroad, they were harassed by enemies, both Muslim and Christian, while at home, at any time, day or night, they had to face Muslims who would appear at the convent door demanding wine, vinegar, candles or clothes. Palestine Orthodox frequently complained of Franciscan transgressions to Turkish authorities in Istanbul. Patriarch Theophanes III charged the Franciscans with forbidding the Orthodox to hang lamps in the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and with needlessly closing the well outside the church. The sultan's government, siding with the Orthodox, ordered the Latins to desist, and in obvious reference to the Franciscans, instructed the kadi of Jerusalem to ‘record and report those who display obstinacy and opposition’. Affairs became critical when, in 1611, the Armenians demanded possession of the Rock of the Anointing in the church of the Holy Sepulchre as well as a chapel in the church of Bethlehem. The Franciscans first appealed to ambassador Harlay-Sancy in Istanbul to intercede for their rights, and then unwisely tried to argue that the Armenians had no rights at all in Jerusalem and should be packed off to Cyprus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]