Father Elias Zahlawi: Syrian Priest’s Letters Rattle the Vatican

16 Nov 2021

Tim Anderson

Not once has the Pontiff pointed a finger at “Israel” or the USA for their roles in two decades of slaughter and ethnic cleansing, including the expulsion of Christians.

Syrian priest Father Elias Zahlawi has reportedly shaken Pope Francis over the Vatican’s vague statements on the US-driven Middle East wars. Not once has the Pontiff pointed a finger at “Israel” or the USA for their roles in two decades of slaughter and ethnic cleansing, including the expulsion of Christians.

While both men are in their 80s, Father Zahlawi has ministered in Damascus since the 1960s and, since 1975, at the Church of Our Lady of Damascus. Syrian-born, he studied in Jerusalem and founded the now famous Damascus ‘Choir of Joy’ in 1977. That huge choir has toured Europe.

Pope Francis attained the highest rank in the Catholic Church after being an Archbishop in Argentina, but he is said to be ‘haunted’ by accusations of his involvement in Argentina’s dirty war, carried out by a US-backed military dictatorship. No charge was ever laid against him but some years ago the Argentine judiciary found that the Catholic Church was “complicit in abuses”.

According to some Syrian Christians, Father Zahlawi’s accusations over the Pope’s meaningless words – in face of the US and Israeli-led atrocities in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – touched a raw nerve.

Syrian Priest Tells Al-Ahed How Hezbollah protected Christians in Qalamoun

The gentle, humble priest in Damascus, now 89 years old, wrote a series of letters to US and Syrian leaders, to the European Parliament, and to the last two Popes. But his first two letters to Pope Francis, in 2018 and 2019, were probably the most incisive.

On 29 June 2018, Father Zahlawi asked Pope Francis:

“Why don’t you decisively and unequivocally adopt this very clear position of Saint Peter, against a western world that has spared nothing in its pursuit of total and absolute world dominance … including the systematic and continuous killing and destruction of total peoples and countries, including my homeland Syria?

“All of that is happening … either with complete media silence or worse yet, with the roaring noise of fabricated “facts”, designed to give credence to the worst obscenities, under the banner of “human rights, democracy, and freedom”.

“I have continued to read ‘with sorrow and dismay’ … the Roman Observer, hoping that one day I will find in it even one word of activism, [but] to be honest I only find in it … empty words, of the usual clerical content that we have gotten used to since the Emperor Constantine, with very rare exceptions. Yet outside the Church, in the west, there are many courageous and honorable voices.”

On 12 February 2019, he wrote again, after the Pope’s address to ROACO, the Board of the Society for Support of the Eastern Churches, where Francis was reported to have denounced the “great sin of war”, the thirst for “domination” of great “World Powers” and a refugee crisis which carries with it the risk of “eliminating Christians” from the Middle East.

This was a more carefully thought out letter, in which Father Zahlawi raised eight points. He began by asking, gently: “I wonder if the many grave issues you raised … did not deserve a clearer stand of more commitment and responsibility?”

His first point was to do with the Pope’s refusal to address the ethnic cleansing in Palestine:

“You say that “In the Middle East there is also a danger … of eradicating the Christians” … [but] do you believe that your audience and consequently your readers are ignorant, as your words suggest, of the countries which strive, with open insistence, and since the establishment of Israel, to totally eradicate the Christian existence in the whole Near East at the time they are about to accomplish this in occupied Palestine, which you call “the land of Jesus” and which has become the land of injustice, vengeance and death, and whose true name has been obliterated to become only ‘The Holy Land’?

In a second point he refers to the failure of the Pope’s generic words about the “pain” of the Middle East, and of land theft by ‘World Powers’, to address the US-led assault on his own country, Syria:

“these ‘World Powers’, at the head of which is the United States of America … forced about 140 member states countries … to declare war on my home country, Syria, and drove to it, from a hundred countries … jihadis, haunted by the evil of money, blood, avarice, and power.”

Third, Father Zahlawi chastises the Pope for suggesting that the “diminishing” numbers of Christians in the region might be due to pressure from Muslims. “If you want to suggest that the Muslims are the ones who force Christians to leave ‘the land they love’ … how can you explain their emigration at a worrisome rate since the establishment of “Israel” while they [Christians] throughout hundreds of years, lived … side by side with the Muslims?”

