ARTICLES

A Star in the East

Treasures of Lebanon Come to El Cajon

by Anne Knight

Lebanon's connection with Christianity goes back to its contact with Christ. "And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid" (Mark 7:24). Mark's gospel continues with Jesus exorcising a Syro-phoenician woman's daughter. Father Nabil Mouannes, pastor of St. Ephrem's church in El Cajon, believes that, since Galilee borders on Lebanon, Jesus probably visited Lebanon more than once.

When discussing Maronite history, Father Mouannes emphasized the need to understand that the Maronites "are a very, very Marian Church. The Virgin Mary came to Lebanon and she used to wait for Jesus." Father Mouannes cited a large Marian shrine in southern Lebanon, between Tyre and Sidon, called the Lady of Mnitra, meaning the lady that waits. "That's why we're going to build this shrine [see Little Notes in this issue]." The Middle East is where Marian veneration was first undermined, Father Mouannes related, as a consequence of heresies, particularly Nestorianism, which denied that Mary is the mother of God. Few Christians remain in the Middle East, he noted, and "the Christians that are still very strong there and still holding the flame there are the ones who, in some way, venerate the Virgin Mary.... When we lose this vision about the Virgin Mary, we can lose a lot of our vision of the Lord, we can lose a lot of our life on earth, we can lose a lot of our battles ... we can lose, unfortunately, our way to be saved."

Father Mouannes has pondered Islam's conquest of North Africa and the Middle East when it burst forth from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. "Why couldn't the Christians resist? They were the majority.... Because, it seems to me, we lost the right relationship with Mary. When we set the Virgin Mary in a place very far from us, it's like setting her away from us. We have a very big place for her in the Book of Revelation. She is in our future; we cannot ignore it.... She is going to destroy the head of Satan."

The Maronite church is one of five Eastern Catholic churches which originated from the church of Antioch. The church of Antioch was founded by the early disciples, taught by St. Paul and Barnabas, and served by St. Peter as its first bishop until he went to Rome. The term Maronite derives from Saint Maroun, who was born around 350. After his ordination he became a hermit near Antioch, now in Turkey. He died around 410. Shortly after his death his followers relocated to the south, and the Maronites came to be identified with Lebanon.

Large-scale Maronite emigration began after 1860 and has continued since. In the 1960s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began to spill over into Lebanon and culminated in the outbreak of a civil war in Lebanon in 1975. Lebanon remains under Syrian domination. Estimates of how many Lebanese Christians emigrated as a result of the war range between about half a million and 1.5 million. Some returned to Lebanon after the hostilities decreased. However, during the economic troubles of the 1990s many of the same families emigrated again. The Maronite church has 3.5 million members worldwide and its U.S. membership is about 90,000. In the mid-1970s Maronite archbishop Francis Zayek requested the establishment of Saint Ephrem Mission in San Diego, named after the fourth-century Syrian hermit and doctor of the Church. By that time local Maronite families were seeking a priest who could provide the Maronite liturgy. The archbishop referred them to Father Dennis Krouse, a USD instructor who had learned the Maronite liturgy while in Rome. Eventually monthly Maronite liturgies were being held at USD's Founders Chapel, celebrated by Father Krouse or Father Antoine Bakh of Anaheim. Later on, Masses were held at Holy Angels Byzantine Catholic Church, and by 1990 Fathers Krouse and Bakh were providing a weekly Sunday liturgy for the Maronite community.

In 1992 Father Mouannes arrived as Saint Ephrem Mission's first permanent pastor. Saint Ephrem bought its present facility in El Cajon from a Lutheran church in 1999. In the early 1990s Father started Saint Joseph's Maronite parish in Phoenix, which now has its own pastor, he took over as pastor at Saint Sharbel Mission in Las Vegas, which has 100 families, and he recently started a Maronite mission in Denver, which now has 70 families and will be called Saint Rafqa. He shuttles between San Diego, Las Vegas, and Denver on weekdays; he usually says Masses at Saint Ephrem's on Sunday. In February 2001 the Maronite patriarch visited Saint Ephrem's for the first time and blessed the ground where the shrine will be built.

Upon Father Mouannes' arrival in San Diego in 1992, the mission had 20 active families. Saint Ephrem's now numbers about 300 registered families, with approximately 200 families at its Sunday Arabic liturgy -- up to 1,000 show up for Christmas and Holy Week. Saint Ephrem's plans to build a parish hall, develop a graded children's playground, and is contemplating replacement of the existing church building with one that conforms more closely to Maronite architecture.

The Maronite liturgy originally incorporated the Church's earliest liturgical forms, which is reflected in the fact that the Maronite Service of the Holy Mysteries contains the Church's oldest Eucharistic Prayer. Rome sent apostolic visitors to Lebanon between the 15th and 17th centuries to scrutinize Maronite liturgical texts, "in the period where they started to Latinize everything," Father Mouannes explained. They ordered the Maronites to purge elements from their liturgy deemed heretical, and the Maronites complied, even when obliged to burn liturgical books. However, in doing so, some of the Church's primordial liturgical practices were lost. "That's why, now, in our Mass, we have a lot of similarities with the Latin [Roman rite] Church," he pointed out. "We were Latinized more than the other ones [Eastern rite Churches], because we searched for it. We wanted to show that now we are one with Rome, one hundred percent; we are with the rock." The pre-Vatican II Maronite liturgy was in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Eventually Aramaic was largely supplanted by Arabic and Persian. The post-Vatican II Maronite liturgy is evenly divided between Syriac and Arabic. The Maronite rite follows its own liturgical calendar, which incorporates some of the major feast days of the Roman calendar. Since Vatican II the Eastern Catholic churches have been encouraged to reform their liturgies in accordance with their earlier tradition. The Maronites made the first such reforms in 1992 and 1993.

