Beirut blast led many to leave Lebanon, now Catholics say pope’s visit brings hope

BEIRUT — Holy icons no longer attend mass at the Lebanese capital’s St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church and there are no more pews five years after an explosion in the main port sent a devastating shockwave through the city.

While new white marble slabs have replaced the old floor and walls have been freshly painted, the Rev. Miled Abboud hopes Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the blast site on Tuesday will highlight the scale of the reconstruction that remains to be done. He also believes that Leo’s visit will bring “a message of hope” and reconciliation between Lebanon’s diverse Christian communities – many of whom have left Lebanon in recent years – and coexistence with the majority Muslim population.

“The pope’s visit is a sign of hope,” Abboud told NBC News on Saturday. “There are many dark things, many things that make us despair, but we have Christ who gives us the strength to continue. »

Abboud, who said he has only been a priest at this Maronite church for a few months, added that he hopes to restore it to its former glory to inspire the local community, even though many younger members of his congregation have left the city or country altogether, largely because of the dire economic situation.

“The majority of young people have gone to other regions or to the Gulf, to Europe, to France, because we have a lot of French universities here, so once they finish their studies, people go to France,” he said.

Many of them made the decision to leave following the massive August 2020 port explosion, which ravaged Beirut after hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in a warehouse, according to Paul Salem, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

A total of 218 people were killed and 7,000 injured by the explosion which devastated large swaths of the city, causing billions of dollars in damage.

Much of the destruction took place in “the predominantly Christian neighborhoods of east Beirut,” Salem said in a series of voice notes Monday. For some, it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he added.

Even though people loved their homeland, he said, the explosion “traumatized many people” in the country, which was already reeling from an economic collapse and struggling to cope with an influx of about 1.5 million refugees who crossed the border into Lebanon as civil war ravaged neighboring Syria. Some have returned home since the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last year.

Noting that members of Christian populations have a long history of migration “from the Middle East to the West starting in the 19th century,” Salem said “they were attracted to and feel comfortable going to the West, which is generally Christian.”

But, he added, Christians and Muslims left the country during the civil war that ravaged the country between 1975 and 1990 and the war with Israel in 2006.

After the economic collapse, he said, “there were no good jobs in Lebanon but there were in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Riyadh or further afield in Canada or the United States.” Others had gone to pursue higher studies in the West, he added.

More recently, the country was rocked by the fallout from Israel’s war in Gaza as well as the war between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah until a fragile ceasefire was negotiated about a year ago.

But just a week before Leo landed in Beirut, an Israeli airstrike on the city killed Haytham Ali Tabatabai, a senior Hezbollah commander, and four others, and injured 28 others.

Elsewhere, some Syrian Christians have left their country due to concerns over the new government led by interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, former leader of the Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. In June, an unprecedented terrorist attack in Damascus on the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church during mass killed at least 30 people and injured 54 others.

Large numbers of people had already fled the country, as well as neighboring Iraq, after the militant group Islamic State, or ISIS, declared its caliphate.

In Gaza, the small surviving Christian community saw churches bombed and worshipers killed during the war between Israel and Hamas, while in the occupied West Bank, Christian communities were targeted by Israeli settlers and the economy suffered as tourist numbers fell dramatically.

While Lebanese Christians live in relative peace in the predominantly Muslim country, the country’s dire economic situation has led many of them to seek new lives abroad.

“No one wants to leave their house, especially if their house has been passed down for thousands of years and people have fought to keep that house there. But we also want to live here with dignity,” Giovanni Lteif, 21, said in an interview with NBC News on Saturday.

With his twin Charbel Lteif, he created “Oriental Christians” pages on social networks, which have gathered nearly 700,000 followers.

“One of the biggest problems we face is the number of Christians who have left,” Charbel Lteif said, adding that with their videos they were trying to raise awareness and preserve their culture and traditions by creating “a new voice for Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, a voice that is not political, a voice that is not on anyone’s agenda, a voice that speaks to Christians in the East and the whole world.”

Charbel Lteif said churches were “still very much alive” in Lebanon, which has the largest percentage of Christians in the Middle East, making up more than a third of the population.

A power-sharing agreement has been in place since Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, in which the president is a Maronite Christian, the speaker of parliament is a Shiite Muslim and the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim.

That makes Lebanon the only Arab country with a Christian head of state, a tradition that continued earlier this year when President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and a cabinet were elected on reformist platforms and pledged to hold those behind the port explosion to account.

Five years after the blast, no one responsible has been convicted, and years of obstruction by top officials have stalled the investigation and hampered hopes for justice.

In the absence of a centralized effort by the Lebanese government to rebuild surrounding neighborhoods, many families and business owners have used their own money to repair their properties or turned to local charities and initiatives.

At Saint-Antoine de Padoue, Abboud held out hope that he would return to his former glory.

“When the church is closed, it means we lose a piece of our region,” he said. “I say this as a Christian who sincerely believes that we have a mission with our Muslim brothers: a mission of dialogue, a mission of coexistence, of peace. »