In his fourth point, he asks if the Pope while speaking of the Middle East as ‘the cradle of Christianity’ can possibly be ignorant that the “the Judaising of occupied Palestine …will very soon end every presence of Christians in ‘the land of Jesus’?”

Fifth, with regard to the Pope’s references to “great churches” in the Middle East, and ignoring the role of “Israel”, Father Zahlawi says “what you are practically doing … shackled by a horrific and sickly guilt complex towards the Jews” is to ignore and close your eyes to “the atrocities that are being committed openly and in flagrant violation of all laws, against all the Arabs, Muslims and Christians equally”, while even “some distinguished Jews” speak out against these crimes.

Sixth, he finds fault in the Pope’s overly general words about “the Middle East … [as] a land of death and emigration”, as the pontiff says nothing about the displacement of 12 million of the 23 million people in Syria, “without pointing an accusing finger at those who are responsible for these planned and inhuman emigrations in a country that was considered, before the so-called Arab Spring, as one of the safest countries on earth?”

In a seventh point, Father Zahlawi cites the Pope’s reference to “the grave sin … the sin of war”. But what does this mean, he asks, “without pointing, in the end, an accusing finger to countries such as the United States of America, Britain, and France, on the global scope, and at “Israel” on the scope of the Middle East, as they do not stop exploding totally unjust war … [in the name of] Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights?”

Finally, he refers to the Pope’s call that “the Middle East is a hope that we must take care of”, linking this to a revelation said to have taken place in Soufaniyeh Alley in Damascus in 2014, in the midst of the war on Syria. This revelation likens the wounds on Syria to those on Jesus. The clear, implicit message is: why has Pope Francis not denounced those who, like Judas, betrayed the people of Syria?

Open Letter To Pope Benedict XVI From Arab Catholic Priest Father Elias Zahlawi

April 1, 2010

By Father Elias Zahlawi
Father, Your Holiness

During these hard and critical times, which the world in general and our Orient in particular is undergoing, I would like to take the opportunity to tell you what is going on in my mind, what burdens my heart, especially being an Arab Catholic priest from Syria, concerning the invitation you kindly extended a few months ago to those responsible for the Eastern Catholic Churches, to hold a convention during October 2010 to discuss the conditions Arab and non-Arab Christians are passing through throughout the countries of the Orient.

There are three points that I would like to raise and discuss with your Holiness, from a son to his father.

The first subject is in relation to this conference.

I trust that all those who received your kind invitation had lauded this initiative.

But did anybody tell you that it came too late?

I am sure that the papers, which were put into their hands received their “admiration”.

But did anybody tell your Holiness that they do not reflect the facts on the ground in our Orient, past and present, except what the West sees and wants the rest of the world to see, whether the people of the Orient like it or not?

I am certain that the Vatican’s “specialized experts” as well as your ambassadors in the Orient try to honesty report what’s going on in it.

But would any of those attending the convention, those “experts” and “ambassadors”, see in general anything bu what those responsible for the Churches of the Orient want them to see? Or what their sphere of responsibilities allows them to see?…

Last but not least, I am certain that those who shall be attending said convention had uncovered dangerous gaps in the “important” papers submitted to them.

But did anybody tell your Holiness personally or in public during the previous convention’s meetings, that there are gaps that they did not discover? And why not, the Vatican or its many or few Western “experts” just ignored in the absence or just the small number of Arab or Oriental experts?

The second point is concerning those invited to the previous and/or forthcoming councils.

It is well known that those invited are either patriarchs, archbishops and/or heads of the various monastic orders.

May I take the permission to ask your Holiness: are you fully convinced that those who are invited do really represent Oriental Christianity, in what is for or against it, especially during these critical, not to say fateful, times?

I am afraid that the majority of them are outside what the Orient as a whole expects of them, both and equally its Christians and Muslims, which is due to their costly stances and declarations, as they have learned due to their positions and their own personal considerations to avoid or mitigate them, which exclude them for incorporeal or material reasons, which is apparent to all.

I said that this conference came late… too late. But what I am afraid of is that it shall come out to the world with phoney introductions, and hollow resolutions and decisions or wishes that shall not bring advances, but rather may delay them too much, because it could add new and heavy failures and fiascos, over and above the historical heavy and exhausting weights, wrongful Western policies and internally confusing and sometimes shameful and floundering policies.

