A prominent French bishop has accused Gregory III Laham, the
Damascus-based Melkite Greek Patriarch of Antioch, of scheming with
President Bashar al-Assad to block a planned Vatican peace visit to
Syria by Catholic prelates in 2012.The Vatican announced at the end of its October 2012 synod on the Middle East that a delegation of seven church leaders, including Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York and Jean-Louis Tauran of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, would fly from Rome to Damascus to express their solidarity with Syrians suffering in the civil war.
Bishop Claude Dagens of Angoulême told Radio Notre Dame in Paris on 11 September that the patriarch promptly telephoned Assad, "of whom we know he is an ally politically and financially" and made an unspecified deal with him.
The plan ran into difficulties and the Vatican announced a week later that the visit was postponed because of the "gravity of the situation" in Syria.
Bishop Dagens denounced Assad as head of a criminal regime and said he backed planned military strikes against Syria.
He also said the argument that Assad protected Christians from Islamist militants, one often echoed by Christians, was Syrian propaganda.
The patriarch hit back in a letter to the Vatican, the French bishops' conference and the Académie Française, of which Dagens is a member.
"You have no idea how much your defamatory words have hurt and endangered the Melkite community," he wrote.
Meanwhile it has emerged that Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists set fire to statues and crosses inside churches in the northern city of Raqa and destroyed a cross on a church clock tower.
The Syria Observatory for Human Rights said yesterday that terrorists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) carried out the attacks at the Greek Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation and the Armenian Catholic Church of the Martyrs.
At the latter church they destroyed a cross on its clock tower and replaced it with the ISIL flag, the news agency AFP reported.
Most of Raqa fell to opponents of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March.
ISIL has imposed sharia on much of the local population.