Arabs, Armenians, Catholics
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World War during which her husband and four children
were massacred by the Turks. She always wore black, even a
black apron and black shawl, in perpetual mourning. Her eyes
were sunk deep, and though her face was the color of parchment, it was plump and babies liked to pinch it. She went
about daily cleaning, washing, drawing water from the well,
baby-sitting with scores of different toddlers who called her
mayrig—mother. She went to church twice daily—though she
really had no need to do so because there was no evil in her—
but she prayed with her gnarled hands and asked forgiveness
for sins she never committed.
THE "FATHER COUGHLIN" OF JERUSALEM
A FEW blocks away a certain Latin priest also prayed, and
wished in his heart that Mariam Doudou and other "dissidents" would forsake their "false" church and join the one
and only true faith in the world. The story behind this priest,
who served as Jerusalem's counterpart of Father Coughlin
during the siege, is an episode of appalling treachery aimed at
the destruction of the Armenian monastery.
He exploited the differences that have existed between the
Latin Church and the smaller Eastern Orthodox Churches,
dating back to the schism at the Council of Chalcedon, in A.D.
451. This developed when the Church of Rome, then a member of the one Catholic Church (used in the universal, not
the Roman sense) took issue with the leadership of the five
different patriarchs then jointly ruling the entire Christian
Church. The differences were mainly on questions of dogma.
The Roman Church withdrew, setting up a Western Church,
while the Eastern Churches (Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and
Syrian) adhered to the beliefs they retain to this day. The
Roman pontiffs, considering the others "dissidents"—when,