Message of reconciliation falls on stony ground

SIXTEEN year old Samia Khoury, a Maronite Catholic secondary school student, was among 20,000 who went to see the Pope at the Basilica of Our Lady of Lebanon at Harissa at the weekend. "I wept the whole time," she said. "I just looked at him and it was so moving. To me he is Jesus on earth."

Samia slept only a couple of hours before starting down the coast to Beirut to attend yesterday's mass. She wore a Pope T shirt and a Pope sun visor, and she held Lebanese and Vatican flags. But she couldn't read John Paul II's quote printed in Arabic on her T shirt, because she doesn't speak Arabic. "I don't really feel like an Arab," she admitted.

And there was the crux of the Lebanese Christians' problem. The Pope had understood it.

In a 200 page apostolic exhortation entitled "A New Hope for Lebanon", he asked them to "consider their belonging in Arab culture, to which they have contributed so much, as a privileged place where they can carry out, in concert with other Christians from Arab countries, an authentic and profound dialogue with the believers of Islam."

The Pope's exhortation also noted it was "particularly urgent" for the Lebanese "to change their mentality".

An old Maronite man from the village of Deir El Kamar, in the predominantly Druze Chouf mountains, did not want to be quoted by name. "If you say anything, you disappear" he claimed.

For despite the Pope's attempts to exorcise civil war demons, the old man still believes in the military victory that eluded the Christians for 16 years of civil war.

"We lost a battle, not the war," he said. "There's an invader in this country," he added, referring to the Syrians. "And no invader has ever managed to stay here."

Adel AbouJaoude (36), a construction executive who once fought in a Christian militia, was more detached, and more lucid, than the worshippers around him.

He had come to hear the Pope because his faith was "part of his way of life" but he didn't expect it to change Lebanon.

Like his fellow Maronites, he does not conceive of eastern Christians as an integral part of Arab society.

He has also contracted the Middle East ailment of believing his fate depends on Great Powers. "At the end of the day, we are perhaps two million Christians in the Levant, in an ocean of 200 million Muslims," Mr AbouJaoude said. "What can we do? We'll try to survive here. After all, we lasted for more than four centuries of Ottoman Muslim rule. But if the big powers decide they don't care, if the US and Europe don't care, we will go."

The Maronites who thought the Pope's visit could precipitate the fall of Syrian power - just as he inspired dissent against the Communist authorities in 1980s Poland - were deluding themselves, Mr Abou Jaoude said.

"He was a much younger man then, and he was in his own country. Everyone in Poland is the same religion, and the people there really wanted a change. Here you have half the country [the Muslims] who don't care.

The Pope's visit brought many reminders of the civil war: partisans of the Shia Amal movement and the now outlawed Phalangist militia brandished their flags for the Pope to see.

His words, both in his homilies and in the 200 page text of which he released a synopsis, were carefully chosen to make Lebanese Christians think of themselves differently.

But old habits are hard to break and Lebanon hasn't stopped living in its past.