Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
A substantial part of the vast area affected by the Kahramanmaras earthquake – the equivalent of the territory of Hungary or mainland Portugal, for example – is located on Syrian land. A region, precisely, that has long been devastated by all kinds of violence and grievances and which, ironically, was awaiting a decisive land attack by the Turkish forces, which have occupied the border strips for years. Air strikes, drone strikes and artillery fire have targeted the key Kurdish towns of Hassaké and Qamishli, as well as several smaller ones in the provinces of Aleppo, Raqqa, and Deir ez Zor.
Ankara has been justifying such acts of interference in foreign land by the need to fight the Kurdish rebels harbored in the now designated Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria, led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), in essence, an alliance of militias made up essentially of Kurds but which counts in its ranks with Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians and Circassians and even dissident Turks. This scenario of pain and suffering, resulting from the destruction of basic infrastructure such as the water and electricity supply, favorite targets of Ottoman projectiles, has always been remembered by the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate, which, during the past Advent, launched a call to prayer in the hope that the “coming Saviour, Jesus” would also bring peace and “an end to suffering and danger to the population of northeast Syria”.
This was when, a few days earlier, in Hassaké, an attack on a gas refinery had caused a colossal fire, killing and injuring several workers, and the drone bombing of the El-Hol refugee camp had allowed the escape of dozens of jihadist detainees linked to to the Islamic State.
Well, this generalized day-to-day suffering has now been replaced by another one of no lesser magnitude – quite the contrary – in a landscape that has long been martyred. The earthquake on the 6th of this month, magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale, was the most violent in eight centuries.
Antoine Audo, Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, warned of the importance of, “now more than ever”, the Church reaching out to people, who are naturally terrified because they are faced with a type of disaster they are not used to. “After 12 years of war, this was yet another tremendous bomb, lethal and unknown, that fell on us,” commented the prelate to Fides agency. Audo reports that the Melkite (Greek-Catholic) Archbishop Georges Masri had been pulled alive from the rubble, but his vicar had still not been found. Melkite priest Fadi Najjar has also faced death and devastation… “Even now we can hardly sleep. With each passing hour we receive more and more survivors in our parishes,” he confided to the Catholic News Agency.
Najjar, 40, ministers at St. Michael’s Church in Aleppo, where he serves about 200 families, and runs Al-Inaya school, attended by more than 300 students. He is also a leader of the Christian Student Youth movement. He added, “We lost a priest from our community. Fear reigns. We don’t know exactly what to do…” The demand for help is such that Najjar and some of his parishioners were forced to rescue people from the rubble: “we could hardly believe what was happening”. Expectations, far from improving, got worse: “It’s very cold, it’s been raining for six days, the situation is not good at all”. His final plea: “Join together in prayer, please; pray for us, please.”
Also from the north, from Turkey, the clergymen gave us news. Bishop Paolo Bizzeti, Vicar Apostolic of Anatolia, reported that the cathedral in Iskenderun had collapsed, as had countless churches belonging to the Syro-Orthodox and Orthodox communities in that city. However, the most dramatic reports come from Antakya, the ancient Antioch of Orontes, now integrated in the southwest of the Turkish province of Hatay. “Entire buildings collapsed, mosques and churches were annihilated. It is freezing cold, there’s no light, there’s no water, the bread ovens have been destroyed, the shops are closed. The streets, full of rubble, are impassable even for rescue vehicles. I am told that at least half of the city is destroyed or has suffered serious damage, especially in the oldest part,” says Father Domenico Bertogli, 86 years old, a Capuchin friar born in Modena.
From the late 1980s until 2022, Father Bertogli served as pastor of the local Catholic community. Fortunately, the parish house, “since it is a low-rise building”, withstood successive shocks. The city’s great mosques, or the Orthodox or Protestant churches, did not have the same luck. With its doors open, the parish house now welcomes the displaced families who live nearby: “They feel safer here, as our garden is an immediately accessible escape route, in case of new earthquakes,” he says.
The parish house of São Pedro and São Paulo is a creation of Father Bertogli, already many years old, in a city full of memories associated with the primitive apostolic preaching. Basically, these are two old houses in ruins that have been restored, in the old Jewish quarter, where presumably the dwellings of the first Christians of the city were built. When the work was finished, the friar engraved the inscription on the stone above the door: “Turkish Catholic Church”.
Antioch occupies an important place in the history of Christianity because it was there that Paul of Tarsus preached his first sermon, curiously inside a synagogue. Also in Antioch were the followers of Jesus called Christians for the first time.
(Photo Credit : Khalil Hamra / Associated Press)
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