MacLean’s Magazine, Canada
Jan 6 2012
Monks with brooms fight in Jesus’ birthplace
The tussle at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity is only the latest in
a long series of turf disputes
by Patricia Treble on Friday, January 6, 2012 5:40pm
It was a spectacle that should put smiles on women’s faces: dozens of
men fighting for the privilege to do housework. Yet in this case, it
wasn’t a light-hearted holiday fracas but a religious contretemps,
sparked in one of the holiest seasons, in the birthplace of Christ:
Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.
Some 100 Greek and Armenian Orthodox clerics attacked one another with
brooms and �sts while cleaning the 1,700-year-old church in the West
Bank last week in advance of the Jan. 7 Orthodox Christmas (and after
the Western Christmas). While the exact spark of the crisis is
unknown, its origin can be traced back to a centuries-old system known
as the Status Quo. Promulgated by the Ottoman Turks, who ruled
Palestine from the 1500s to the First World War, it was meant to end
physical battles over control of all of the area’s holy sites by
preserving forever the existing rights of those Christian churches
that occupied the buildings. So whoever dusted a particular area of
floor, cleaned a specific chandelier or used a particular area on a
particular feast day, owned that right forever.
While those rules have reduced the bloodshed, they also resulted in
churches fiercely protecting their rights, since letting anyone take
over a responsibility, however slight, resulted in the loss of
ownership of that right. In 1853, a dispute involving a golden door
key and whether Catholics could put a silver star over the manger
escalated until several Orthodox monks were killed and Russia had the
excuse it needed to start the Crimean War against Turkey. And in 2006,
the Greeks were doing their traditional dusting of chandeliers in an
Armenian-controlled part of the church when they tried to move their
ladder from its mandated spot. `They had to know this was like waving
a red rag in front of a bull,’ Raymond Cohen, a professor at
Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, told Smithsonian magazine. Several
clerics landed in hospital.
Since the custodial churches can’t agree on how to fund and carry out
repairs’crucial ownership rights are at stake’it’s no surprise that
major repair jobs have piled up. The roof is now so rotten that water
is leaking onto priceless paintings and mosaics. The Palestinian
Authority is trying to negotiate a settlement but history shows that
could take time. After an earthquake badly damaged Jerusalem’s Church
of the Holy Sepulchre in 1927, it took a decade for its churches to
hammer out a repair agreement.
From: A. Papazian