Palestinian Nuns Canonised By Pope Become First Arabic-speaking Catholic Saints

An esti­mat­ed 2,000 pil­grims from the region, some wav­ing Palestinian flags, were on hand for the can­on­iza­tion of the first saints from the Holy Land since the ear­ly years of Christianity. The cer­e­mo­ny fol­lowed a meet­ing between Pope Francis — who vis­it­ed both Israel and the occu­pied West Bank a year ago — and Mr Abbas at the Vatican on Saturday. It comes days after the Vatican con­firmed it had con­clud­ed a treaty which effec­tive­ly recog­nis­es Palestinian state­hood, prompt­ing crit­i­cism from Israel, which says such recog­ni­tion pre­empts essen­tial peace nego­ti­a­tions. The treaty — which has yet to be signed — states that the Vatican has switched its diplo­mat­ic rela­tions from the Palestine Liberation Organisation to the “state of Palestine”, thus giv­ing fur­ther impe­tus to grow­ing inter­na­tion­al calls to rec­og­nize a Palestinian state.

While the sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion of the two 19^th cen­tu­ry nuns is intend­ed to be a pure­ly reli­gious, Mr Abbas hailed it as a land­mark in the Palestinian strug­gle for polit­i­cal recog­ni­tion. Their sto­ry pro­vid­ed “an inspi­ra­tional mes­sage which.…emphasizes our uni­ty, and affirms our deter­mi­na­tion to build a sov­er­eign, inde­pen­dent and free Palestine based on the prin­ci­ples of equal cit­i­zen­ship and the val­ues of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and sub­lime human­i­ty”, he said before depart­ing for Rome at the head of a large del­e­ga­tion. The two nuns will be the first fig­ures from the Middle East to be rec­og­nized as saints since the ear­ly days of Christianity. They will also be the first Arabic-speak­ing Catholic saints.

Marie Alphonsine Ghattas — to be known as St Marie Alphonsine — was born in Jerusalem and ded­i­cat­ed her life to wom­en’s edu­ca­tion and left behind a net­work of con­vents, schools and reli­gious cen­tres, known as the Rosary Sisters. She died, aged 80, in British Mandate Palestine in 1927. Mariam Bauardy Haddad, was born in the vil­lage of Ibillin in what is now Israel’s Galilee region in 1846 and died in Bethlehem in1878. She estab­lished a Carmelite con­vent in Bethlehem which still exists today. Her body lies buried nearby.

Both women have been canon­ised in hon­our of mir­a­cles said to have been attrib­uted to prayers made to them after their deaths. Their recog­ni­tion comes at a time when hun­dreds of thou­sands of Christians in the wider Middle East have been flee­ing jihadist vio­lence car­ried out by groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
Despite being the birth­place of Christianity, Christians make up less than two per cent of the pop­u­la­tion of Israel and the occu­pied Palestinian ter­ri­to­ries — with num­bers hav­ing dropped in recent decades because of emigration.