As a result, I found that it is necessary, with your permission, to suggest expending the span of invitations extended by the Apostolic See, to cover courageous and effective voices of various Christian circles both Catholic and Orthodox, both cleric and secularist, in addition to the various Islamic circles, especially as most of the inhabitants of the Orient are Muslims, it is supposed that what is to be said in this convention or what is to be issued by it, should concern them equally much as they concern Christians.

Point three, is the span of Western churches, especially the Vatican, regarding to what takes place all over the world, and especially to the Arab and non-Arab Orient.

My first question is: Is it possible that I could be distancing myself from truth if I say that everything that is taking place all over the world in general and in the Orient in particular, was done by the West, I mean the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Australia and Russia in particular, these countries that appropriate all the wealth of our globe, and solely possess the great part of the striking force around it up till now?

My second question is: Am I distancing myself from truth if I say that most of what is now taking place, first in the Arab homeland and in the Islamic world and in the second place in the Islamic areas all around the world, is nothing but a reaction to the West’s grievances, which are reactions that started and continued in most cases, demagogic, bloody and spontaneous, then some of them continued in two modes of armed movements, first legal resistance in occupied Palestine, which was unjustly described by the European Union in September 2002 as being carried out by groups they labelled as terrorist organizations, second the fundamentalist resistance, starting first in Afghanistan against Russia and later against U.S. aggression then in Iraq and Pakistan that was the case of the Taliban and the al Qaida movements.

But, is there anybody who doesn’t know that these two movements were originally created by the United States itself?

But what is taking place in the heart of the Arab homeland, which is Palestine in particular, Palestine, which you no more call it in your Western churches other than “The Holy Land”, are not but wrongful wars and occupation that deem permissible anything: killing, imprisoning, torturing, siege and displacement against all the Palestinian Arab people, Christians and Muslims, and all of that is taking place under the eye sight of the entire world, with full support of the West, and what made Mrs. Clinton say: “Attacking Israel is equal to attacking an American city like “San Diego”, and what made Mrs. Merkel, the German Chancellor, say also shamelessly: “Attacking Tel Aviv is exactly like attacking Germany in particular…”.

But what has taken place and is still taking place against Palestinian Arabs by “Israeli” Zionist occupation!

What is the relation between what happened and what is happening to the Palestinian Arab people, for longer than sixty years, by Zionist “Israeli” hands, if compared to human rights as announced in “The Human Rights Charter”, and all international treaties, especially the Geneva Conventions, as well as hundreds of resolutions taken against “Israel” by the United Nations and its miserable Security Council? Did all the West become a slave to Zionism, to follow these dissolute double standards in the West’s relations with the Zionist entity on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other, which are the weak and deemed weak peoples, on the other hand?

With all of that, all European Churches keep silent. Yes we mean all of them, starting with the Vatican itself. It kept silent after the passing away of Pope John Paul II, with the exception of the courageous the Cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law.

I have been thoroughly and regularly reading for years the Vatican’s daily newspaper “corriereromano” http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.corriereromano.it, and was aware that since you became Pope, its language was flattened and neutralized in relation to the Arab / Zionist conflict, and the same concerning war tragedies, hunger, diseases, poverty, exploitation, forgery and organized plundering, which are tragedies that their beastly spreading over the world is aggravating… day in and day out!

This became apparent in a grievous manner during your personal visit to occupied Palestine, I expected from you words that are at least equal in courage and trueness of that your predecessor, Pope John Paul II, the moment he laid foot on the land of Syria in 2001, as he immediately demanded the execution of United Nations resolutions for a just and comprehensive solution of the Arab / Zionist struggle!

I was also expecting from you words, which are sympathetic, strong and courageous towards the Palestinian Arab people, that Zionism had been subjugating for more than sixty years to a terrible and continuous uninterrupted “Shoah” (Holocaust), with unlimited Western support, words that are at least a little equal to the sweeping sympathy that you expressed towards the Jewish “people”, for example what you expressed during your meeting with some of its American leaders during your visit to the United States on Feb. 12th 2009, and during the visit of the leading “Israeli” Rabbis to the Vatican on March 12th 2009! As for what you said on January 1st 2010 on the memory day of the “Shoah”, which the “corriereromano” (Page 2) that expresses that what is taking place in what remains of Palestine (The West Bank and the Gaza Strip) for over sixty years is completely absent from your memory!