Saint Ephrem's offers an 8 a.m. Mass on weekdays. On Sundays its 11:00 a.m. Mass is in Arabic and Syriac and is usually accompanied by a large choir performing traditional Maronite hymns. The Sunday schedule includes a 9:30 a.m. Mass largely in English, with key parts of the liturgy in Arabic and Syriac. In keeping with Eastern liturgical tradition, Father Mouannes chants several parts of the Mass. A small choir provides musical accompaniment and hymns are selected from repertoires of the Maronite and Roman rites. In both Masses worshippers hear the words of consecration spoken in Syriac, using the exact words spoken by Christ at the Last Supper. The Saturday vigil Mass is at 5:30 p.m. and confession is available on Saturdays from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. or before any Mass. On the third Sunday of each month at 5:30 p.m.Saint Ephrem's offers a French Mass for San Diego's French Catholic community.

In September, 2000 the parish opened Saint Ephrem Academy, the first Maronite school in the U.S. and Canada. Father Mouannes credits divine intervention for his introduction to Catholics pursuing the same vision for a school in the East County. Michael Horvath, the group's leader, was led to Father Mouannes in 1999 by a priest friend of Horvath's. The school obtained a conditional-use permit from the city of El Cajon in April 2000. Horvath, now the academy's headmaster, holds a master's degree in education, has extensive teaching experience, and served as youth minister for nine years at Ascension Church in Tierrasanta. "The academy is loyal to the Holy Father and the traditions of the Church," Horvath explained. "The philosophy of the school is the salvation of souls through excellence in education." In its first academic year 20 students were enrolled; this year there are 30. The academy promotes the traditional spirituality of the Eastern Catholic and Roman rites and is open to students from both rites in grades kindergarten through twelve. Students are required to wear uniforms.

Each school day starts with 8 a.m. Mass, and students pray a decade of the rosary every hour on the hour. They pray the Stations of the Cross in the church each Friday. Horvath teaches religion to grades three and up, assists teachers as needed, performs administrative work, and teaches physical education to grades kindergarten through two. Students are divided between two full-time instructors, one for kindergarten through second grade and the other for grades three and up.(One of these teachers, Karen Koch, taught for years at Sacred Heart Academy in Ocean Beach.) A part-time instructor teaches Arabic and French to students in grades kindergarten through six and French only to the older students. Another part-time instructor teaches math and science to older students. A parent volunteer teaches physical education to grades three and up. Families with students enrolled at the academy are expected to attend Mass at Saint Ephrem's at least once per month. Father Mouannes is the school's spiritual director and provides instruction in Maronite spirituality. Saint Ephrem's sponsors an Arabic language course for children at the parish on Saturday mornings.

Father Mouannes was born into a family of six children near Beirut, Lebanon on February 11, 1958, the centennial of the first apparition of Our Lady of Lourdes. As a young man he narrowly escaped death three times and believes Our Lady saved his life. Civil war was raging when Father Mouannes was in the seminary and, at times, his classes were interrupted by bombs falling nearby. He asserted that although the Western news media often depicted the war in Lebanon as a Christian persecution of Moslems, when Palestinian refugees began entering Lebanon from Jordan in the early 1970s, "We opened our doors for them ... as we opened our doors for all the persecuted people in the Middle East.... We opened our homes and our monasteries for them, even the Moslems, and we even offered them land. That's why all Palestinian camps [in Lebanon] are on Maronite church land."

For the previous thirty years, Lebanon had experienced relatively peaceful Christian-Moslem coexistence and acculturation, and there were many conversions to Christianity. Father Mouannes believes these trends alarmed Islamic fundamentalists outside of Lebanon and speculates that they exploited the Lebanese political situation to bring about a war to halt the process: "They used the Palestinians; they used all the factions ... as a tool to stop this very big acculturation." When the war began most Christians were unarmed, while the Palestinians were heavily armed. Father Mouannes recalled that, during the war, at the seminary, "We were never taught by our theologians or professors to have any hate or any discrimination. They never gave us any interpretations or any answers that could help us or lead us to go to war.... On the other side, you could hear people saying, 'Go out, kill them!'" Maronite leaders did much soul-searching regarding the proper Christian response to the war, Father Mouannes related, and he confesses that he was amazed by the restraint they displayed. They consulted Pope Paul VI, who advised them that they needed to defend themselves and resist evil.

A year after his ordination in Lebanon in 1984, Father Mouannes was sent to Europe to continue his studies. After studying at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and the Catholic Institute of Paris, he received a degree in anthropology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1990. He earned a doctorate in religious philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1996. In 1999 he brought his parents to live with him in the house adjoining the parish, where they are frequently visited by his two siblings and their families who live in the San Diego area.

Father Mouannes: "From the beginning, when I arrived here, and until now, everything that is happening with us [Saint Ephrem's] is because of her [Mary] too; I have to say it. I was praying, asking her to help us and give us exactly what we need, and she sent me the right person at the right time, always."

For more information, contact Saint Ephrem Church, 750 Medford Street, El Cajon, CA 92020, phone 619-697-3040, e-mail frmouannes@stephrem.org or visit www.stephrem.org.

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