Inner Compass: Archbishop Elias Chacour

From the Campus of Calvin College, Inner Compass is a program that provides important interviews exploring how people use faith and ethics to guide them through critical questions in life.  In this interview, Inner Compass interviews Elias Chacour, Archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.  He recounts a story of how he locked his warring parishioners in the church on Palm Sunday and confronted them with a choice, reconcile together or die as a community.

Archbishop Elias Chacour originally recounted this amazing transformation of his small parish of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in the Holy Land in the book "Blood Brothers".  In this interview, he also tells of his passion and work towards reconciling Jewish, Muslim and Christians in the Holy Land and the many issues of civil and human rights facing the Palestinian citizens living there today.  He is an advocate not a two-state solution, but a one-state solution, that is a nation that is democratic and secular (in that it protects the religious freedom of all its citizens).  He ends his interview with this statement regarding the conviction that both Palestinians and Israelis often hold that the land belongs exclusively to one group, "we have to stop believing that the land belongs only to them (whichever group claims it) it belongs to God, and they have to belong to the land, not make the land belong to them."  He recalls a time when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim lived together in harmony and believes that respect for the rights of all is the only way forward today.

His story stands as a beacon of hope for all Christians as well as the struggle for civil rights of Palestinians in the Holy Land.

Inner Compass Calvin College (off site)

Melkite Greek Orthodox Catholic Information Page (off site)

Melkite Greek Catholic Church information site (off site)