ROME, Italy — The Maronite Patriarch of Antioch blasted Lebanon’s leaders Sunday, accusing them of destroying the country by their failure to govern.
“We cannot continue like this in Lebanon,” Cardinal Béchara Boutros Raï said during his Sunday homily. The rulers “to whom are entrusted the future of the country, public money, the ports, the autonomous offices, and relations with other countries cannot continue to waste, block, and contribute to the collapse and emigration of the population.”
“You cannot continue to destroy the country and impoverish its population despite the appeals launched by the whole world,” he declared, recalling that the pope himself has repeatedly made similar appeals.
The head of the Maronite Church pleaded for Lebanon to “exit from its political, economic, financial, vital and social collapse.”
Officials “are sticking to their positions, destroying the country voluntarily or involuntarily and blocking the progress of the state and its institutions,” the cardinal said. “The time of hostility and divisions is over.”
“The time of militias trying to bring us back to a page that has been turned is over,” he continued, in an implicit swipe at Hezbollah, which claimed to have launched a drone over Israel on Friday. “We are a united family, which has a role and a message in the East and we must know how to play this role again.”
On Friday, Pope Francis lamented that “the tragedy of Lebanon continues, leaving so many people without their daily bread; young people and adults have lost hope and are leaving those lands.”
“Yet those lands are the motherland of the Eastern Catholic Churches: there they developed, preserving age-old traditions, and many of you, the members of the Dicastery, are their children and heirs,” Francis said during a summit of the Eastern Churches in the Vatican.
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