BEIRUT — Holy icons no longer witness Mass at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic church in the Lebanese capital and there are no pews five years after an explosion in the main port sent a devastating shock wave through the city.
But new slabs of white marble have replaced the old floor and the walls are freshly painted and Rev. Miled Abboud is hopeful that Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the blast site on Tuesday will highlight the amount of rebuilding that still needs to be done while bringing “a message of hope” and reconciliation between Lebanon’s diverse Christian communities — a large number of whom have left in recent years — and coexistence with the majority Muslim population.
“The pope’s visit is a sign of hope,” Abboud told NBC News Saturday. “There are a lot of bleak things, of things that make us despair, but we have Christ who gives us strength to carry on.”
Abboud, who said he had only been a priest at this Maronite Catholic church for a few months, added that he hoped to restore it to its former glory to inspire the local community although many younger members of his congregation have left the city or country altogether, largely due to the dire economy.
“The majority of young people have moved to other regions or to the Gulf, to Europe, to France, because we have a lot of French universities here, so once they finish their studies, people move to France,” he said.
Many of them took the decision to leave in the aftermath of the massive explosion at Beirut’s port in August 2020, which tore through the city after hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate detonated in a warehouse, according to Paul Salem, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
In total, 218 people were killed and 7,000 others wounded by the blast which devastated large swathes of Beirut, causing billions of dollars in damages.
Much of the destruction was in “majority Christian neighbourhoods of East Beirut,” Salem said in a series of voice notes on Monday. For some it was “the last straw,” he added.
As much as people loved their homeland, he said the explosion “traumatized so many,” in the country which was already reeling from an economic collapse and struggling to cope with an influx of around 1.5 million refugees who crossed into Lebanon as civil war ravaged neighboring Syria. Some have returned since the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad last year.
Pointing out that members of Christian populations have a long history of migration “from the Middle East to the West from the 19th century,” Salem said “they were attracted to and feel comfortable going to the West which is generally Christian.”
But he said that both Christians and Muslims had left during the civil war which wracked the country between 1975 and 1990 and the war with Israel in 2006.
After the economic collapse, he said, “there weren’t great jobs in Lebanon but there were in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Riyadh or further afield in Canada or the U.S.” Others had left to pursue higher education in the West, he added.
More recently, the country has been rocked by the spillover of the Gaza conflict and the war between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah until a fragile ceasefire was brokered around a year ago.
But just a week before Pope Leo landed in Beirut, an Israeli air strike on the city killed Haytham Ali Tabatabai, a senior Hezbollah commander, and four other people, while injuring 28 more.
Elsewhere, some Syrian Christians have left the country amid concerns about the new government under interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, former leader of the Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. In June, an unprecedented terror attack in Damascus on the Greek Orthodox Mar Elias Church during mass, killed at least 30 people and injured 54.
Large numbers had already fled the country, as well as neighboring Iraq, after the Islamic State declared a caliphate.
In Gaza, the small surviving Christian community has seen churches shelled and worshippers killed during Israel’s war with Hamas, while in the occupied West Bank, Christian communities have been targeted by Israeli settlers and the economy has suffered as tourists numbers have dropped dramatically.
While Lebanese Christians have lived in relative peace in the Muslim-majority country, the country’s dire economic situation has led many to seek a new life abroad.
“No one wants to leave their home, especially if their home has been passed down for thousands of years and people have fought for that home to stay there. But we also want to live here with dignity,” Giovanni Lteif, 21, told NBC News in an interview Saturday.
Together with his twin brother Charbel, he has set up “Eastern Christians” pages on social media which have wracked up almost 700,000 followers.
“One of the biggest problems we are facing is how many Christians have left,” Charbel said, adding that with their videos they were trying to raise awareness and preserve their culture and traditions by creating “a new voice for the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, a voice that is not political, a voice that is not for anyone’s agenda, a voice that is from the Christians of the East to the whole world.”
Charbel said churches were “still very alive,” in Lebanon which has the largest percentage of Christians in the Middle East, making up over a third of the population.
A power sharing agreement has been in place since Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943 in which the president is a Maronite Christian, the parliament speaker is a Shiite Muslim and the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim.
This makes Lebanon the only Arab country with a Christian head of state, a tradition that continued earlier this year when President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and a Cabinet were elected on reformist platforms and vowed to hold those behind the port explosion to account.
Five years on from the blast, no official has been convicted, and years of obstructions by top officials have stalled an investigation and hampered hopes for justice.
With no centralized effort by the Lebanese government to rebuild the surrounding neighborhoods, many families and business owners used their own money to fix their properties or reached out to charities and grassroots initiatives.
At the Saint Anthony of Padua church, Rev. Abboud remained hopeful that it would be restored to its former glory.
“When the church is closed, it means we’ve lost a piece of our region,” he told NBC News. “I say this as a Christian who truly believes we have a mission with our Muslim brothers: a mission of dialogue, a mission of coexistence, of making peace.”