Lebanese bishop on ACN podcast discusses background to country’s current troubles
A Lebanese bishop has appealed to Christians in the West to put pressure on government leaders to work for peace and find solutions to the ongoing war in the Middle East.
Archbishop Georges Bacouni of the Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Beirut and Byblos, spoke with Dr. Robert Royal, special advisor to ACN-USA on Christian persecution, for the second installment of his podcast “Faith Under Siege.”
Lebanon has been drawn into the war in the Middle East, resulting in over 1,000 deaths and about a million internally displaced persons. After Israel and the United States attacked Iran February 28, the Lebanese Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, began attacking Israel. The Israeli military then began shelling Lebanon March 2, focusing on areas they say are Hezbollah strongholds. Christian villages in the south of Lebanon, where a priest was killed by Israeli shelling, have largely been evacuated.
Archbishop Bacouni, in the March 23 interview, presented the picture of Lebanon as one that recent popes have visited and upheld for its promise of peaceful coexistence on the one hand and a place where many of Lebanon’s best and brightest, among them its Christian community, has begun to leave the country because of the constant threat of instability.
“We can’t stay in a place where every decade we have a war and there is no security,” the archbishop lamented.
Archbishop Bacouni, who was a member of the Preparation Committee for last December’s visit of Pope Leo XIV to Lebanon, is a leader in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, one of the 23 sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome. In the interview, he encourages listeners to familiarize themselves with Eastern Christianity, whose “mentality is a little different” from Latin Catholicism.
In addition, he reminds listeners that Lebanese Christians by and large “are Arabs but not Muslims.”
“We are a minority who are witnessing to Jesus in this area,” the archbishop says. “We have to stay here.”
The first episode of the “Faith Under Siege” podcast can be viewed here. Dr. Royal, founder of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor of the website The Catholic Thing, is known for his expertise on the persecution of Christians, having published The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century in the year 2000 and The Martyrs of the New Millennium, commissioned by Aid to the Church in Need in 2025.
–John Burger
