Living Stones Pilgrimage to Jordan encounters Suffering Church in the Middle East

Fr Dominic with refugees at Our Lady\'s Mount Refugee Centre. Image: Leslie Giltz

A group of 14 pilgrims from various Christian congregations in Britain, including five from Farm Street Jesuit Church in London, have just returned from a Living Stones Pilgrimage to Jordan. The pilgrimage provided the opportunity to show solidarity with the Christian churches of the Middle East through meeting and worshipping with the Christian communities in Jordan as they celebrated Holy Week and Easter together.

In Jordan Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter on the same date as a way of showing the unity of the Christian population at this extremely threatening time in the region.

The pilgrims worshipped together with the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox and Anglican communities, as well as celebrating Holy Thursday at the Latin Cathedral and Easter Vigil at the Melkite Cathedral in Amman.

Good Friday saw an ecumenical Way of the Cross in the wholly Christian town of Fuheis, led by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and attracting 2,000 Christians.

Then on the final day there was a meeting with the Middle Eastern Council of Churches who spoke of the serious situation of Christians in Jordan as they welcome tens of thousands of their sisters and brothers expelled often violently from Iraq and Syria.

In addition there were visits to places of biblical interest, the site of Our Lord's baptism and Mount Nebo where Moses settled and died.

But the aim of the pilgrimage was not to learn of the past but to encounter the 'living stones', the real people in the region today who need our support so badly as they struggle to keep Christianity as part of the mosaic of the Middle East.

This included a visit to a Catholic orphanage in 'Anjara, where about 50 Syrian and Iraqi refugee children with disabilities are cared for. And a refugee resettlement centre run by the Sons of Divine Providence in Zirqa, where 44 Christians expelled from Mosul and surrounding areas, often in the most violent ways, are cared for. For the group these visits were especially harrowing, with many of our group touched by the wonderfully warm hospitality and the hope these refugees had in what seemed to be a hopeless situation.

In Zirqa we spent the afternoon with the refugee community and learnt how, having been there for seven months, they were now cut off from other family members who had fled to Kurdistan, and just waiting to leave. Caritas and the www.jesuit.org.uk/blog/jrs-syria-dedicated-refugee-education Jesuit Refugee Service are trying to help move them on through the UN, but at present they have nowhere to go. Living Stones, in conjunction with Farm Street and Christians of different traditions, will be organising a similar pilgrimage elsewhere in the Middle East next spring.

Watch this space for further details.

See also: www.jesuit.org.uk/refugees-welcome-pilgrims-jordan