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HOUSES OF WORSHIP
‘The Mother of All Churches’
One site in Jerusalem unites, and divides, Christians.
BY BENJAMIN BALINT
Friday, July 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Last month, Pope Benedict XVI addressed what he called "the delicate
situation" in the Middle East. He told a Vatican meeting of the Aid
Agencies for the Oriental Churches that "peace, much awaited and
implored, is unfortunately greatly offended." Although the pope’s
words were meant to refer to strife in Iraq and Israel, they also may
be taken to describe the delicate, oft-broken peace in Christianity’s
own holiest site in the region.
Ever since it was built by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in 335 on
the hill of Golgotha, where his mother, Helena, claimed to have found
the remains of the True Cross, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in
Jerusalem’s Old City has enjoyed little peace. The historian Eusebius
records that the original structure, "an extraordinary work," was
crowned by a roof "overlaid throughout with radiant gold." But
Constantine’s marvel was razed by the Persians in 614, reconstructed,
and then destroyed again by Caliph Hakim of Egypt in 1009. Rebuilt by
Crusaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, the building evolved into
the motley collection of shrines, chapels and grottos that greet–and
sometimes disappoint–the visitor today. The critic Edmund Wilson said
it "probably contains more bad taste, certainly more kinds of bad
taste, than any other church in the world."
The architectural mishmash reflects the overlapping theological
resonances of the spots contained under one roof. As Amos Elon notes
in his book "Jerusalem: City of Mirrors," the church marks the site of
"Christ’s alleged prison, Adam’s tomb, the Pillar of Flagellation [to
which Jesus was bound], ‘Mount’ Calvary [the Latin name for the hill
where Jesus was crucified], the Stone of Unction [where his body was
washed in preparation for burial], Christ’s sepulcher and the Center
of the Earth, as well as the site of the resurrected Christ’s meeting
with Mary Magdalene." No wonder Pope John Paul II called it "the
mother of all churches."
In a deeper sense, however, the stylistic dissonance embodies the
rivalry that in Jerusalem not only partitions one faith from another
but also prevents a faith from mending its internal fissures.
In 1757, after Greek Orthodox clergy violently wrested majority
control of the church from the Roman Catholics, the Ottoman rulers of
Jerusalem decreed a status quo for the city’s holy sites. For the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, this meant that control was split
primarily among the three patriarchates of Jerusalem–the Latin, the
Greek and the Armenian–and secondarily among the churches of Egypt
(Coptic), Syria and Ethiopia. The arrangement, formalized in 1852, has
been enforced by the British, Jordanians and, today, Israel.
But this has not created harmony. Back in 1869, Mark Twain visited and
noticed the denominations chanting, sometimes simultaneously, in their
own languages: "It has been proven conclusively that they can not
worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the World in
peace." And the cease-fire’s fragility persists to this day.
Five years ago, Ethiopians, exiled since 1658 to quarters on the roof,
resented the placement of a Coptic priest’s chair there, and the
ensuing brawl sent 11 monks–seven Ethiopians and four Copts–to the
hospital. A couple of years later, Greek clerics tussled with
Franciscans.
The turf wars also paralyze maintenance. A wooden ladder has rested on
a ledge over the church’s entrance for at least 150 years. The
edicule, braced with scaffolding, is falling apart. The Chapel of
St. Nicodemus, over which both the Armenians and the Syrians claim
ownership, has for that reason never been restored. To prevent
denominational disputes, the very keys to the church have since the
days of Saladin been entrusted to Muslims from the Nuseibeh and Joudeh
families.
Recently, Father Athanasius Macora, negotiator on Holy Sepulcher
issues for the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land (which represents
Roman Catholics in Israel), showed me several large color-coded maps,
signed and sealed by the heads of the three patriarchates, which
detailed even which sewage lines belong to which rite. Even the repair
of a pipe requires ecumenical negotiation.
The drawings resembled nothing so much as the intricate jumble of
lines that one sees on Jerusalem’s political maps these days. Seeing
them, one is tempted to dismiss the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as a
stage for the absurd and the mundane, and to scoff at the way, like
the city at whose heart it stands, it suffers a discordance of
religious impulses vying for supremacy. But one also wants to yield to
a fascination with a space that, like Jerusalem, finally reveals
itself as a sort of palimpsest, a tangle of inscription upon erasure
upon inscription.
Mr. Balint is a writer based at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.
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