Rediscovering Greater Lebanon

"What is the veneration of a founder worth when his life's work is undone by those who claim to be his heirs?"

In a previous article, commenting on the saying "charity begins at home," we showed how Lebanon's history constantly oscillates between internal communal selfishness — retreating into one's sect at the expense of the state — and external ideological "altruism" — prioritizing regional causes at the expense of the homeland.

In both cases, the vision of a strong, prosperous, and democratic Lebanese state has been sacrificed. Let us take the analysis further.

In a letter published by L'OLJ, lawyer Carole Chelhot wrote some harsh but deeply accurate lines about this fatal fragmentation: "Lebanon's failure is no longer territorial. It is political, moral, and institutional. The administration has been handed over to patronage networks, public services distributed as personal favors, and the law negotiated according to power dynamics (…). The state, which was meant to transcend the communities, has become the spoils they divide among themselves (…). This is where the memory of Elias Hoayek ceases to be reassuring and becomes an indictment.

The Maronites love to call him the father of Greater Lebanon. They celebrate his name, invoke his legacy, and honor his beatification. But what is the veneration of a founder worth when his life's work is undone by those who claim to be his heirs? (…) How many Maronite leaders have understood that protecting Christians does not mean weakening the state to preserve privileges, but rather building a state strong enough that no citizen needs a protector?"

How can we repair the fragmentation and identity-based retreats that are delaying the emergence of a Lebanon that aspires to the Greater Lebanon founded in 1920?

Every community in Lebanon must reflect on its own path. And perhaps it would only be right to begin this historical and political examination of conscience with the Christians — and specifically with the Maronites — who were the driving force behind Greater Lebanon.

They were the first custodians of Patriarch Hoayek's vision. We know the sorrow — indeed the dismay — that Patriarch Hoayek felt in the face of the lack of civic responsibility shown by the political class of his era, and the desperate appeal he made for the moralization of public life in his final message to the nation: "The Love of the Homeland."

"Administrative and Pastoral Insularity"

After the Second Vatican Council, the Maronites and all Eastern Catholic Churches were urged by the popes — most notably by John Paul II — to work in unity and to build Lebanon together with Muslim communities, in a spirit of communion and service.

To no avail. On the political front, the same wheeling and dealing, the same scheming, the same miscalculations continued right up to the catastrophe in which we now find ourselves. On the religious front — the only domain over which they have full control — the Eastern Churches continued to resist calls to coordinate their pastoral work, their projects, and their aspirations. The impression has always been one of "every man for himself": "our" saints, "our" ceremonies, "our" broadcasts, "our" armchairs, "our" seats of honor.

For years, the most clear-sighted among her sons have had the courage to quietly reproach the grande dame of Lebanon's Churches "for having enjoyed the privileges that came with the creation of Greater Lebanon (1920) without fully assuming its duties; for having planned for herself rather than for the homeland she had founded; and if any good was done through her efforts, for having done so in a spirit of domination rather than a spirit of service."

It is high time to step out of the shadows and call things what they are. "If there is no personal encounter with Jesus Christ, there will be ethnicism disguised as Christianity," Pope Francis once said — perhaps with the autocephalous Churches of the Orthodox world in mind. One has to wonder whether this judgment applies equally to the Churches of Lebanon, which coexist on the same territory yet operate in administrative and pastoral self-sufficiency.

Role-playing and borrowed identities

The accusation ought to be extended to all the communal components of Greater Lebanon. Nearly a century after the death of its founder, the State remains cruelly "unfinished" (to use Chelhot's word), and citizenship is smothered by the most basic form of communitarianism. Much of the blame lies with a State that has surrendered its own identity and has renounced, in particular, the teaching of history.

How many Lebanese have grown up without a history textbook, without memory, and therefore without the foundation of knowledge needed to shape and anchor their identity — relying instead on scraps gathered as much from truth as from error, as much from happy memories as from communal traumas? How many Lebanese, including the author of this article, knew nothing of Patriarch Hoayek until just four months ago? Was establishing a "national education" really too much to ask? Or, once again, was laxity mistaken for wisdom?

The same judgment can be applied to military service, that incubator of citizenship — keeping in mind that neither national education nor military service should ever be taken for granted, but must be renewed with each generation.

"The land of missed opportunities"

For as far back as anyone can remember, Lebanese communities have embodied borrowed identities, shaped by external pressures or historical imagination. Today, it is the Battle of Karbala that is being re-enacted in South Lebanon. Politics is, of course, the realm of ambiguity par excellence, but one gets the sense that our history has been nothing but a succession of remakes and catastrophic role-playing exercises. All of this because the particular Churches, lulled to sleep by the most rigid clericalism, and the Lebanese State, hollowed out by its oligarchs, lacked the courage and the political will to show us where the treasure of our human and spiritual identity lay — the ideal of pluralism, freedom, and tolerance that once lifted Lebanon to greater heights. Without lining anyone's pockets.

As a Christian philosopher friend of mine puts it, "Lebanon is, par excellence, the homeland of missed opportunities." Among those missed opportunities — and let us never forget it — were the nocturnal apparitions of the Virgin Mary above the dome of the Syriac Orthodox basilica in Mouseitbeh in 1970. A heavenly visit that was ridiculed by the clergy of the Eastern Catholic Churches, who were nonetheless well aware of the twin apparitions of the Virgin in Zeitoun, Egypt, in 1968, and of their worldwide impact. It was yet another warning sign to which these Churches refused to pay the slightest attention.

"What the Spirit says to the Churches"

Since then, however, the spread of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council has fortunately fostered a greater sensitivity among the clergy toward "what the Spirit says to the Churches." "Too often," said Hans-Peter Kolvenbach (1928–2016), former Superior General of the Society of Jesus, "we forget the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation, where the Lord moves from one Church to another to approve and disapprove of what is happening there, and above all to announce what is to come. He continues to speak to us, especially in times of crisis, through the voice of the Theotokos and of so many other witnesses — who hold no magisterial office, yet speak with an authority from On High."

By applying the principle of "charity beginning at home," the Churches of Lebanon must finally understand that they have two levers at their disposal to save Lebanon and, with it, the Christian presence there: their support for the rule of law, in a spirit of service rather than "domination," and their genuine, uncompromising unity "as Christ willed it and by the means He willed."

By standing united, by placing themselves at the service of a culture of Lebanese citizenship, and by avoiding any retreat into identity politics—even at the cost of relinquishing some of their levers of power (the partial de-confessionalization of the civil service or of electoral law, as provided for in the Taif Agreement)—the Eastern Churches would fulfill their noblest mission: bringing Lebanon closer to its founding vision and turning Lebanese diversity into a strength rather than an inherent fragility. For even if the branches are corrupt, "the stump is a holy seed" (Isaiah 6:13).