The worst thing about living in Aleppo? According to Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the local Catholic archbishop, it’s the anxiety. Christians in Aleppo’s war zone, he writes, “are afraid of tomorrow, worried about their children’s future. The thought that they will one day be subject to fundamentalist Islam is an unbearable nightmare for them.”
Archbishop Jeanbart is a priest of the Melkite Greek Church, which is in communion with Rome. He represents one of the oldest Christian communities – “We have hundreds of millions of holy people resting in the soil,” he tells me over the phone – and, today, thanks to Syria’s civil war, one of the most endangered. But he believes it may be Christians in the West who can save it.
