Spiritual summit to ponder ways to bolster unity

Top Muslim and Christian religious leaders will hold a spiritual summit Sunday to discuss how to bolster national unity and sectarian coexistence as Lebanon faces threats to its stability from the repercussions of popular upheavals roiling the Arab world, sources said Thursday. The meeting will be hosted by the Maronite Patriarchate in Bkirki and chaired by Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai. Sunday’s meeting will be the third Muslim-Christian spiritual summit to be held since Rai was elected head of the Maronite Church a year ago. Sources in Bkirki said the summit will tackle ways to protect Lebanon from the reverberations of the popular uprisings in the region through dialogue between the country’s feuding parties, whose political differences have been sharpened by the yearlong turmoil in Syria. Last year, Christian and Muslim spiritual leaders met twice, in Bkirki and at Dar al-Fatwa, the seat of the Sunni mufti, with the aim of defusing political and sectarian tension in Lebanon as a result of the widening rift between the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance and the opposition March 14 coalition. The two camps are sharply split over the crisis in Syria. While the March 14 parties, led by the Future Movement, staunchly support the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, Hezbollah and its allies are siding with the Assad regime. In the meantime, sources at Dar al-Fatwa confirmed that all religious heads of the various Muslim and Christian communities would attend the Bkirki meeting. The convening of the spiritual summit coincides with the Feast of Annunciation, which has been declared by the government as an official holiday. The summit will be preceded by a Mass to be celebrated by Rai after which spiritual leaders of various sects will begin arriving in Bkirki. The summit is scheduled to convene at 12:30 p.m. and will be followed by a luncheon to be hosted by Rai for the participants. Sources told The Daily Star that the National Muslim-Christian Dialogue Committee is preparing a communique to be issued at the end of the summit after winning the approval of the religious heads of Muslim and Christian communities. The communique will highlight boosting national unity and sectarian coexistence in order to confront challenges that Lebanon and the region are facing, in addition to underlining the need for dialogue and consensus among the rival political parties in Lebanon, the sources said. However, the communique will not touch on contentious issues in Lebanon and the Arab world such as Hezbollah’s arms and the yearlong popular uprising in Syria, the sources added. Rai has just concluded a pastoral tour that has taken him to Jordan, Qatar and Egypt. He said Wednesday upon his return from Egypt that he still planned to make a pastoral visit to Syria “when things calm down.” The spiritual summit comes as Rai is currently at the center of a heated controversy in Christian areas over his stances on the uprising in Syria. Last year, Rai’s controversial statements on the unrest in Syria and Hezbollah’s arms caused a new rift within the Maronite community, a rift which has not yet been healed. Last week, Rai criticized Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea’s comments on his stances on Syria, saying Geagea had failed to read the statements in their entirety. In response to a question about Geagea’s criticism of his statements, Rai said: “Those who read the statement ‘There is no god but God’ as simply ‘There is no god’ are ignorant.” Geagea had lambasted Rai’s stance on the uprising in Syria, accusing the patriarch of defending the Syrian regime and endangering Christians in the region. Geagea’s broadside came after Rai warned that violence and bloodshed are turning the Arab Spring into winter and that this was threatening Christians and Muslims alike across the Middle East. President Michel Sleiman and Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun entered the fray, defending Rai. Sleiman said Rai was striving to preserve the presence of free Christians in the Levant, amid popular upheavals in the Arab world.