Downtown Beirut church hit by blast is a symbol of hope, unity and grit
The blast in Beirut blew out the windows of St. Elias Cathedral, in the heart of the downtown district. Photo courtesy of St. Elias Cathedral.
BEIRUT— Like the rest of Beirut’s afflicted buildings, alleys and neighborhoods, St. Elias Cathedral – standing at the heart of the city’s downtown – was severely damaged from the Aug. 4 blast of ammonium nitrate in a port that destroyed a 20-kilometer area, including hundreds of thousands of homes, injured thousands and killed more than 200 people.
The Greek Melkite Catholic Church’s community learned about the cathedral’s damage from the photos Father Agapios posted on his Facebook page. The blast’s shockwave blew away the church’s huge wooden doors. Glass and marble fell from the ceiling and benches were either moved or broken. But amazingly, the church’s holiest elements – the altar, icons and a hanging cross – remained relatively unscathed.
Father Agapios has been serving as a pastor in Saint Elias Cathedral for seven years. I have known him for 5 years now— the thought of the church’s destruction hit me hard.
I went to see the church myself on Aug. 8, four days after what seemed like Beirut’s doomsday. When I first arrived, I caught sight of Father Agapios, wearing shorts and a T-shirt while working in the church’s yard. He was alone sweeping ashes and shattered glass, like the rest of Beirut’s residents.
The church’s hanging cross was not damaged in the blast. Photo by Zainab Chamoun.
Father Agapios was not physically present at the church when the nuclear-like explosion hit Beirut’s port, which is 3.6 kilometers away from the church’s site.
Ever since the outbreak of the pandemic in March, the church has been closed to ensure the safety of the community that visits regularly. But prayer gatherings have continued to take place virtually on Skype.
At the moment of the explosion, at 6:07 pm local time on Aug. 4, Father Agapios was praying with family and the church community virtually. They heard a scream coming out of one of the mics. It was from Vicky (who wishes to keep her last name anonymous). Vicky was attending the prayers online from inside the church to water the plants. She loves and insists on watering the plants in the church’s garden. She did not leave the church’s plants to die during the lockdown, and she did not leave them to die during the catastrophic blast.
Despite the damage caused by the blast, the altar area remained intact. Photo by Zainab Chamoun.
On the day of the explosion, the COVID-19 lockdown, which was re-imposed during Eid al-Adha that started on July 30, was lifted for two days. The church’s community was desperate to perform the prayers at the church, but Father Agapios refused. Many churches and mosques in Beirut opened their doors during those two days of loosened rules.
“If the government isn’t worried about its own citizens, I can’t expose my community to danger,” Father Agapios said, explaining his logic.
After the blast, Vicky’s connection ended and the rest started to exit the online prayers one after the other, trying to understand what had happened.
The icons of Jesus and the saints survived with minimal damage. Photo courtesy of St. Elias Cathedral.
Father Agapios felt a sway at his home, like everyone across Lebanon.
“There is an explosion in Beirut,” his wife said. Father Agapios couldn’t believe the thought of an explosion blowing up Beirut and wanted to continue the prayer. He wanted to embrace everything around him with prayer; the worry, anger, sadness and loss.
Greek Melkite Catholic Churches are part of Eastern Catholicism in full communion with the Vatican in Rome but with some traditions inherited from Eastern Orthodoxy, like ordaining married men.
Throughout the first half of August, the church community had been reciting the “Prayer for Healing” – devoted to those in trouble, crisis and conflicts.
Lebanon was already living a multifaceted crisis, Father Agapios said. Such an explosion is the worst thing that could happen next. The prayer came just on time, he said.
Minutes later, Father Agapios called Vicky and the first thing he heard was her trembling voice, saying, “There’s no church anymore.”
He was less concerned about the church than Vicky’s safety and the safety of the city’s people.
Father Agapios and his son immediately began driving to Beirut. Coming from Darayya, a village in Mount Lebanon, where they live, the father and son passed by the crater where the port had exploded and the heavy traffic jam there at the time.
“Everything was completely destroyed,” Father Agapios said. “Crushed cars parked on the side of the streets, hovering glass, blasted trees and ambulance cars rushing by from every side. It looked like a dusty battlefield. It smelled like death.”
Vicky welcomed him with a broken smile. By the time he arrived, it was night time. The church was completely dark and without electricity. Recently, the Lebanese people have been suffering frequent power outages that have damaged electricity systems, including the cathedral’s.
When he first saw the church’s rubble, Father Agapios was grief-stricken, not because of the material loss, but because of what this church means to everyone who knows it.
“I thought about the church’s community that has been deprived from a regular normal prayer for months,” he said. “I thought about Muslims who work in Downtown Beirut and choose to perform their midday prayer in the church.”
Although there are multiple mosques nearby, many Muslims pray at Saint Elias Cathedral for the intangible ambiance they feel there. Once, a group of Muslims told the church’s keep, Thaer, that they do not identify as strangers when they enter and pray— they just feel safe.
Father Agapios on Good Friday in April 2020. Photo courtesy of St. Elias Cathedral.
Even the church’s Christian community is not traditional. It’s not like the typical community of residents living in the church’s neighborhood. It embraces families and youths from everywhere in Beirut and its suburbs. They come to the church out of love. They formed the community out of love.
