Bishop: no ‘justification’ for establishing independent church in Maronite area.

ISTANBUL – Maronite Catholics attacked a newly-built, independent Baptist church near Beirut this month, mauling churchgoers preparing to host war refugees from southern Lebanon.

The violence flared up after of several weeks of tense public debate between Maronite and Baptist clergy. The Maronite Church is an Eastern Rite church in communion with Rome.

More than 20 men from Ajaltoun village attacked Christ Bible Baptist Church on August 2, slashing car tires, breaking the church door and windows, stealing computer and sound equipment, beating men and groping several women.

A group of 10 Maronite men assaulted Baptist Pastor Raymond Abou-Mekhael and another church member at 6:30 p.m. as they were on their way to retrieve items from their parked cars. The Maronites broke the unidentified church member’s rib and both men’s glasses, smashed the car windows and then dumped the two men inside before joining another group of 10 in attacking the church building.

“Police were at the church watching everything,” Abou-Mekhael, 35, told Compass. “They even advised the attackers on what to steal and vandalize.”

Abou-Mekhael said that the men were led by Ajaltoun Mayor Khalil Tabet, who had the church officially sealed off with “red wax” immediately after the attack so that no one could enter the building.

In an August 6 newspaper article entitled, “No Justification for Building a Baptist Church in a Region whose Overwhelming Majority is Maronite,” the local Maronite bishop attacked the Baptist church’s right to exist.

Bishop Guy-Paul Noujaim wrote in local newspapers that there were “no followers of the Baptists in Ajaltoun,” and the “decrees of the Middle East Council of Churches [to which the church does not belong] prohibit building a church in areas without followers therein.”

In an e-mail to Compass, Bishop Noujaim said that the Baptist congregation had requested a permit to build a residence but had instead built a church. He declined to answer questions about whether he had been aware of plans to attack the church on August 2, but said that he had been celebrating mass at a church in the mountains when he received a telephone call alerting him to the violence.

In articles published in Addiyar and Annahar newspapers, the bishop called for the attorney general to close down the building.

“This is nonsense,” said Salim Sahyouni, President of the High Council of Evangelical Churches in Syria and Lebanon, to which the Ajaltoun Baptist church belongs. “We can worship in a legal church building, we can worship in an apartment and we can worship in the free air.”

As a Protestant community in Lebanon, “we have the full rights to build churches to worship freely in any place we choose,” Sahyouni told Compass. “We do not need to get permission.”