community of Uniates (p. 204). Maximos III, after enormous labours, at last obtained the repeal of this law, and the complete civil autonomy of the Melkites under their own Patriarch. First he obtained his own appointment as agent (murakhkhaṣ) of the Armenian Patriarch for the Melkites. But there was then a general movement in favour of separation among all the other Uniates. The Syrian and Chaldæan Uniates demanded the same thing as the Melkites, though they did not obtain quite so much. In 1846, after long negotiations, Maximos persuaded the Government to recognize the Melkites as a quite separate nation under himself and his successors. From that time the Melkite Patriarch has a berat from the Porte giving him this authority.[1]
But the civil arrangements of the Turkish Government are not quite the same thing as ecclesiastical jurisdiction, given only by the central authority of the Church at Rome. Maximos seems to have thought that it is. So, on the strength of his berat from the Turk, he began to assume ecclesiastical jurisdiction also over all Uniates of the Byzantine rite in the Turkish Empire. He even tried this over the few Byzantine Uniates of Constantinople. He built a church there and quarrelled with the Latin vicar, who would not allow people to attend it.[2] Ecclesiastically he was only Patriarch of Antioch. However, already in 1773 the Pope had entrusted the Melkites of the other two Patriarchates, Alexandria and Jerusalem, to the Patriarch of Antioch; though so far no title had been granted for these (p. 203). Maximos now asked at Rome that he might be recognized as "Patriarch of the Greek Melkite Catholic Church." So strange and new a title, with its vague claim, was not approved. But Pope Gregory XVI, in 1838, granted him, as a personal favour which was not to continue to his successors, the titles of Alexandria and Jerusalem. Since he
- ↑ The story of the emancipation of the Melkites is told at length, with the full text of the documents in Charon, op. cit., ii, chap. iv, pp. 153-216. The text of Maximos's berat of January 7, 1848 (Muḥarram, A.H. 1264) will be found at pp. 202-207. The rights and privileges conferred are drawn up in twenty-three paragraphs. Notice the second. No one is to prevent him from "reading the Gospel (Kirā'at alInǵīl)". This is the regular Moslem euphemism for celebrating the holy liturgy. My Moslem mukäri used to take me to Franciscan convents in Syria that I might "read the Gospel" next morning.
- ↑ This question was settled eventually. The priest serving the church is nominated by the Melkite Patriarch, but has his faculties from the Latin Vicar Patriarchal (Charon, "Hist. des Melk.," i, p. 212).
