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208
THE UNIATE EASTERN CHURCHES

Shuwair into Dair alMukhallis. At any rate, they resisted it successfully.[1]

Instead of union between the two existing Congregations, a dispute a hundred years later produced three, by dividing the monks of Shuwair. For some time there seems to have been mutual jealousy and unfriendly feeling between the Shuwairites at Aleppo and their brethren in the Lebanon. The monastery at Aleppo was at some distance from the others, and developed independently of them. It is said that the Aleppo monks affected to be superior to those of the Lebanon, despising them as rude mountaineers. In 1826 there was a schism (monastically, of course, not ecclesiastically) between Aleppo and the mountain monks. But the Emir Bashīr Shahāb reconciled them. However, the feeling persisted; in 1829 it broke out again. This time the quarrel was too serious to be healed by reunion. So the Patriarch Ignatius V (1816-1833) and Propaganda agreed that they should be separated. Each then formed a separate Congregation with its own Superior General. At first they were the "Country Shuwairites"[2] and the "Aleppo Shuwairites."[3] Now it seems that the country branch has kept the old name; so they are Shuwairite Basilians, the others Alepin Basilians. This makes, with St Saviour, three Congregations.


5. Germanos Ādam and the Synod of Ḳarḳafah.

With the constant opposition of the Orthodox at their side, one would have thought that the Papacy was so much the cause of the Melkites that they would have been always Ultramontane to excess. It is, then, rather startling to find that in the early nineteenth century there was a considerable movement among them of what is called variously Gallicanism, Febronianism, even Jansenism. This was the work chiefly of a Melkite theologian of unimpeachable piety and considerable learning.

Germanos Ādam was born at Aleppo[4] and studied at Propaganda, which shows that not even the things they teach at Rome are a quite safe guarantee. From the beginning he had a great reputation for his knowledge. He spoke Arabic, Greek, Latin, Italian, and French fluently. In 1774 Ādam

  1. Echos d'Orient, x, 102-107; 167-173, "Essai de Réunion des Chouérites avec les Salvatoriens, 1734-1737" (by P. Bacel).
  2. Ash-Shuwairiyīn al-baladiyīn.
  3. Ash-Shuwairiyīn al-halibiyīn.
  4. The year of his birth is not known. For all this paragraph see C. Charon in the Echos d'Orient, v, 332-343.