I regret to add that the complete silence of Western churches was expressed in wretched words written by some Catholic bishops in France, Germany and Canada after their visits to the “Holy Land”, where they equated between the Arab victim and the Zionist butcher. They also expressed their “great” disturbance for the pains both peoples are suffering, and they were always concluding their word with calling on their peoples to raise prayers for “peace”, and to give financial help to the: “Holy Lands”.

We feel as if they have lost their eyesight, and they can no more see, erased their brains and thus can no more remember the history of Palestine, the homeland of Jesus Christ, neither the old nor the contemporary, and the vital change that is taking place in this homeland in its historical landmarks. And what happened to its indigenous population, Christians and Muslims, of massacres, displacement and genocide/extermination!

Father, Your Holiness,
At last, I have six questions, that I find necessary to raise to you at the end of this letter:

1st Question: does the anti-Semitism that the West, the Church, authority and people, practiced against the Jews, justify today’s spilling the blood of the people of the Arab and non-Arab East, starting with Palestinian Arabs, for the sake of the “poor” Jewish “people”? And does it justify all Western Churches keeping silence, concerning this injustice, while they continue to request remission for the sin of anti-Semitism, that it alone committed, excluding Arabs and Muslims?

2nd Question: isn’t it clear for all the West including these Western Churches, that this situation shall end up with two formidable evils that I find no possible forgiveness for:

The first evil, is the transforming of all the “poor” Jewish “people” to become a group of killers?

The second evil, is the emptying of all the Orient from its indigenous Christians?

3rd Question: Don’t you see with me a fearful and shameful similarity between what all Western powers are doing today all over the world in general and the Arab homeland and the Islamic world in particular, and what Western powers, which invaded the American continents starting with the 15th century had done? I mean the savage and systematic extermination of about forty to fifty million people of the indigenous population as per Western researchers themselves?

4th question, in facing all these crimes against humanity, is it enough that a new Pope to come, after four hundred years, requests the forgiveness from the slaughtered peoples, as the brave Paul John Paul II did, during his extraordinary visits to the world, so as the Church would say the Church had done what it had to do?

5th question, is it not necessary for Western churches today, and before tomorrow to get out of their silence, and speak the Gospel’s words, to defend the wronged, the poor, the hungry, the sick and the prisoners of war that Jesus identified all his love for them, who are no more individuals as Matthew the Apostle’s gospel said? On the contrary, they became peoples who cover the greater part of the world? Some may hear it and we be able to liberate some of the Western, the “rich” and the “haughty”, whether those who were fully liberated from God, or those who exploited him, as what is taking place in the United States of America, so as to finish of, in his name, with the Christians and the Muslims of all the Orient, and stir the peoples against each other, through sectarian and ethnic wars that spread day after day, and shall not grant mercy to anybody?

6th Question, which is a question that I hear you forwarding to me, as many Western bishops and priests had already addressed it to me: But “is there anybody to hear?” In turn I shall tell you and the whole Western Church: You are no better then Jesus, “He came to his special people, but they didn’t accept him”. But in spite of that, he spoke, and what Jesus said, nobody had ever said it, and nobody shall ever say it!

Yes, Your Holiness, I have something else to add.

Father, Your Holiness, please, I am your son, the Arab Catholic priest from Syria, I beg you, with all the love and importunity, to take the initiative and invite the truthful elite of those responsible in Western Churches and secularists, so as to discuss with those responsible and the truthful in the Eastern Churches and the rest of the world to discuss, discuss with Christians and Muslims, during the forthcoming convention, which you called for in October 2010, about the responsibilities of what is taking place today in the Orient and the rest of the world, so as to take the required and sincere stances before it is too late.

A lot of time has passed, and days are pregnant with new tragedies, that nobody wishes upon anybody else.

God’s world is spacious, as spacious as God’s heart, so I hope that your heart shall be spacious enough to grasp my words,

You, Your Holiness,

I beg you to pray for all my brethren in the Orient, Muslims, Christians and Jews, please accept your son’s love and respect.

Father Elias Zahlawi – 13/3/2010

Translated from Arabic by: Adib S. Kawar and revised by Mary Rizzo for Tlaxcala

This letter was published at the Palestine Think Tank on March 22, 2010