The church holds a one-of-a-kind spiritual symbolism for both Muslims and Christians. The last time I visited the church was last year’s Ramadan. Every Ramadan, Father Agapios and the church’s community invite Muslims over for a feast. We break our fast together and spend the rest of the evening with spiritual solidarity activities and inter-religious dialogue.
I still remember Christmas Eve in 2017. It happened to be also the birth of Prophet Mohammed. Father Agapios hosted a spiritual celebration for both Muslims and Christians in the church lobby. I participated in the choir where we chanted both Christian and Islamic songs.
Father Agapios speaks proudly about what the church represents to many.
“I have been serving in this church for seven years, and I’m proud of what it means to many people, despite their differences,” he said. “It’s people who make the worth of worship houses and not the walls.”
He received a lot of calls from the church’s community and friends who wanted to help clean up the rubble and fix what can be fixed. He asked them to help other people who lost their houses.
On the day I visited the church, it was roughly in a better shape. I asked him who cleaned the space. He told me that on the day after the explosion, he received a phone call from a lady he did not know. She told him that a group of volunteers want to help clean up the church.
“I don’t know them. They don’t know me. They came and helped us in cleaning the rubble,” he said. “I was overwhelmed by their kindness and liveliness. They are Saint Elias Cathedral’s angels.”
What happened with Father Agapios happened in every house of Beirut’s neighborhoods. Since day one after the blast, volunteers have been rushing into the damaged streets and houses to clean up, close windows and doors and provide food and shelter for afflicted families. This resilient Lebanese scene, as Father Agapios described it, pushed him to be steadfast again and overcome the destruction once again.
The church’s broken doors and benches shortly after the blast. Photo courtesy of St. Elias Cathedral.
Beirut’s blast isn’t the first explosion that damaged Saint Elias Cathedral. The church was built in 1849 and has outlasted many wars. The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) destroyed the church completely. It was bombed several times and used as a military barrack. The amount of destruction was enormous, but the church was repaired.
Although he only served in the church after it was restored, Father Agapios has gone through several other battles that affected the church, including the economic crisis, constant negotiations with Beirut’s Municipality over the ownership of the church, which stands in a very attractive area in the center of the capital, and the recent tragic blast.
Despite admitting to having moments of weakness, wanting to give up amid these consecutive challenges, Father Agapios rises every time. He believes in the church and its community.
When I asked him if there would be a prayer on Sunday, Aug. 9, the first Sunday after the blast, he said, “The altar was not damaged at all, as if it’s a call for me to pray. As if God pushed me forward to that blessed protected area. But, this depends on what happens in today’s protests against the government. I can see our people are in rage, and I’m all in!”
Father Agapios stands up against “corruption” bravely and openly. He says things as they are. In our conversation, he got emotional while talking about an afflicted family who are left now without a shelter and are asking friends to host them for showers.
“It so hard to accept what they have done to us,” he said. “The amount of pain they are causing is unacceptable. It’s absurd to see them, the politicians, wandering Beirut’s streets on the next day with their suits on to consolidate us. They are a bunch of liars who don’t feel ashamed of lying and crossing red lines.”
My talk with Father Agapios ended with a story about a novel he’s reading, Noah’s Child by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt. He wanted to stress the importance of individual free will against all crisis and corruption. The novel is a story of young Jewish Noah who got rescued from the Nazis in World War II by a Christian priest. When finally safe, Noah says, “God has rescued me.” The priest answers him and says, “Don’t say that. If you say God rescued you, we need then to ask why he couldn’t rescue others? Why your life is better than that of others?”
Father Agapios added, “I imagine when God created us, he did not interfere in our lives, it’s us who are responsible for what’s happening to us, it’s us who can achieve our own salvation.”
The protests on Aug. 8 were violent. The police used teargas against the protesters. People wanted justice for the city of Beirut, accountability from the government of all the lives and neighborhoods lost, but the road appears to be long and full of pitfalls.
I am not sure if Father Agapios performed a prayer alone in the church the next day, but I’m sure that he motivated all of the church’s community to believe in change again, to believe in good.
Seeing Father Agapios on Lebanese TV’s live coverage of the protests came as no surprise. At the time when many people have already given up and couldn’t bear the heat of teargas or protect themselves from rubber bullets, Father Agapios was still there, fighting for a better country, giving an example of how a cleric can be a role model for his community. Instead of endorsing the traditional religious discourse of remaining patient and abiding in prayer, Father Agapios teaches that we should be God’s will on earth and not only pray for a better country, but also stand up for it.
Everyone will remember the catastrophic explosion. The walls of the city will remember and the walls of St. Elias Cathedral will remember. The memory of the blast will live under our skin, especially those who lived it, second by second.
Before I left the church, I met Vicky. I was curious to know what she felt, in danger in the house of God. Vicky, in her mid-twenties, saw the mushroom cloud that covered our city without hearing the explosion. She saw the fumes, she felt the shockwave, but she doesn’t recall hearing the explosion. She was traumatized. All she can remember is her mind going to Psalm 91:
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’ Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.…
“‘Because he loves me,’ says the Lord, ‘I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. With long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation.’"
This article was written in collaboration with Egab, a network of journalists in the Middle East.
Zainab Chamoun is a Beirut-based journalist with a master’s from the American University of Beirut. She works with Adyan, a Lebanese foundation for diversity, solidarity and human dignity and focuses on marginalized communities. Follow her on Twitter @ChamounZainab.