The Patriarch Who dedicates his Life for Tolerance , Coexistence Values Passes Away
DAMASCUS, (ST)_ Patriarch Ignatius IV Hazeem of Antioch and All the East of the Greek- Orthodox Church died at St. George- Hospital in Beirut on Wednesday following a brain stroke.
Ignatius IV, the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, was born in the village of Mhardeh, near Hama in Syria. He is the son of a pious Arab Orthodox family, attracted to service within the Church from a young age. While studying literature at the American University of Beirut (AUB), he entered the service of the local Orthodox diocese. In 1945, he went to Paris where he graduated from the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute.
On his return to the Middle East, he founded the Balamand Orthodox Theological Seminary in Lebanon which he then served for many years, as dean. As dean he sought to provide the Patriarchate with responsible leaders who had received a good spiritual and intellectual training and who were witnesses to an awakened and deeply personal faith .
He was one of the founders of the Active Orthodox Youth Movement of Lebanon and Syria in 1942, through which he helped to organize and lead a renewal of Church life in the Patriarchate of Antioch. Later, in 1953, he helped to found Syndesmos, the world fellowship of Orthodox Youth and Theological Schools. He was consecrated to the episcopacy in 1961 and elected Metropolitan of Lattakia in Syria in 1970. His style as metropolitan broke with the former tradition of Episcopal grandeur and he inaugurated an authentic practice of frequent communion. In July 1979, he became the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, the third ranking hierarch of the Orthodox Church after the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria. As Patriarch he has ought to give a new dynamism to the Holy Synod to make bishops closer to the people and motivated to develop the church’s ecclesiastic spiritual life.
He believed that Eastern Christians, more than any other, have knowledge, experience and an understanding of living with Muslims, for they have been in a state of coexistence, cooperation and harmony with them from the rise of Islam in the 7th Century AD until the present.
For him, Muslims and Christians in Syria have established the best of relationships, founded on respect for everyone’ s freedom to practice rites as he wishes and according to his belief in the teachings of his religion and the principles of his divine law. This springs from the fact that both the essential and preeminent relationship between Christianity and Islam, and the culture of individual coexistence, have sprung from the east, from this land of sacred religions.
The late Patriarch dedicated a life span for the sake of peace for Syria and the world . A peace which is , for him, the fruit of justice. And peace cannot rest, nor be lasting upon injustice and oppression.
Tomader Fateh