ARTICLES

Occupied Territory

Arab-Catholics Find Peace and Security in San Francisco

By Renee Horton

Each Sunday, St. Anne of the Sunset Church on Judah Street fills with Catholic hymns sung in Arabic. During the prayers of the faithful, Father Labib Kobti prays "that the people of the Arab-American Catholic community will be good examples in America of Christians from the Holy Land." After Mass, a visitor can meet people from Nazareth, where the Bible tells us Jesus was conceived, and others from Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. There are families from Jerusalem, where Jesus was condemned to death, and businessmen from the villages in the Galilee region where he often preached.

While the ritual is similar to any Roman liturgy, Sunday Mass for the Arab-Catholic community is offered primarily in Arabic, a close cousin of Jesus' native Aramaic, and the liturgy contains some elements not used regularly in America. The Gospel is chanted, the altar is incensed before consecration, the Eucharistic prayer is sung and communion is by priestly intinction. These are traditions from the Latin rite in the Holy Land and important to Arab Catholics in the states. Beirut-native Father Kobti, 51, said the reason these liturgical traditions are important is because it helps children born in the states to Palestinian parents "remain connected to their homeland."

"The children are in between two cultures," Father Kobti said. "They know of Palestine, they know some Arabic tradition and culture -- they are living this at home. But outside their homes, they are in American culture, in the streets, in the malls, in the schools. Mass is very important to keep them connected to their heritage. In the past, a lot of families would send their children for a visit to Palestine to see the cities of their parents or grandparents. But now, this is not possible because the situation is not safe."

Christians have always been a minority in the Holy Land and their numbers continue to dwindle daily, which makes communities like St. Anne's very important.

"In 1967, Christians were about 30 percent of the population in the Holy Land," said Jadi Massis, 42, a member of Father Kobti's congregation. "Now we are less than two percent there."

The Palestinian Catholics in San Francisco come primarily from the village of Ramallah, a region 10 miles north of Jerusalem, although there are a few members from Jordan, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Beit Jala.

"When I first came, I had only 400 families," Father Kobti said. "Now there are more than 800 and I add at least two new families each month."

Dr. Maram Heisam, an obstetrician in San Francisco, said her family came for a better life. "The situation in Palestine is very hard, the economy is not well," she said. "People are not allowed to work with the blockades, people cannot send their children to school. And people like to, at bare minimum, live in freedom and with peace and that is not possible with the Israeli occupation."

In Palestine, there are more than enough priests to minister to the fewer than 100,000 Catholics in the Latin patriarchate, which covers Jordan, Palestine and Israel. Palestine is the 23 percent of the historic Holy Land not taken over by the 1948 creation of Israel. It consists of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. But in the United States, where many Holy Land Catholics have relocated since Israel's military occupation in 1967 of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Arab-speaking priests are in short supply.

The Latin patriarchate, centered in Jerusalem, is so called to distinguish it from the Eastern Rites of the Church and because it is one of the original four sees established by an apostle -- in this case, James. Although located in historic Palestine, the Latin patriarch was always Italian until 1987 when Pope John Paul II appointed Nazareth-native Sabbah to the post. When Patriarch Sabbah recognized in 1992 how many Catholics were fleeing the Holy Land for the United States, he assigned Father Kobti to come to California to minister to two communities -- one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles.

"He called me in and told me he was sending me to America and told me to write a letter of acceptance," Father Kobti recalled. "I went back to my chapel, fell on my knees, and wept. But I wrote the letter. I begged God to send me anywhere but America; I was very afraid of Americans. But now I realize my mission is here, to support Arab Catholics, to offer them hope and to help the holy land from here." For six years, Father Kobti traveled by shuttle between San Francisco and Los Angeles, ministering to the growing number of Arab Catholics relocating to those areas.

In 1998, Patriarch Sabbah decided the Los Angeles community needed its own priest and sent Father Isah Sabini from Jerusalem. Father Kobti stayed with the San Francisco community and gave speeches to groups interested on the situation of holy land Christians. Within the year, San Francisco Archbishop Levada asked him to help out at St. John of God Newman Center, which was lacking a pastor.

"The archbishop asks, you serve, that is the priesthood," Father Kobti said. "I like the community and they like me; it has been a very good relationship. So I have two superiors, His Beatitude in Jerusalem and Archbishop Levada here."

On August 5, Father Kobti celebrated two Masses in English at St. John of God Newman Center on 5th Avenue, followed by an Arabic Mass at St. Anne of the Sunset Church on Judah Street. Thirty minutes after Mass he celebrated the first of two weddings scheduled for that day, eating half a sandwich in between them and coordinating, via cell phone, the next-day arrival in San Francisco of Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem. The primary reason for Sabbah's visit was to encourage Palestinians in the area to not be discouraged by the current violence in Israel and the occupied territories and to report on his presentation in the spring to the U.S. bishops.

"Every human being bears the image of God and is to be loved as God would love him because everyone -- Jew, Christian, Muslim -- is loved equally by God," Sabbah said. "This is our input, very humble because of our small number and representation in the holy land, but we are behaving according to a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness. "In this spirit, it is the responsibility of all American Catholics to know the nature of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians," he continued. "The U.S. bishops are very aware of the actual situation and have issued a statement, as the Holy Father has, calling for observance of international law and a return of land to the Palestinians. Therefore, American Catholics should listen to what their bishops are saying and do what their bishops say."

Patriarch Sabbah said if Catholics around the world do not move to protect Catholics in the occupied territories, the Church takes a grave risk of the Holy Land becoming little more than a "museum of holy places" with no Christians living in the place where Christianity was born.

TOP